The Meaning of Home Part III

The failure of the PRS to provide real homes

Before getting started, I just want to mention that I will be taking the next few weeks off for annual leave so there won’t be any issues of The Week in Housing for most of August. Having said that, if Darragh O’Brien publishes the Housing for All strategy in July, as anticipated, I might interrupt my break to write about that. I also wanted to flag this blog post just out this week that takes a rather different look at the issue of ontological security and housing, which we covered last week. It’s by Craig Gurney who has done a lot of work on the ‘darker side of housing’ and is well worth a read.

In the previous two instalments of this series we looked at the theory of home. Today, I want to talk about the existing research on ‘home’ in the private rental sector (PRS). In recent years, a body of literature has emerged examining the construction and experience of home in the PRS, focusing on Anglophone and liberal jurisdictions where the creation of home within the PRS is often challenging (Bate, 2018, 2020; Byrne & McCardle, 2020; Chisholm et al., 2020; Easthope, 2014; Hoolachan et al., 2017; Hulse & Milligan, 2014; Soaita & McKee, 2019). As Soaita and McKee (2019) note, renting regimes vary across countries in ways which have direct implications for home, and much of the literature is most relevant for countries with weak security of tenure provisions and often with high levels of informality within the PRS.

With regard to ontological security, the most immediate way in which home can be undermined in the PRS is via weak security of tenure protections. Many jurisdictions, including Ireland (Byrne & McCardle, 2020); the UK (Bone, 2014; Hoolachan et al., 2017); and Australia (Hulse & Milligan, 2014), do not provide meaningful long term security of tenure and therefor tenancy and/or lease durations are often short and frequent moves are the norm for tenants.

Hulse and Mulligan (2014), however, have argued for a conceptualisation of security in the PRS which goes beyond the legislative domain. Their ‘secure occupancy’ approach focuses on the ways in which the actual security experienced by tenants is ‘shaped by the interaction of legislation/regulation in a variety of domains, government policies, market factors and the everyday practices of various actors, underpinned by cultural norms about rental housing…’ (Hulse & Milligan, 2014: 643). In other words, security can be undermined by lots of things, including high and unpredictable rent prices, cultural norms that treat tenants as ‘less than’, and dodgy landlords.

The other core aspect of home we talked about last week was control. Again, research has demonstrated numerous ways in which control is undermined for tenants in the PRS. First, privacy is often undermined, for example via property inspections or through landlords entering the property without permission or unannounced (see Byrne & McArdle, 2020; Soaita & McKee, 2019). Second, the ability of tenants to personalise or otherwise shape the aesthetic or physical attributes of a dwelling is often limited either by legislation or within lease arrangements. This includes limits on tenants’ ability to paint and decorate (Bate, 2020), but also other ‘homely’ practices such as pet ownership (Power, 2017). Third, poor quality dwellings and minimum standards violations are manifestation of tenants’ lack of control over their ‘home’ as well as undermining home making practices and feelings of safety and security (Chisholm et al., 2020; Desmond, 2016). Taken together, this can amount to a pronounced feeling of inability to control and shape a dwelling and to the feeling of inhabiting someone else’s (i.e. the landlords) ‘home’.

Cutting across these issues is the relationship between landlord and tenant. This has emerged as significant issue shaping PRS tenancies and tenants’ experiences in recent literature (Bate, 2020; Byrne, 2019; Byrne & McCardle, 2020; Chisholm et al., 2020; Lister, 2004, 2005; Soaita & McKee, 2019). To a greater or lesser extent, landlords are in a position to exercise influence over tenants continuing access to their home, the nature of that access and the condition of the dwelling (Desmond, 2016; Madden & Marcuse, 2016). The most obvious form of power held by landlords is the power to evict or to terminate a tenancy. Landlords also exercise power, however, through the setting of rents, management of the tenancy (including the regulation of interior design and lifestyle choices) and in property maintenance (Chisholm et al., 2017; Lister, 2005; Soaita & McKee, 2019). The power relation between landlords and tenants can thus undermine tenants feelings of both security and control (Bate, 2020).

Last week we talked about social reproduction as one major feature of home. I am not aware of a specific literature on social reproduction and PRS housing, but it is certainly an issue where I think research is required. If you are aware of any, be sure to let people know by commenting below.

Taken together all the issues discussed above, and in the other posts in this series, I think a solid case can be made that tenants in the PRS are being systematically excluded from something which is a fundamental human need and is, or should be, a right. The human being is an animal that needs a stable dwelling. If you put any animal in an environment in which their needs are not met, they will suffer. If you put a squirrel, for example, in a place where there is nothing to climb (e.g. a tree) so they can feel safe, they will have a heart attack in a matter of days. If you deprive a human being of a stable dwelling they will also suffer, though it may not be as obvious initially. If there is any reason to continue to work towards the improvement of the rental sector, in my view, it is to end this unnecessary suffering.

This brings to a close our special series on ‘the meaning of home’. It has taken me a long time to get my head around all this literature, and I hope I have done a reasonable job in summarising it and that bringing it all together is useful to at least some of you.

References

Bate, B. (2018). Understanding the influence tenure has on meanings of home and homemaking practices. Geography Compass, 12(1).

Bate, B. (2020). Making a home in the private rental sector. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1–29.

Bone, J. (2014). Neoliberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK. Sociological Research Online, 19(4), 1–14.

Byrne, M. (2019). The political economy of the ‘residential rent relation’: antagonism and tenant organising in the Irish rental sector. Radical Housing Journal, 1(2), 9–26.

Byrne, M., & McCardle, R. (2020). Secure occupancy, power and the landlord-tenant relation: a qualitative exploration of the Irish private rental sector. Housing Studies.

Chisholm, E., Howden-Chapman, P., & Fougere, G. (2017). Renting in New Zealand: perspectives from tenant advocates. Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 12(1), 95–110.

Chisholm, E., Howden-Chapman, P., & Fougere, G. (2020). Tenants’ responses to substandard housing: hidden and invisible power and the failure of rental housing regulation. Housing, Theory and Society, 37(2), 139–161.

Desmond, M. (2016). Evicted: poverty and profit in the American city. Broadway Books.

Easthope, H. (2014). Making a rental property home. Housing Studies, 29(5), 579–596.

Hoolachan, J., McKee, K., Moore, T., & Soaita, A. (2017). ’Generation rent’and the ability to ‘settle down’: economic and geographical variation in young people’s housing transitions. Journal of Youth Studies, 20(1), 63–78.

Hulse, K., & Milligan, V. (2014). Secure occupancy: A new framework for analysing security in rental housing. Housing Studies, 29(5), 638–656.

Lister, D. (2004). Young people’s strategies for managing tenancy relationships in the private rented sector. Journal of Youth Studies, 7(3), 315–330.

Lister, D. (2005). Controlling Letting Arrangements? Landlords and surveillance in the private rented sector? Surveillance and Society, 2(4), 513–528.

Madden, D., & Marcuse, P. (2016). In defense of housing: The politics of crisis. Verso Books.

Power, E. (2017). Renting with pets: a pathway to housing insecurity? Housing Studies, 32(3), 336–360.

Soaita, A., & McKee, K. (2019). Assembling a ‘kind of’ home in the UK private renting sector. Geoforum, 103(148–157).

Events

It is very much summer now so there are not so many events at the moment. Nevertheless, the diligent people at the Housing Agency are organising this event on the 29th of July that looks at trauma, homelessness and addiction.

What I’m reading

I came across what looks to be a super interesting article entitled Post-neoliberal housing policy? Disentangling recent reforms in New York, Berlin and Vienna. Housing policy has been changing rapidly in recent years as policy makers respond to growing affordability and supply issues in many cities. This piece analysis the significance of these changes and asks if they represent a departure from neoliberalism.