What is housing inequality?
The Week in Housing 11/11/22
Before getting started with this week’s Newsletter, a brief reminder about UCD’s Professional Cert in Social Justice. This Programme allows you to take one of our 12-week masters level courses, one of which is my Critical Political Economy module, which is very focused on housing and inequality from a political economy perspective. Find our more about the Programme here, or get in touch with me directly.
One way of thinking about how housing systems have changed over the last two decades is in terms of the transition from housing exclusion to housing inequality. Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, I think it is fair to say that political and policy debate was typically focused on those excluded from decent housing, in particular the homeless. The implicit framing of housing policy challenges, then, was in terms of a housing system that worked for most but from which some vulnerable social cohorts are excluded. In more recent years, and particularly since around 2014, I have the sense that the concerns of researchers and policy makers have shifted to focusing on problems which effect a much wider swathe of people, problems that effect those who are included within the housing system as well as those who are left out. The obvious issues here are affordability, both in terms of house prices and rents, residential instability/evictions, the decline of homeownerships, and structural problems around supply.
‘Housing inequality’ is not a terms which is widely used in the literature as yet, but it does seem to be growing. I am very much drawn to the term because I think it makes us focus on the structural nature of the housing system and on the extent to which this produces very different outcomes for different cohorts. In particular, it asks us to question whether our housing system operates as a ‘leveler’ or, conversely, whether it acts as driver of unequal access to resources and opportunities. From this point of view, we can theorise the direction of housing system transformation, in Ireland and in many other jurisdictions, as moving from the former (leveler) to the latter (divider).
The difficulty with the term housing inequality is that, as is often the case with academic concepts, it appears to be immediately obvious what it refers to, but on closer inspection is actually used to describe quite a wide variety of phenomenon. Happily, a recently published literature review by Laura James, Lyrian Daniel, Rebecca Bentley and Emma Baker, entitled Housing inequality: a systemic scoping review, unpicks these issues.
Their point of departure is a concern that:
‘The breadth and diversity of the use and characterization of housing inequality in research and literature, could suggest that it is a ‘conceptually blunt’ term, either failing to distinguish between the different forms of unequal hosing, or not adequately incorporating how housing works. Concepts that seem to cover everything can be so broad they ‘explain rather little’; and many uses of housing inequality… might be susceptible to just that’.
But the wide variety of contexts in which the concept of housing inequality is employed is a symptom of more than just academic sloppiness – it stems from the way in which housing interacts which virtually every aspect of life, and in particular many aspects that are central to social inequality, such as financial well-being, the labour market, place and access to place-based amenities, stigma etc. etc. Indeed, James et al. view housing and inequality as ‘mutually constitutive’.
The article attempts to tidy up this conceptual muddle by teasing out a number of different aspects or dimensions of housing inequality:
- Differences in housing conditions: access to and experience of housing is unequally distribution, in terms of size, quality, location, suitability, and security
- Differences in affordability and financial outcomes: the housing market functions via the price mechanism, which inherently discriminates on the basis of income, ensuring access and experience of housing is mediated by income inequality (and access to credit). On the flip side, housing cost burdens impact other areas of household expenditure, such as transport or education, an impact which is of course unequally distributed
- Differences in wealth: housing is the most important asset and form of wealth for most households. Home ownership, the value of homes, and the level of mortgage debt are therefore all major determinants of wealth inequality.
- Differences of social stratification: this dimensions flips the focus – rather than examining how the housing system generates unequal experiences, it starts from existing inequalities between social cohorts (especially class and race), and looks at how these impact on and are reproduced by the housing system. A classic example is ‘red lining’ in the US mortgage market.
The authors go on to highlight four ways in which housing inequality is employed within the research literature:
1. An outcome of a market society
2. A situation experienced unevenly across populations
3. An unintentional product of public policy
4. A cultural construct
The first two are the most useful to my mind, especially the role of markets. The housing inequality literature frames the topic of markets via a number of different lenses, including the failure of governments, regulators and markets to enact fair housing policies; tensions in public policy between housing as a home and housing as an investment asset; precarity in the PRS; and the uneven spatial distribution of housing markets.
Summarizing the literature on inequality in the PRS, they argue that:
‘Particularly in societies with poorly regulated systems, tenants’ experience of home in rental tenures is significantly more ‘precarious’, and often more of an economic burden, than homeownership... The literature highlights a diversity of forms of housing inequality outcomes [for tenants], across evictions, insecurity, vulnerability, and a lack of perceived or actual control over one’s home’.
The uneven experience of housing across populations, on the otherhand, refers to ‘housing inequality within and between different population groups of a society, and these tend to be groups with other or multiple disadvantages’. E.g. research on unequal housing experiences of migrant groups, but also indigenous or first nations peoples, lone parents, or any other group. This research, implicitly or explicitly, tends be intersectional in that it is interested in how forms of inequality which have their roots in economic structures or representational/cultural politics interact with the housing system. For example, racist attitudes impact tenant experiences to the extent that they lead to discriminatory letting practices among landlords.
Stepping back from their review of the literature, the article concludes by arguing that: ‘Our analysis of how housing inequality is used in research, revealed it to be latent as a frame for analysis, and unable to capture the interacting powers, processes and practices that define and constitute what we consider ‘housing’ generally, and which (re)produces inequalities’ (my emphasis).
This is an important conclusion. It suggest that housing inequality, as a concept, is not quite fit for purpose. While it is currently a useful heuristic to gesture towards a set of issues, it lacks sufficient conceptual specificity. In particular, the point that housing inequality is ‘latent’ is important because it reminds us to be cognisant of the fact that while the term, or cognate terms, is used frequently in research, it is typically not explicitly or fully conceptualised. There is thus plenty of scope for further research, particularly of a theoretical nature, that can help to progress housing inequality as a concept and research agenda.
In writing this piece I’ve been trying to figure out what my own take on all this is. I think perhaps the most fruitful line of thinking is rather than seeing housing inequality as either unequal housing experiences created by socio-economic differences/stratification, or as unequal stratification created by the housing system, we might see housing inequality as precisely the forms of inequality that arise as a result of the interaction between the housing system and wider socio-economic inequalities. For example, the housing market does not in and of itself generate unequal housing experiences. Instead, price, as a mechanism for allocating housing (the housing market), interacts with income inequality (the labour market), to produce unequal outcomes. These outcomes come in a variety of forms. Different levels of access to housing (uneven housing outcomes). Locational differences (uneven spatial outcomes). Different levels of economic burden associated with housing costs and of wealth accumulation associated with asset ownership (uneven economic outcomes). And perhaps different levels of access to social resources and opportunities, such as cultural capital (uneven social outcomes).
These may seem like a very wide set of issues to conceptualize with a single lens. The point is they all arise from the interaction of the housing system and wider socio-economic structures. Housing inequality, from this perspective, could retain conceptual specificity by honing in, not on all these different forms of outcomes, but on the central mechanism of interaction between housing and other socio-economic processes.
Events
A reminder that next Thursday I’ll be speaking at an event organised by Type as part of the Housing Unlocked exhibition at the Science Gallery. On November 15th the fourth of the Housing Agency’s seminars on land will take place. Not and event but some readers might be interested in these job opportunities with Threshold.
What I’m reading
A reminder that I have a new article out in Housing Studies looking at the ‘post-neoliberalization of the Irish PRS’ (someone on Twitter noted, upon seeing the title of this piece, that they had ‘never felt so gaslighted’! As an aside, in my experience, any attempt to suggest that neoliberalism may not be the best way to think about absolutely everything tends to provoke a lot of resistance). Since we’re on the subject of housing inequality, I thought I’d include some relevant Irish literature. Last year IHREC/ESRI published this major report examining a variety of forms of inequality in the Irish housing system; IHREC/ESRI also produced this classic report; and the ESRI have done important work on wealth inequality and housing; a recent Threshold report looked at how ‘risks and vulnerabilities’ impact on different cohorts of renters; and finally this really interesting quantitative research on discrimination in the PRS from Sociologists at TCD.