The week in housing 18/06/21

There's no place like home

It was another busy week in terms of research and evidence. The CSO published Property Price Register data showing house prices are increasing, the Central Bank warned about the impact of increasing house prices in its Financial Stability Report, the Irish Council for Social Housing published details of social housing delivery, and the OECD published a new report on housing policy design.

I might discuss some of these in future weeks, but here I want to focus on a working paper I have just published based on research conducted with Juliana Silva (Dept. of Geography, Maynooth). This is the first of a few forthcoming pieces based on recently completed research on the experience of tenants in the private rental sector during the Covid-19 pandemic. We conducted 35 qualitative interviews with tenants in Spring 2021, asking them about issues including rent/income; security; quality of their dwelling; and their experience of ‘home’.

From the outset of the pandemic, and as I discussed in this earlier paper, it was clear that the pandemic would pose particular challenges for renters. We know from the ESRI that 44% of households in the worst hit economic sectors are private renters, and we know from previous ESRI research that affordability problems are most acute in this sector too. In future publications I will look at our research findings in relation to these issues in further detail, but just some bullet points here:

·         More than 60% of our sample experienced some loss of employment and income. However, for about half of those, this loss was offset by income supports (PUP and TWSS) and housing supports (rent supplement and HAP). This echoes early research by the ESRI which modelled the impact of the pandemic on renters.

·         Those tenants who did experience a loss of income responded by borrowing from family, dipping into savings, and cutting back on other forms of expenditure.

·         It was very clear that many tenants are extremely reluctant to enter into rent arrears – many stated that ‘rent is my number 1 priority’ and similar sentiments. When asked why this was the case, research participants typically stated that they are afraid of losing their home, given the lack of available alternatives.

The aspect I want to focus on today, however, looks at the ‘experience of home’. Previous research, from the likes of Bronwyn Bate and Adriana Soaita, has shown that renters struggle to ‘make a home’ in the private rental sector. The pandemic, of course, meant we were all spending much more time at home. And what academics sometimes call ‘homely qualities’ (e.g. security, safety, stability) all became more important as we endeavoured to stay safe.

So what did we find? While some tenants did report a positive experience of home during the pandemic, a worrying number either felt explicitly that their property was not a home (23%), didn’t feel secure (40%), experienced significant minimum standards issues (37%), or had a bad relationship with their landlord (20%). The reasons that tenants struggled to ‘make a home’ in the private rental sector can be categorised under two headings: lack of security and lack of control

Here I will present the qualitative data because I think it is very powerful and we hear way too little of the voices and experiences of tenants in debates about housing policy in Ireland.

What researchers call ‘secure occupancy’ is key to the experience of home. Many research participants did not feel secure in their homes during the pandemic; this is just a selection of quotes from some of the qualitative interviews:

“I’ve learned not to think of anywhere as home… I tend not to get attached to places… it’s not worth the heartache. I don’t ever feel secure in a rental property… you can’t make somewhere your home…”

“It’s funny that. It’s my home, I’ve been there fifteen years, he’s a great landlord, but you’re never secure”.

“Underneath it all I’d feel uncomfortable because I am renting, at any moment the landlord could turn around and sell…There’s no security renting in Ireland”.

“It took me two years to put a flower pot outside because I had this weird thought in my head, if I start to make it look like a home then something bad would happen”.

“There is a little voice in your head that says, “no, don’t improve it”, because you will be gone soon”.

“It’s your home, but it’s not your home. Its where you live and you try and keep it nice, but at the same time you’re not going to invest a lot of money in it, like sometimes if you’re getting something for the garden, you think, am I wasting my money here?”

The set of issues that undermined our research participants’ experience of home relate to what I call lack of control, which can in turn be broken down into two main issues. First, the quality of the dwelling. Poor quality dwellings and minimum standards violations were a significant issue, and because tenants rely on landlords to address these issues, tenants can feel a lack of control over their dwelling. This was exacerbated during lockdown due to the amount of time spent at home:

“I don’t feel comfortable inviting people over, because I know the paint is coming off the walls, there’s mould in the bathroom.. It is embarrassing to invite people over to a place, when there are obvious maintenance issues. So from that regard, you know, it’s not like my home, it is a rental place, you know.”

“You’re spending more time here and you’re very aware of all the problems that would grate on you and drive you crazy… It’s a more constant feeling of entrapment almost…There was a real pressure on me, I have to somehow get out of this house. I don’t want my daughter to grow up here… It really put a real onus on me to try and better her life, to find a better home for her, that we’re not living this all the time. It [COVID] really compounded it.”

“I always worked a lot. I had a very busy routine... But there are things that you only notice when you stay at home for a long time… Like the importance of having hot water in the kitchen tap, for example. Or simple things, when you're at home all the time, using everything, electricity, heater, boiler, various things…”

Second, many tenants lack the ability to personalise their dwelling, i.e. to make changes to the dwelling that would make it feel more like home:

“I can’t actually paint the wall and decorate, to make it more homely… Even though I have been here for 10 years, at this stage, there isn’t any decoration that I have put in there, if you know what I mean. At one stage we had to replace the carpet, I didn’t get to choose the colour or anything. It’s not my taste, if you know what I mean. It’s not what I’d call home.”

“It doesn’t feel like a home, and in the back of my head I’d always like to have a home where, you know, you could paint your own walls and you can feel more relaxed in, and you can do things to. And I guess it’s always in the back of your head with rentals, especially if the landlord is very… Like [my current] landlord has a 20 page itinerary of things you can and cannot do. You can’t even hang pictures on the wall… It has affected more negatively the way I would feel about my home.”

“I don’t actually ever feel secure in a rental property because nine times out of ten they’ll be sold, or something will happen. So there’s no security of tenure in Ireland anyway for most renters, and that’s one of the really horrible things about it. You can’t make somewhere your home, when you know it’s never going to be. You know the lease here, there’s a stipulation in the lease that says you can’t even hang a picture, so it’s very hard to make somewhere home when you can’t even hang a bloody picture ”

“[I]n a lot of rental you can’t have animals even, you can’t even have a cat, there’s no sense of home and that.”

In terms of the experience of home, the main finding of the research is that many tenants were forced to endure the experience of the pandemic and associated lockdowns without access to a secure, safe home. Given the amount of time spent at home over the past year, it does not take much to imagine the impact this can have for tenants. What is worse, the factors which undermined the experience of home in the PRS have all been documented for quite some time internationally and in Ireland. The research supports growing evidence of the importance of tenure inequality, especially inequality in the experience of home between renters and owners. It underlines the importance of addressing these issues as we come out of the pandemic.

As noted, the research also looked at issues of rent, affordability and income, as well as the impact of the moratorium on evictions. These will feature in forthcoming publications and no doubt in this newsletter as well.

On a housekeeping note, you can now comment on these posts so please comment below!

Events

This looks like a very interesting event focusing on the future of financing social housing. I think this is going to be a very contested area in the coming years as we see a much greater involvement of the private sector, including the dreaded ‘funds’, in social housing finance.

Most importantly though, I am really looking forward to this conference organised by Threshold and the ESRI. The conference will focus on the private rental sector through the pandemic, and I will be on one of the panels presenting the research described above. Christine Whitehead is giving the key note.

What I’m reading

Apart from the various reports mentioned above, Clúid Housing in conjunction with the HFA have published a major new report on financial inclusion among housing association tenants. If you are interested in the intersection between housing and poverty this is a must read.