The week in housing 23/04/21
Power, politics and the PRS
This week's instalment is a little different as I'll be focusing on the seminar I organised last Friday (16th of April) entitled Covid-19 and the private rental sector: an international qualitative research seminar. Despite starting at the ungodly hour of 8am there was great turn out to hear some really excellent papers. You can watch a recording of the seminar here.
Each of the papers presented qualitative research on the experience of tenants in the PRS. They also looked at the impact of the pandemic on tenants, as well as looking at the role of Government policy in responding to that impact. We were very lucky to have an all-star international line up: Adrian Soaita from the University of Glasgow, Bronwyn Bate from Western Sydney University, and the Bridgette Toy-Cronin and Sarah Bierre from the University of Otago (New Zealand).
There are three reasons why I felt it was important to organise a seminar on this issue. First, across many countries, including those featured in the seminar and of course Ireland, the rental sector has grown very rapidly over the last two decades. Connected to this, before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the private rental sector was facing a number of major challenges and had become a central driver of housing inequality. High rents, weak security of tenure, poor quality dwellings, emerged as major policy challenges. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have a particularly negative impact on the private rental sector. This is for two reasons. On the one hand, it has made ‘home’ much more central to our lives and therefor access to quality, secure housing all the most important. On the other hand, PRS tenants are over-represented in the sectors of the economy most badly hit by the crisis, such as food, accommodation and retail. And therefor there are real risks in terms of affordability, rent arrears and evictions.
Third, and finally, we know from previous research that policy implementation and enforcement in the PRS are challenging. The sector is dominated by small scale, amateur landlords in most countries and typically has high levels of informality. Most importantly, policy in the sector is mediated by the relationship between the landlord and the tenant, which is at the same time a market relationship, a social relationship, and a power relationship. This is why it is so important for us to understand the experiences of tenants and the social relationships at the heart of the rental sector, in order to better inform policy making.
What emerged most strikingly from the seminar was the importance of the power relationships between landlord and tenant in shaping tenants' experiences. Bronwyn Bate's research on tenants in Sydney's PRS looked at the everyday ways in which the relationship between landlord and tenant shape tenants' experiences and their ability to create a secure home. This in turn effects tenants' ability to exercise agency and to advocate for themselves. In the context of Covid-19, this is crucial because it means tenants have a limited ability to negotiate rent reductions, for example. In the current Irish context, we see that only 400 tenants have declared themselves 'relevant persons', despite the many thousands who would qualify due to their income being impacted by Covid-19. If tenants are disempowered within the PRS, we need to challenge any future government policy which, for example, relies on negotiations between landlords and tenants to deal with rent arrears.
The issue of managing rent arrears was at the heart of Bridgette Toy-Cronin and Sarah Bierre's paper which looked at the tribunal hearing system (a form of dispute resolution not unlike the RTB) in dealing with rent arrears. The main finding here was that the failure to embed any concern with tenant protection within the hearing process led to consistently bad outcomes for tenants and, most notably, many tenants not even attending the hearings. Again this speaks to power relationships and suggests that any attempt to mediate disputes based on the idea of landlord and tenant as two equal parties is ultimately false and only serves to reinforce the power imbalance between them.
Finally, Adriana Soaita's paper took a different approach by focusing on what happens when tenants collectively organise to challenge the inequalities within the PRS. Her research drew on interviews with tenant activists across the UK and looked at the ways in which tenants are emerging as a collective political actor attempting to shape the reality of renting. Tenants unions have emerged in many countries over the last few years, including CATU in the Irish context. It will certainly be interesting to see if this new tenant politics can start to (finally) counteract the power imbalance between landlord and tenant and the 'neo-feudalism' of the current property market.
Events
I mentioned this before but just a reminder that the High Rise Housing as Sustainable Urban Intensification? Report is being launched at the end of the month.
What I’m reading
In terms of new stuff this week, Rachael Walsh from TCD Law and Human Rights Observatory has a great piece which sets out very clearly the recent changes to the legislation in the PRS. I also wanted to include some of the international research on the landlord-tenant power relation, linked to the above discussion of last week's seminar. All the below are well worth reading if you are interested in the politics of the PRS:
Soaita, A. M., & McKee, K. (2019). Assembling a ‘kind of’ home in the UK private renting sector. Geoforum, 103, 148-157.
Bate, B. (2020). Making a home in the private rental sector. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-23.
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.
Byrne, M., & McArdle, R. (2020). Secure occupancy, power and the landlord-tenant relation: a qualitative exploration of the Irish private rental sector. Housing Studies, 1-19.