Join us for this session and take part in a lively discussion where we'll be considering the issues raised by three papers that include topics such as housing aspirations, renting and precarity, and young adults' housing struggle. The full abstracts are below.
Presentations from these authors and a live Q&A session are available to all HSA members. Book here
Session 9 features:
1. Richard Waldron Generation Rent and Housing Precarities in 'Post Crisis' Ireland
A remarkable outcome of the 2008 financial crisis has been the rapid decline in homeownership across a number of developed societies and the concomitant growth of an increasingly unaffordable and insecure private rental sector. While a burgeoning literature examines the economic, social and political conditions shaping the emergence of ‘Generation Rent’ and the growth of the rental sector as an investment class, less attention has focused on the extent and nature of the precarities experienced by households living in an expanding rental sector. This paper relates processes at work in the literature on generation rent with more recent work on housing precarity, understood here as a state of uncertainty arising from the experience of insecure, unaffordable, poor quality and inaccessible housing. The article develops and applies a Housing Precarity Index (HPI) to data on private renters in Ireland, using objective and subjective indicators from the EU-Survey on Incomes and Living Conditions. This provides a nuanced account of the extent and severity of precarities and living conditions in the Irish rental sector among differing sub-groups during a housing crash, economic recession and dubious “recovery” period (2008 - 2016). The HPI enables an assessment not only of current conditions for renters, but also identifies the key drivers of housing precarity and assesses how such precarities might contribute to further declining living standards among renters into the future.
2. Trudi Tokarczyk Housing Aspirations: Class, networks and social capital
Younger generations in Scotland are currently experiencing work uncertainty, slower pay progression, and are finding it more difficult to own a house compared to their predecessors (Willetts, 2010; Hoolachan and McKee, 2018).Whilst there has been much discussion of how the increasing difficulty of accessing home-ownership may be deepening intergenerational wealth inequality (Willetts, 2010) little is known about how this differs across other socio-economic characteristics, such as social class and across other tenures. The combination of social network analysis with housing studies in this study brings together two formerly disparate research areas. This thesis aims to further understand how young people utilise social capital when navigating the field of housing, and the extent to which housing choices, aspirations and expectations are being reconfigured in the contemporary housing system.
3. Heather Rollwagen and Brennan Mayhew Narratives of luck among young adults experiencing housing struggle
In this paper, we consider a trend whereby young adults report feeling “lucky” about their housing circumstances, despite facing significant struggle with respect to the safety, stability, or affordability of their housing. This trend emerged out of the first 25 in-depth interviews conducted as part of a larger study of housing among young adults in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on a modest literature in the sociology of luck (Loveday 2018; Lukes and Haglund 2005; Byrne 2003) to ground this analysis, we explore how luck is conceptualized and employed in relation to housing. Our analysis highlights the way discourses of luck reflect a general sense of powerlessness within the housing system, and a lack of agency with respect to future housing outcomes. Further, we demonstrate the way narratives of luck serve to minimize different forms of labour undertaken as a way to maintain housing. For example, young adults engage in emotional labour with landlords and roommates in order to ensure housing stability and avoid homelessness. We consider the implications for the broader housing aspirations of young adults within Toronto.