Inequality of home
The week in housing 24/05/24
This is the fourth and final installment of a series on inequality and the PRS (click on Part I, Part II and Part III to read the previous pieces). A full bibliography can be found at the end of this Newsletter. A brief bit of housekeeping: I have a bunch of exciting guest posts scheduled for June and I plan on releasing them weekly (as opposed to fortnightly). Obviously, the big news this week is the publication of the Housing Commission report, I hope to write something on this asap.
I’m just back from a week in London where I presented a paper at UCL and had the chance to meet some fantastic tenant's’ rights organisations. What is extremely clear is that the PRS in England/Wales is badly in need of reform because the PRS has doubled in size over the past couple of decades, but tenants have practically no protections. So it’s a good moment for Part IV of this series on housing inequality and the PRS. In the previous pieces in this series, we have focused on economic inequality. Today’s piece, in contrast, looks at unequal experiences of ‘home’, i.e. the unequal distribution of the complex set of resources associated with home that go beyond money and wealth. These more in intangible concerns, though central to wellbeing, are harder to conceptualize, and even more difficult to measure. Home is primarily a subjective, experiential, relational and affective phenomenon, and therefor can primarily be captured through a qualitative lens. Obviously, any account of inequality depends, per force, on the ability to make comparisons between households or social groups (such as classes). The intangibility of home makes this difficult. This is frustrating because in my view inequality of home is the most important form of inequality for PRS tenants.
In order to break down ‘home’ into something more concrete and tangible, and drawing on the very wide literature on the meaning of home (something I wrote about here), we can think of the following four key characteristics:
Security (the stability and predictability of home over time, and the subjective sense of well being derived from this)
Control (the ability to express autonomy and agency over the dwelling’s physical and aesthetic characteristics, including the ability to express one’s identity via the dwelling)
Privacy (the ability to control who enters a dwelling, and to be free from surveillance or other forms of intrusive behaviour within the dwelling)
Dwelling quality (including the size and quality of the dwelling)
Of all the forms of inequality of home, security is perhaps the most unequally distributed between tenures. While affordability and dwelling quality issues can arise in any tenure, housing insecurity is very strongly associated with the private rental sector, and can be considered a feature, rather than a bug, of housing policy in most jurisdictions. In most countries private tenants have systematically lower levels of housing security than other tenures, especially homeowners (Aarland & Reid, 2019; Rolfe et al., 2020).
This is most obvious in relation to formal security of tenure, i.e. the rights of tenants as set down in legislation or policy. For example, in most countries there are a variety of circumstances under which a landlord can terminate a tenancy, and in some countries, such as England, they can do so more or less at will. Formal security of tenure is just one aspect of this story, however. Market factors like unaffordability also play a role in housing insecurity, as do cultural understandings of renting as a ‘transitory’ tenure. The literature clearly shows that housing insecurity has a decisive impact on tenants and their experience of home (Soaita & McKee, 2019, 2020), as well as in areas including mental health (Arundel et al., 2022; Suglia et al., 2011) and children’s educational outcomes (Li, 2016).
The issue of control is also unequally experienced by tenants in general, and PRS tenants in particular. In many jurisdictions, tenants have limited control over their dwellings, even being unable to hang pictures or shelves, paint the walls or change the furniture). Pet ownership is a good example of this, with many landlords forbidding pet ownership, thus exercising control not just over the tenants’ home but also over their lifestyle, which can be experienced by tenants as infantilizing. Tenants can sometimes also be restricted in their ability to have guests stay with them. Homeowners, and to some degree social housing residents (Morris, 2009), have much greater agency and autonomy with regard to their dwelling, and indeed this is often linked to the widely documented greater levels of resident satisfaction and well-being associated with homeownership (Zavisca & Gerber, 2016).
In terms of privacy, the issues of landlords entering the dwelling without the tenants permission and of conducting ‘checks’ on tenants, are also well documented (Byrne & McArdle, 2020a; Izuhara & Heywood, 2003). Some cohorts can be more vulnerable within the context of power dynamics between landlord and tenant, for example to abuse and harassment, as research on older renters has found (Izuhara & Heywood, 2003). At am extreme, the lack of control and privacy can manifest as a abuse and harassment on the part of landlords (Cowan et al., 2000).
A final aspect of housing inequality relates to the physical quality of dwellings. This includes issues such as damp, quality of light, central heating, energy efficiency etc. (Waldron, 2023). The impact of sub-standard dwellings on mental and physical health has been well documented (Evans, 2006; Rolfe et al., 2020). There is evidence internationally that the dwelling quality for private renters is particularly poor (DeLuca & Rosen, 2022), although it should be noted that dwelling quality for public/social housing residents is often poor (Waldron, 2023). Dwelling quality is also related to residential instability. For example, one of the most common reasons renters move house in the US is to escape poor conditions (DeLuca & Rosen, 2022; Desmond, 2016).
From an inequality point of view, there are two main ways to think about the inequality of home. The first, which I have focused on here, is of inequality between housing tenures. The second is inequality between socio-economic groups, such as classes, races etc. Tenure-related inequalities typically dovetail with non-housing forms of socio-economic inequality (see Part I of this series). For example, low-income and migrant households are often over-represented in the PRS. But socio-economic inequalities also operate on an intra-tenure basis, i.e. inequalities between households within the same housing tenure. For example, some cohorts are vulnerable to discrimination and these will typically end up in the lower end of the PRS, with worse quality conditions and more insecure housing. Inequality of home thus cuts across tenures and non-housing socio-economic inequalities.
Events & news
A reminder that I’ll be presenting a paper entitled A vision for Ireland’s Private Rental Sector as part of the Simon Talks seminar series, May 27th at 10am. Register for the Webinar here. On the 30th of May the ESRI will launch exciting new research on the impact of inadequate housing on parent/child wellbeing. It’s a while away yet, but Threshold will hold a conference on September 5th at the Richmond Centre, 1 Brunswick St N, Smithfield. The day will be a variety of panel discussions reflecting on the past 20 years of the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 and a look to the improvements needed over the next 20 years. Focus Ireland are launching an evaluation of their Outlook Programme, which is aimed at preventing homelessness among female offenders. And finally, one for the animal lovers: in June CACHE are hosting a seminar on pets in rented accommodation.
What I’m reading
I have a chapter, co-authored with my colleague Stephan Koppe, in the new volume Handbook on the Political Economy of Social Policy. The chapter is on the political economy of housing policy. I’m half way through the new book Against Landlords. It’s an unusual analysis which I’m sure many people will disagree with, but I’m finding it very thought provoking. I see the book as part of a wider discussion emerging in housing circles that focuses on the distribution, rather than the supply, of housing. Another piece of writing in this vein was published recently by Stefan Horn, looking at the ‘over-consumption’ of housing, how it relates to climate adaptation challenges, and what we can do about it.
Bibliography
Aarland, K., & Reid, C. K. (2019). Homeownership and residential stability: Does tenure really make a difference? International Journal of Housing Policy, 19(2), 165–191.
Arundel, R., Li, A., Baker, E., & Bentley, R. (2022). Housing unaffordability and mental health: Dynamics across age and tenure. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1–31.
Bate, B. (2020). Making a home in the private rental sector. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1–29.
Byrne, M., & McArdle, R. (2020a). Secure occupancy, power and the landlord-tenant relation: A qualitative exploration of the Irish private rental sector. Housing Studies.
Byrne, M., & McArdle, R. (2020b). Security and agency in the Irish private rental sector. Threshold.
Byrne, M., & Sassi, J. (2023). Making and unmaking home in the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative research study of the experience of private rental tenants in Ireland. International Journal of Housing Policy, 23(3), 523–542.
Cowan, D. S., Marsh, A., Niner, P., Kennett, P., & Forrest, R. (2000). Harassment and unlawful eviction of private rented sector tenants and park home residents.
Cunningham, M., Galvez, M., Aranda, C. L., Santos, R., Wissoker, D. A., Oneto, A. D., Pitingolo, R., & Crawford, J. (2018). A Pilot Study of Landlord Acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers. US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research.
DeLuca, S., & Rosen, E. (2022). Housing insecurity among the poor today. Annual Review of Sociology, 48, 343–371.
Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: Poverty and profit in the American city. Broadway Books.
Dupuis, A., & Thorns, D. C. (1998). Home, home ownership and the search for ontological security. The Sociological Review, 46(1), 24–47.
Easthope, H. (2004). A place called home. Housing, Theory and Society, 21(3), 128–138.
Easthope, H. (2014). Making a rental property home. Housing Studies, 29(5), 579–596.
Evans, G. W. (2006). Child development and the physical environment. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 57, 423–451.
Faber, J. W., & Mercier, M.-D. (2022). Multidimensional discrimination in the online rental housing market: Implications for families with young children. Housing Policy Debate, 1–24.
Gusciute, E., Peter Mühlau, P., & Layte, R. (2020). Discrimination in the rental housing market: A field experiment in Ireland (2020): . Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–22.
Hulse, K., & Milligan, V. (2014). Secure occupancy: A new framework for analysing security in rental housing. Housing Studies, 29(5), 638–656.
Izuhara, M., & Heywood, F. (2003). A life-time of inequality: A structural analysis of housing careers and issues facing older private tenants. Ageing & Society, 23(2), 207–224.
Li, L. H. (2016). Impacts of homeownership and residential stability on children’s academic performance in Hong Kong. Social Indicators Research, 126, 595–616.
Meers, J. (2024). “Professionals only please”: Discrimination against housing benefit recipients on online rental platforms. Housing Studies, 39(1), 29–51.
Morris, A. (2009). Living on the margins: Comparing older private renters and older public housing tenants in Sydney, Australia. Housing Studies, 24(5), 693–707.
Rolfe, S., Garnham, L., Godwin, J., Anderson, I., Seaman, P., & Donaldson, C. (2020). Housing as a social determinant of health and wellbeing: Developing an empirically-informed realist theoretical framework. BMC Public Health, 20(1), 1–19.
Rosen, E. (2020). The Voucher Promise:" Section 8" and the Fate of an American Neighborhood. Princeton University Press.
Soaita, A., & McKee, K. (2019). Assembling a ‘kind of’home in the UK private renting sector. Geoforum, 103(148–157).
Soaita, A., & McKee, K. (2020). Private renters’ housing experiences in lightly regulated markets. UK Centre for Colloborative Housing Evidence.
Suglia, S. F., Duarte, C. S., & Sandel, M. T. (2011). Housing quality, housing instability, and maternal mental health. Journal of Urban Health, 88, 1105–1116.
Tester, G. (2008). An intersectional analysis of sexual harassment in housing. Gender & Society, 22(3), 349–366.
Van Gelder, J. L. (2010). What tenure security? The case for a tripartite view. Land Use Policy, 27(2), 449–456.
Zavisca, J. R., & Gerber, T. P. (2016). The socioeconomic, demographic, and political effects of housing in comparative perspective. Annual Review of Sociology, 42, 347–367.