Everyday activism: Private tenants demand right to home

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought under the spotlight home’s severe inadequacies, which take a particular intensity in the various unregulated, insecure rental housing markets across the globe. It is now timely to deliberate what it takes for a rented property to be made home, and in that debate tenants’ voices should be heard. Taking the UK as a case-study and drawing on data collected through an online qualitative questionnaire, the paper focuses on a group of tenants theorised as ‘everyday activists’ to address the empirical question of what they demand from the government for the sector to improve. Considering participants’ legitimising narratives and assertions for self-representation in policy construction, the paper then proposes a reading of the demands made through the ‘Right to Home’, a concept carefully grounded in Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City. The Right to Home calls for home-ing and democratising current de-radicalised understandings of the right to housing in order to craft more transformative futures.

Keywords:

• right to home
• right to housing
• everyday activism
• United Kingdom
• Western Europe

Introduction

Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck, a set of wide-ranging emergency measures have been implemented, including extensive Stay-Home orders. The pandemic has re-emphasised the importance of a good home to peoples’ and society’s health and wellbeing. It has also brought under the spotlight home’s severe inadequacies, whether the Majority World’s informal neighbourhoods or the Anglo-Saxon countries’ unregulated private rental sectors (PRS) (RHJ Editorial Collective 2020). While in the latter some tenant vulnerabilities were temporarily addressed through emergency measures (Byrne 2021; Soaita 2021), particularly regarding eviction, time is ripe to deliberate how the PRS can be improved longer-term. In this debate, tenants’ voices should be heard.

The fact that a private tenancy in the market-based PRS of Anglo-Saxon countries rarely constitutes the place of safety, agency and comfort that we call home has been documented. The insecurity of short-term contracts, landlords’ almost unrestricted power to evict, high market-rents, unregulated rental increases, and poor property conditions frame some key tenant vulnerabilities, felt more intensely in booming cities and by lower-income households (Morris et al. 2021; Soaita et al. 2020). Scholars have emphasised the asymmetric tenant/landlord power relationship, and consequential tenant lack of agency, as it is certainly constituted in these countries across legal provisions, ingrained cultural norms, and economic inequalities (Byrne and McArdle 2022; Chisholm et al. 2020). Nonetheless, tenant agency surfaced even in these studies in terms of complaints against landlords; was observed elsewhere in terms of prohibited practices of even small personalisation, e.g. hanging pictures on the wall or changing the furniture layout (Soaita and McKee 2019); and put centre-stage in analyses of housing activism (Lima 2021; RHJ Editorial Collective 2020).

Moreover, policy concerns for the socioeconomic consequences of housing (wealth) inequalities and the housing vulnerabilities that the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare have arguably opened a window of opportunity for policy change (Byrne 2021; Dawkins 2020). Before the pandemic, cancellations of landlords’ tax incentives had been implemented in the UK and New Zealand; new tenancy laws have improved tenure security in Ireland and Scotland (and recently in Northern Ireland, Wales, and the Australian State of Victoria). Ireland’s and Scotland’s governments have led change with provisions for rent stabilisation and incipient debates over the human right to housing. Pro-tenant emergency policy measures, albeit provisional and partial, may have raised tenants’ hopes for change, re-energising activist engagement (Lima 2021; Mendes 2020).

By recognising tenant agency and a timely policy-window for rethinking the PRS regulation in Anglo-Saxon countries, this study puts tenants’ voices centre-stage. With UK as a case-study, the paper focuses on a group of tenants theorised as ‘everyday activists’ (Mansbridge 2013) to address the empirical question of what they demand from government and to further reflect on how tenants’ demands can be theoretically interpreted.

The paper’s relevance is threefold. First, housing movements have become more visible since the global financial crisis, an emerging scholarship substantiating activists’ radical practices and calls for policy change (Lima 2021; Teresa 2016; Wells 2014). By engaging the idea of everyday activism, the paper expands this scholarly interest into a broader, more concealed set of practices that nonetheless constitute activist engagement. By moving the research gaze from first-line to quieter activists, the paper flags an unexplored niche in housing studies of valuable policy and scientific knowledge—as demonstrated in political studies and human geography (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010; Jean-Klein 2001). Second, and following from the first, the paper helps reframe private tenants as exercising activist agency notwithstanding the unbalanced tenant/landlord power in the market-based PRS of the Anglo-Saxon countries. The undeniable constraints that tenants face in these countries (Chisholm et al. 2020)—despite some regional variation and excluding the exception of some US cities/states, most notably New York (Kholodilin 2020)—only magnify the importance of their actions. Third, the paper proposes an empirically-grounded vision of the Right to Home, grounded in Lefebvre’s Right to the City, thereby calling for ‘home’-ing and democratising currently de-radicalised understandings of the right to housing (Hohmann 2013) in order to craft more transformative housing futures.

Following this introduction, the next section presents the concept of ‘everyday activism’, within which the empirical approach is situated. The methodological section follows after that. We then move onto the main empirical section; this discusses tenants’ policy demands, introduced by a set of justificatory grounds proposed by participants and followed by participants’ assertions for self-representation in policy construction. The article concludes by reading tenants’ demands through a Lefebvrian-inspired vision of the Right to Home, outlining some of its potentialities.

Everyday activism

To observe tenant activists’ demands, I opted to mobilise the theoretical framework of ‘everyday activism’, which invites us to broaden the understanding of what constitutes activist engagement. The concept of everyday activism has come to be understood as “talk and action in everyday life that is not consciously coordinated with the actions of others but is (1) to some degree caused (inspired, encouraged) by a social movement and (2) consciously intended to change others’ ideas or behavior in directions advocated by the movement” (Mansbridge 2013 p.437-8). Intuitively simple, this definition requires nonetheless a brief theoretical unpacking, particularly regarding the relationship between everyday activism and the social movements to which it aligns, and its understanding of the ‘everyday’.

Everyday and organised activisms cultivate mutual streams of influence, which are articulated in an array of structurally and culturally specific ways. Structurally, the risks posed by open-action may determine individuals to avoid a public stand (e.g. formal membership, public talk, street protest) despite sharing the movement’s ethos. In authoritarian contexts, open activist action can face life-threatening dangers (Bayat 2013). For instance, to avoid incarceration in the occupied Palestine, Jean-Klein (2001) documented alternative activist practices of affirming nationalised identities through the act of suspending collective gatherings of everyday life (e.g. wedding celebrations or evening strolls) and the talk of justifying that suspension. These ‘disguised’ practices aligned with and expanded the United National Leadership of the Uprising’s directives. In patriarchal Saudi Arabia, Alkhaled (2021) documented ‘quiet’ forms of feminist activism, confined to the private spaces of household and female-only entrepreneurship.

However, open activism could pose livelihood risks in democratic states, too. Getrich (2021 p.27) showed that undocumented migrants’ “very-real fears about being exposed or deported” determined many to cultivate alternative, more hidden practices (e.g. anonymous talk or talk in safe places). Stigma could also determine individuals to (initially) engage in everyday rather than organised activism, e.g. sharing personal stories in closed communities rather than public spaces (Vivienne 2016). Nonexistent local activist structures also privilege everyday activist talk against militant action. More generally, ideological distance from an organised movement or simply lack of time implies that many individuals may occasionally support a demonstration without necessarily inhabiting the subjectivity of an activist while nonetheless ‘doing’ activism. Indeed, by privileging ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’, this literature attends to quieter acts of ideological empathy and resistance. Documenting shifting individual positionality against changing institutional context or personal circumstances (Bobel 2007; Getrich 2021; Jean-Klein 2001), this scholarship rejects simple divisions between everyday and organised activists while paying attention to their associations. If we must distinguish between concepts of (subaltern) resistance and everyday activism, it is the alignment of the latter with the advocacy of recognised social movements that arguably marks the difference.

If the ebbs and flows of everyday and organised activism are well articulated in this literature, the ‘everyday’ remains untheorised. Jean-Klein (2001) offers a genealogy of the concept from an anthropological perspective, ultimately equating it with ethnographic observation of actual human life, however, methods employed by others include qualitative interviews (Bobel 2007), story-telling (Vivienne 2016), archival research (Cooper 2017) and digital-platforms analyses (Caldeira et al. 2018). Given that a sense of oblivion does not fit activists’ drive to consciously reconfigure everyday life, Goksel (2019) narrows its meaning to the ‘ordinary locus’ of activists’ lives notwithstanding the ordinary or otherwise entanglement of spaces, practices, contexts or indeed the very extraordinary becoming ‘ordinary’ (e.g. lawsuits in Jenkins 2017). We can trace this dialectical reading of the everyday to Lefebvre (1991) theorising: the reciprocal enactment of the familiar in the unfamiliar as a base to articulate a critique of an alienating human reality. This critique constitutes the core of everyday activism; the everyday becomes the site of political struggles for justice.

The right to housing and the recent wave of (everyday) housing activism

Grounded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent (inter)/(super)national declarations, charters and treaties (for in-depth discussion see Hohmann 2013), the human right to housing implicates: legal security of tenure; availability of all materials required for needed activities; affordability; habitability; accessibility to marginalised groups; location clear of hazard and connected to employment/facilities; and cultural adequacy. Born of the social movements of the early 20^th Century and adopted by many countries, including the UK, through ratification of international UN treaties, most notably the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and by a few countries through constitutional inclusion,¹ the right to housing is only posited as a mere governmental aspiration. Hence, historic activist claims for housing justice were rather co-opted than secured by governments (Hohmann 2013). Discontent regards its contested, ambiguous, abstract terms set from above, lack of legal enforceability, and disconnect from policymaking (Dawkins 2020; Fitzpatrick et al. 2014; Harvey 2012); in other words for its de-radicalised instantiations (Hohmann 2013).

Nonetheless, after 2000, the right to housing has received renewed attention from UN institutions and some national governments (Harvey 2012; Kuymulu 2013) as housing movements and protests have again ignited with the intensification of housing financialisation before, and even more rampantly after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Clearly, deliberating on the ontology of ‘social/housing movements’—new, embryonic, emerging, nonmovement, local, translocal, global—exceeds this paper’s remit. It suffices to mention a few: occupy/squatting (Nowicki 2021; Vasudevan 2015; Wells 2014) and increasingly, fighting eviction in thousands of repossessed homes that changed hands from households to financialised corporate landlords (Akers et al 2019; García-Lamarca 2021; Martinez 2019) or in any rental housing primed for renovation as a strategy to repurpose the stock from low- to higher-income tenants (Fields and Uffer 2016; Listerborn 2020; Teresa 2016).

However, while scholars are increasingly interested in housing activism, the focus remains on organised rather than everyday engagement, the entanglement between the two remaining commonly unobserved. Exceptionally, Listerborn et al (2020 p.128) notes that “despite their enthusiasm and bold engagement, a number of participants did not regard themselves as activists, but simply tenants whose tenure was under threat, usually by renovation programs” and who did not want to remain passive; while others, who had only engaged to fight their own case, adopted active membership. Likewise, Lancione (2019) documents the activist agency of evicted Roma households who occupied their street as a cry for justice. While everyday activists’ presence transpires across many studies, their agency is commonly overshadowed by positioning them as supporters or ‘clients’ for defense.

This lack of visibility of everyday housing activists may reflect beliefs in the greater efficacy of organised (translocal) action. However, Bayat (2013 p.14), for instance, showed that tremendous social change can be achieved through the “collective actions of noncollective actors”, which he conceptualised as “nonmovement”, i.e. everyday practices of encroaching the public space through micropolitics of presence or appropriation. Squatting as a practice of survival rather than a radical political statement is such a case; it unseeingly produces vivid settlements across the globe, wherein functional co-presence and a sense of collective fate mobilise collective pressure for recognition or collective resistance against eviction (Simone 2018). Such practices cut through key distinctions in social and housing movements as some aim to radically challenge the status-quo, fighting the state and the market; others to reach the policy-arena in order to negotiate progressive change and domesticate the market through compromise; while some others to construct non-capitalist spaces within the current world order (Gonick 2016; Vasudevan 2015).

Whether individual or collective, hidden or in the public gaze, activist talk and action are oriented towards creating more just (or less unjust) presents and futures. Summarising over 40 qualitative studies that looked at militant action related to housing, one notes that ‘success’ may be temporary (Wells 2014), partial (Çelik and Gough 2014; Listerborn et al. 2020), altogether non-existent (Lancione 2019) or fully achieved (Nishita et al. 2007). Furthermore, ‘success’ depends on the affinities between policy-agenda and grassroots demands; activism may not shift ideology but influence those governments that are already open to change but may not have acted otherwise (Martinez 2019; McPherson 2004; Mendes 2020). However, the orientation of activist engagement may be framed beyond immediate (un)success as (everyday) activists look longer-term, to raise awareness through narratives of justice and strategies of disruption or experimentation (Listerborn 2020; Nowicki 2021).

Methodology

The ‘everyday activism’ scholarship invites us to capture tenant activism within and beyond the organised spaces of militant action; be reflexive on their lively imbrications; and attentive to everyday activist talk. Hence, taking the UK as a case-study, I decided to: reach tenant activists and tenants interested in tenant activism through an online qualitative questionnaire based on self-selection and self-declaration; to promote the questionnaire on Facebook tenant community groups hosted by tenant unions (ACORN in England and Living Rent in Scotland, both free for everyone to access), ensuring thus an audience exposed to activism; and to recognise participants’ demands as everyday activist talk (Mansbridge 2005).

The qualitative questionnaire remains “an uncommon but effective method” (Rockler 2006 p.46) despite its capacity to collect data of breadth and depth (Soaita 2022). The method suited the resource constraint of my research and the more dispersed nature of everyday activism, while taking it online ensured geographical range and a larger pool of participants. Of the 11 open-ended questions, all but one mandatory, five addressed participants’ renting experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic (reported in Soaita 2021) while six focused on tenant activism. Additionally, 13 closed-ended questions elicited socioeconomic and demographic information, with some routing/introducing open-ended questions.

The questionnaire’s eligibility screen—being a private renter in the UK aged 18 and over and engaged or interested in ‘tenant activism’—described activism as any deed taken “with the belief that your action may help not only you but also other tenants”, such as “signing a petition, making a complaint to a landlord or to a third party, becoming a member of a tenant union/organisation, participating in a local meeting or taking to the streets”, capturing therefore both organised and everyday actions.

Ethically approved by the University of Glasgow, 60 questionnaires were completed during September-November 2020; participants typed about 34,000 words, equally distributed between the group of questions on renting and those on activism (five participants typed over 1,000; three below 100). Respondents are referred to by codes (r1-r60), followed by some relevant information. There is welcome variation in terms of age group, sharing, household type and financial situation (Figure 1). Females are over-represented at the same magnitude as in other studies using qualitative questionnaires (Butler and Modaff 2016; Jowett and Peel 2017), and not unlike some qualitative studies notwithstanding the method or topic. However, of the 46 females, only 25 represented single households; 15 were couples using the ‘we’ rather than the ‘I’; and six were single mothers. Responses came predominantly from the pressured markets of southern England and the Scottish central belt.

Figure 1. Sample characteristics.

Forty-eight participants saw themselves engaged in tenant activism while 12 were interested but not involved.² Of the latter, one actively fought the letting agency against intrusive inspections, confirming that ‘doing’ everyday activism is not necessarily interpreted as ‘being’ an activist (Bobel 2007). Many respondents engaged in organised action: 26 were Tenant Union members, of whom two were setting up new local branches, three were part of ‘defense teams’ and 12 took part in picketing and campaigning. Some respondents (also/only) engaged in everyday activist action: signing petitions (n = 14, of whom two initiated their own); complaining to/against landlords/letting agents, including via Councils (n = 10); writing to the local MP (n = 4); speaking up to Councils/Mayor (n = 4) or to the media (n = 4); giving legal advice (n = 3); taking Court action (n = 3). Participants shifted between organised and everyday activism, e.g. because of relocating in a non-unionised town or no longer feeling comfortable with the attitude of the Tenant Union’s board (e.g. sexist). However, by engaging in activist talk (Mansbridge 2013) through this research, all participants can be seen as (everyday) activists.

The data were attentively read both by question and by respondent. Inductive/grounded thematic analysis was conducted (e.g. justifications for policy change; tenant demands). Data were occasionally explored by categories (e.g. financial situation) or counted (e.g. how many participants demanded a certain policy); when reported, numbers are illustrative or used to organise the discussion not to ‘weight’ an argument as the sample is not representative either for tenants or tenant activists. The rich arguments made nonetheless warrant broad relevance.

Tenants’ demands

I now proceed to discussing tenants’ policy demands, introduced by a set of justificatory grounds for policy change as argued by participants, and followed by participants’ assertions for self-representation in policy construction.

Legitimising change

Interestingly, participants did not just articulate their demands, but engaged in legitimising talk (notably, without being asked to do so). Their accounts came strikingly close to Boltanski and Thévenot (1999 p.361; 2000) model of ‘orders of worth’ according to which people ground their modes of justifications by building on more general ‘principles of equivalence’, which are at least to some extent recognised as legitimate by both the one who criticises and the one who must respond to criticism. A principle of equivalence is ‘the operation of bringing together different items or different facts’, ‘different sets of people and objects’ and ‘clarify what they have in common’ in the action of justifying, critiquing and converging towards agreements.

Indeed to transcend individual subjectivity and justify their demands, participants explicitly referred to ‘entry-points’/’legal equivalences’, centred on the orders of worth of the market, the domestic, and civic citizenship.³ In relation to the first and reflecting consumer subjectivities (Henry 2010), two participants explicitly claimed—others alluded to—tenants’ consumer rights of receiving a fit-for-purpose service:

Policy should be made from the starting point of tenants as individuals paying for a service and landlords should be treated as business owners with the responsibility to provide a service (r22, female, 18-34, single, London, ‘just about getting by’).

Clearly, consumer movements have won important rights, e.g. in energy markets and the banking system, and some were ‘constantly fueled with revolutionary energy’ (Hemetsberger 2006 p.494; Henry 2010; Larsen and Lawson 2013). In housing, it has been noted that consumer movements tend to coalesce around progressive (lifestyle) ideas, attracting everyday rather than organised activists. Some scholars posit tiny-homes, boat/car dwelling, land-trusts, self-built and other forms of alternative housing as consumer movements (Cook et al. 2016; Shearer and Burton 2019)—and it is easy to note they represent forms of exiting rather than contesting the worth of the market (Chatterton and Pickerill 2010). Given that most private tenants are unable to exit the PRS and that in a market world of sellers and buyers worth is distributed to the rich (Boltanski and Thévenot 1999), it is not surprising that the justificatory power of consumer rights was also strongly refuted:

Estate and letting agents take an ever fatter share, and then have the audacity to tell the tenants, who are paying their wages, that their client is the landlord, not the tenant/…/tenants have become powerless victims, seen only as cash cows (r50, male, 65+, couple Abingdon, undisclosed).

Within the same market paradigm, one participant claimed legal equivalence with commercial tenancies, showing that a secure private tenancy that offers tenant control is far from alien to the UK market context:

There should be an equivalence to a commercial tenancy, when you can have a very long-term rental with the option to completely be in control of the interior of the house, just as long as it’s reverted back to normal after the end of the tenancy, after five, 10, 15 years. That would suit many young families (r49, female, 45-54yo, single parent, Bath, ‘just about getting by’).

While economists, policymakers and landlords would accept tenants’ right to receive a fit-for-purpose service, defining its remit may be more polarising.

An alternative set of principles of equivalence was fully centred on occupancy rights, i.e. the order of worth of the domestic. Accordingly, a few participants demanded legal equivalence to social renting: “Tenants in private sector should have virtually same rights as social sector especially in regards to decorating and right to stay”.⁴ This claim reminds us of the long debate in housing studies on the historical ways in which the terms attached to private v. social renting are different across country regimes, and how they are changing (Kemp and Kofner 2010; Kettunen and Ruonavaara 2021).

Within the same paradigm of the domestic, many more participants claimed occupancy rights by referring to an explicit right to home—most concisely expressed as “everyone has the right to a home”⁵—that governments should ensure:

Government needs to make it illegal for landlords to prevent tenants from living in a property as in a HOME, regardless of who owns it. They’re paying to live there, they should be able to make it their home (r18, female, 18-34, Southampton, couple, ‘comfortable’).

As shown above, claims for the right to home in a private tenancy were reinforced by arguments of paying one’s way in life, hence intertwining two different orders of worth, those of the market and the domestic. Such ‘ambiguous situations’ are not exceptional, Boltanski and Thévenot (1999) argue, and a sense of justice can be reached through compromise, by justifying a relevant ‘reality test’, an idea to which I will return in the next section. Exceptionally, but along the same parameters, participants formulated an implicit occupancy-equivalence to homeownership:

supporting and backing up the tenants to their right to live peacefully especially the rent are not cheap, so for example if I wanted to buy a flat and I am paying rent 2000 pound, why I can’t pay this amount to be able to buy instead, or at least to live peacefully (r20, female, 45-54, family with children, London, ‘just about getting by’).

Equivalence to owner-occupation, as ambiguously expressed above, indicates the historic normalisation of homeownership in the UK; while PRS’s equivalence to owner-occupation (bar property disposal) seems radical, including to tenants, this is accepted in countries such as Germany (Kemp and Kofner 2010), and continuously fought over in some American cities (McPherson 2004).

Finally, the third and more radical ‘entry-point’ to argue for PRS regulation is grounded in the worth of civic citizenship, which I will refer to as the right to social justice:

The UK seems still very much engrossed in upstairs, downstairs thinking, class divide, the haves and have-nots, giving the haves more privileges, it is a cancer through the entire British system, law, society, culture, not only related to housing/…/it seems a very stubborn one sided culture at times. I am not saying that any country is perfect, but I wonder if the UK should be more socially advanced instead of believing in total hardcore capitalism. Germany, Scandinavia are also capitalistic but with a much higher social, humane touch than the UK and a much more democratic system (r13, female, 55-64yo, with adult daughter, Littlehampton, ‘finding it very difficult’).

The right to social justice, claimed assertively by some participants, shows that tenant activism in the UK today, as in the struggles of the past, is as much about home as it is about the right to live a dignified life (Dawkins 2020; Listerborn et al. 2020). The core tension here is a more radical polarisation between, on the one hand, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1999) worth of the market and that of the industry, and civic citizenship on the other as it is embedded in the nature of housing as a commodity and a social good. It is here that historic, organised social movements, unionised actions and protests that had ignited in the early 1900s across Europe (Voldman 2013) or fight gentrification, financialisation, displacement and other forms of (housing) inequality today (Teresa 2016; Wells 2014) can be situated. Fragile compromises have been reached, violated, challenged and refashioned through political struggles over justifications of different senses of justice. The right to social justice chimes with many tenants’ policy demands for tackling housing inequalities, within and beyond the PRS, to which I turn next.

Policy demands

Overall, 221 self-reported itemised policy demands for the improvements of the PRS were made by 55 participants (five were unsure or did not know what would be needed). Table 1 presents them grouped by key policies (column 2), ranked by the number of participants who mentioned them (column 3) and developing some specifics in column 4.

Table 1. Tenants’ demands.

	Policy	No	Specifics
1	Rent control	31	Reduction (n = 5); Freeze (n = 2); Capped/indexed increases (n = 7) by quality, local wages or equivalent mortgages; German model (n = 1); Unspecified (n = 16).
2	Tenure stability as well as flexibility*	28	Tighter clauses for eviction (n = 26): including making it illegal to evict in winter (n = 1), for a rent increase (n = 1), for landlord to move in for just a short time (n = 1), during the Covid19 pandemic (n = 1); Remove Section 21 (n = 6); New York model (n = 1). Allow tenant flexibility (n = 8) via: rolling contracts (n = 1), unlimited contracts (n = 1), open-ended contracts (n = 2), longer-assured contracts (n = 1), longer eviction notes (n = 2); opt-out clauses (n = 1).
3	Personal-isation*	19	Right of or choice in: decorating (n = 11, including for carpets and kitchen units), furnishing (n = 6, even just changing the layout), pictures hanging (n = 4), wall painting (n = 3), mirror fixing (n = 1), planting flowers in the garden (n = 1).
4	Property quality, maintenance and repairs*	17	Quality (n = 11): Legislate more ‘detailed, stringent, higher, greater, less vague, livable, decent’ standards (n = 10), including for thermal efficiency (n = 2), quality of furniture (n = 1), dividing walls in HMOs (n = 1), mandatory living room in HMOs (n = 1); Do not allow poor quality housing to be rented (n = 1). Repairs (n = 8): Quick deadline (n = 5); Rent reduction (n = 5); Prompt enforcement, including through the Court (n = 2); By tenant & deducted from rent (n = 2); Real teeth legislation (n = 1).
5	Pets	16	Pro-pet, standard position (n = 9, unless landlord give good reason not to, n = 2); Make pet discrimination illegal (n = 5); Recognise benefit for mental health (n = 2).
6	Detailed regulation*	14	Detailed quality standards for property, maintenance/repairs and rent deductions/ increases (n = 14); Repeal the 1988 Act (n = 1); Defining “peaceful habitation” (n = 1) or “home” (n = 1).
7	Disputes*	13	Support with non-Court third party (n = 11) and Court proceedings (n = 5); Strengthen enforcement (n = 3).
8	Licensing	12	Including: public register (n = 3) and transparent tenant reviews (n = 2).
9	Rules for landlords*	12	Greater penalties (n = 6); Disallow rough landlords to continue letting (n = 3); Limit landlord portfolio (n = 3); Disallow speculation (n = 1); Selling with tenant at the same rent as in Germany (n = 1); see also raw 2 on restrictions for landlord to move in (n = 1).
10	More systemic changes*	11	Move away from the asset economy (n = 4, including by tackling house price growth and speculation, and progressive wealth taxation); Enact Right-to-Buy in PRS (n = 1); Make social and private renting equivalent (n = 4); Make renting history equivalent to a mortgage deposit (n = 2); More generous welfare system (n = 2); Build a reliable pension system (n = 1); Implement a living wage (n = 1).
11	Affordable alternatives*	10	Social housing (n = 8); Homeownership (n = 2), Cooperative model (n = 1), State-regulated institutional PRS (n = 1).
12	Ban discrimi-nation*	5	Family with children (n = 3); Benefit claimants (n = 3), see also row 5 on pets.
13	Ban entry barriers	6	Help with rent deposits (n = 4); Ban use of guarantor (n = 1) and prior landlord reference (n = 1)
14	Others	11	Ban letting agency’s fees (n = 3) and intrusive visits (n = 3, including taking photos of tenants’ stuff); Regulate BtL mortgages (n = 1); Greater awareness of legal rights (n = 1); Give squatter rights (n = 1); Choice of utility providers from day one (n = 1); More flexibility on HMOs household types (n = 1, i.e. gender and sexual identity)

Note: * as some participants mentioned several items while others have not specified any, the numbers in column 3 are different from those in column 2.

Demands for rent control topped tenants’ agenda. Of the 60 participants, 27 experienced Covid 19-related loss of income (furloughed, reduced hours, unemployment); six accumulated debt during the pandemic; 36 were (very) worried about losing their tenancies. These are worrying trends of the ongoing Covid-19 economic crisis, requiring government action. Indeed, at the time of writing, the Scottish government has announced a (perhaps insufficient) £10 m grant fund to support Covid19-related rent arrears.

However, demands for rent control trumped those for rent assistance. They were also more radical than, e.g. those implemented in Ireland (4% annually above inflation). Respondents proposed rent freeze, even reductions, or indexing to local wages as well as adjustment to property conditions. Such radical demands were associated with a context in which renting is more expensive than buying (Santander 2018) but also with the PRS seen as a mechanism of exploitation, hence the need to “introduce rent control to mitigate the rampant extractive behaviour of landlords”⁶ rather than simply increase housing benefits. Rent cuts, strike, suspension have been demanded by tenant unions in the UK and successfully practiced by student unions in some British universities (Smith 2020). They were also implemented by governments abroad, e.g. Spain and Germany (Byrne 2021). However, calls for rents being indexed to or just slightly above inflation were also made, demonstrating the broader range of opinions that the everyday activism perspective unravels, thus indicating pathways to eventual compromise.

The issue of tenure security/flexibility came a close second to that of rent control. Participants highlighted the need for secure contracts with flexible cessation as “being trapped for six months somewhere you want to leave is horrible”.⁷ Participants suggested fewer eviction clauses than currently provided by the new Scottish tenancy law,⁸ the most progressive in the UK but which is still far from the respective provisions in western Europe (Kettunen and Ruonavaara 2021).

Coming third in Table 1, participants requested control over homemaking by freedom to personalise the space, have pets, and more generally, living in a truly comfortable home:

I am sick of living in places where every wall is painted cream and every room has whatever carpet was cheapest at the time the landlord furnished it, in properties that haven’t seen a lick of paint in over 10 years and have the same kitchen and bathroom as they had when built 30 years ago/…/There should be zero tolerance of landlords who happily rent out properties they would refuse to live in themselves (r9, male, 18-34yo, single, Glasgow, ‘doing alright’).

The above quote proposes one ‘reality test’ for the quality of property conditions and policy ambition, which, to return to Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2000 p.213) grammers of justice, is required “for persons to be able to reach an agreement in practice, not only in principle” and which must be “accompanied by a codification or, at least, an explicit formulation of valid proof” in relation to real objects endowed with value, in this case carpets, wall paint, white goods or furniture. Participants indeed wanted detailed quality standards for property conditions, maintenance and repairs, and landlord penalties for non-compliance. Paternalistic attitudes no longer pass muster:

My next-door neighbours’ landlord knocked on my door last week and talked about doing repairs ‘out of the goodness of his heart’. The fact that landlords can really see themselves in this light/…/is why we need detailed regulation to frame landlords’ duties (r3, female, 18-34yo, couple, Oxford, ‘finding it difficult’).

While some experts (Fitzpatrick et al. 2014) remain sceptical of strong regulatory approaches for several reasons (e.g. challenges of codifying, enforcement), participants disagreed. They asked for detailed regulation on such matters as timing for repairs, rent discount for disrepair, quality of furnishing. Some countries were flagged as models to follow. The PRS models of Scandinavia, France and New York were each briefly referred to by one participant, while the German regulatory system 11 times, extensively by one participant (excerpts below), showing that policy travels not only among policymakers but also among policy users (Soaita et al. 2021):

we need to look at other countries eg Germany and their laws, policies and consumer rights, rents are capped there, if landlords do not improve properties tenants can reduce the rent without going to court until the landlord has complied, there are tables enshrined in law tenants can use, if the roof is leaking the table says how much they can deduct, if the boiler is not working, no heating, there is a fixed amount etc, eviction is nearly impossible and only if courts looked at cases/…/the law states that all activities of everyday living are allowed without asking the landlord for permission eg putting up pictures, mirrors, shelves, etc/…/landlords are not allowed to speculate with property they decided to rent out/there is little right for them to move in themselves, landlords are expected to show they are socially responsible, they have no right to inspect the property except if imminent danger is there or if repairs have to be done, they are not allowed to just come regularly and look if tenants behave which would breach the right to privacy and confidentiality/…/when landlords sell properties, the tenants should have a right to stay like in Germany, properties are sold with the tenants, rights and rents stay the same as in Germany (r13, female, 55-64yo, with adult daughter, Littlehampton, ‘finding it very difficult’).

Detailed regulation can be the first step towards empowering tenants in relation to landlords. Tenants saw themselves as the best law guardians since they had direct knowledge of property conditions and landlord practices. Indeed, despite risks of eviction and the toll of stress and time, many participants have already engaged in disputes, but third-party support and enforcement was welcomed:

Tenants must have meaningful options for recourse when landlords shirk their responsibilities (e.g. independent complaints process, a strike system for landlord licences, financial penalties for landlords) (r58, male, 35-44yo, single, Glasgow, ‘comfortable’).

Enforcement challenges should not dissuade efforts for detailed regulation. This and other studies (Byrne and McArdle 2022; Chisholm et al. 2020) have shown that, even in the current disadvantageous regulatory regime, many tenants are still ready to demand their rights. Moreover, it was observed that legal change enthused cultural change (Fitzpatrick et al. 2014; Hohmann 2013).

Participants were aware that such a “wholesale reform of the sector”⁹ means that some landlords exit the market, which many would celebrate. On the one hand, “if some landlords want to exit the market, good for them, only long-term looking landlords are needed”.¹⁰ On the other, landlords exit but houses remain, possibly converted to more home-friendly tenures, as boldly expressed by one participant: “get rid of landlords and give us the homes”.¹¹ Participants consider that government’s “hesitancy to act in fear that landlords will sell up is pathetic”¹², an opinion compellingly supported by Slater (2020).

Participants were asked what governments should do to help private tenants make their rented property home. Some, however, reflected at a broader scale, e.g. requiring access to a range of affordable housing; tackling speculation through housing; enacting a living wage and strengthening the welfare system, including pensions (rows 10 and 11, Table 1). Participants thereby requested removing housing from the pure logic of capital in order to build an environmentally sustainable, fairer economy and society:

if a country has high standard environmentally friendly safe affordable housing for everyone and high enough pensions, then there would be less pressure to own a house, if land is scarce and the environment precious, it is insane to have a policy pressurising people into unaffordable mortgages for individual houses for everyone, it is unsustainable (r13, female, 55-64yo, with adult daughter, Littlehampton, ‘finding it very difficult’).

Centred in the right to justice for humans and non-humans, the above argument frames a whole rethink of the housing system with which many housing scholars would (in principle) agree. This more systemic view of justice, founded on Earth citizenship, is promoted by Scotland’s Living Rent, a union for social and private renters, including in their more recent manifesto.¹³

Participants were also prompted to comment on the likelihood that the government will respond to their demands. Pessimism dominated but, I would argue, their continuous activist engagement and even their determination in typing long answers in the unfriendly open-ended boxes of an online questionnaire are expressions of hope:

Do I think this will happen? Yes, if we continue to push for it and continue to speak up and, however no, if our governments have anything to do with it. They don’t care, they’re often landlords themselves, so tenants concerns are irrelevant [to them] (r30, female, 45-54yo, single, Bristol, ‘just about getting by’).

The above quote flags the importance of tenant self-representation in policy construction, which was emphasised by the fact that the only optional open-ended question of whether tenants’ voices should be heard in the public debate was answered by 55 participants in order to explain that indeed it should.

Self-representation in policy construction

The everyday activism framework expands social movements beyond their organised core, e.g. tenant unions, however, remaining aligned to that core is an essential ontological condition to discern activist engagement from other forms of resistance. During the pandemic, Tenant Union membership has increased, suggesting a shift from exclusively everyday towards organised activist subjectivities. For example, one Tenant Union reported a “phenomenal growth, from 2000 members at the start of the year to over 5000 as we come to the end of 2020, with growing groups and branches now active in more than 20 towns and cities across England and Wales”.¹⁴ Their online tenant support group reached 6,400 community members by that day and over 7,700 by January 2022. In this research, 26 participants were Tenant Union members, another 28 were familiar with and supportive of tenant unions/organisations;¹⁵ all bar one saw them as giving tenants voice:

they’re one of the only hopes for renters in the UK. For me it feels like tenants need organisational support to feel like they are not alone in their experiences. The knowledge and coordination that they offer is invaluable/…/it gives tenants a voice and has the potential to bring issues to national and international attention (r34, female, 18-34yo, couple, Norwich, ‘finding it difficult’).

While two participants rightly commented on tenant organisations being under-resourced, the others were hopeful. Other organisations were recognised as being useful (e.g. Shelter for legal advice; Labour and Green Party as allies; Local Authorities as enforcement guardians), but self-representation in policy construction should take precedence. Indeed, defining group boundaries and representation based on lived experience—as shown in the quotations below—is a common ontological tenet of many social movements (Stirling and Chandler 2021; Vivienne 2016):

If you don’t rent you have no idea what the stress over where you live can become. People live with such uncertainty and I think everyone should be aware of that (r4, female, 18-34yo, couple, Bristol, ‘finding it very difficult’).

I think tenant union/individual tenant voices should take precedence over more mainstream charities that can’t honestly claim to speak for tenants (r52, female, 18-34yo, Edinburgh, single, ‘comfortable’).

Besides being “a true expression of democratic ideals”,¹⁶ the self-representation of those affected by policies is critical, particularly when the matter is one of contention:

The SNP and Tory MSP’s in Holyrood continually vote against amendments proposed by Labour and Green regarding more progressive housing policy (rent controls, short-term let regulation) and continually refuse to consult tenants about policy affecting them. Instead claiming that Shelter and CAB represent tenants (which they don’t, not out of malice but because that is not their purpose) is wrong (r8, female, 18-38yo, single, Glasgow, ‘just about getting by’).

While plurality and contestation are the rules of democracy, the current David and Goliath-like representation in the public debate (Hemetsberger 2006) needs redressing:

Tenants will always be more vulnerable than property owners, but usually have less influence on the policies that impact our daily lives and standard of living. Our voices must be given equal weight in policy making (r19, female, 45-54yo, single, Irvine, ‘just about getting by’).

Opening up the space for self-representation is even more critical when tenants’ and landlords’ interests are antagonistic, as participants noted countless times, and the democratic debate takes place in what six respondents referred to as a landlord-democracy:

Decision makers are often landlords themselves and they have a vested interest in ensuring private renting remains profitable at the expense of renters. It is therefore vital that tenants voices are heard to provide balance (r14, female, 35-44yo, Slough, single parent, ‘just about getting by’).

Historic and current struggles of regulating the PRS have been fought through justifications of justice across entrenched power and ideological divides, with shifting compromises being temporarily agreed (McPherson 2004; Voldman 2013) not least because “housing is such a fundamental part of all our lives”¹⁷ and “tenants are a HUGE source of income in city economies, we are a powerful client base that can organize to demand better services”.¹⁸ It is clear, however, that to achieve (some of) their demands, the activist repertoire of open contestation, everyday resistance and persuasive justification needs favourable openings in the political state (Mansbridge 2005). It is now that, by way of conclusions, I turn to take the task of reading tenants’ demands through an empirically grounded, Lefebvrian-inspired vision of the Right to Home.

Conclusion: towards a right to home

By mobilising the everyday activism framework, this paper expanded the scholarly interest in housing activism beyond the organised spaces of militant action towards more concealed activist practices and subjectivities, while paying particular attention to activist talk in the form of tenants’ demands for policy change. This framework empowered the analysis to unravel a more plural set of legitimising narratives for change, ranging from the possibly least-contested worth of the market, to that of the domestic, and further to the more radical worth of citizenship (Boltanski and Thévenot 2000). The analysis documented a rich and diverse set of policy demands to improve or entirely reform the PRS and the housing system more broadly while recording participants’ assertions for self-representation in policy construction, individually and collectively.

However, how can we make sense of these demands? Empirically grounded in the worth of the domestic, I wish to conclude my reading along a Lefebvrian vision of the Right to Home as a way of steering the housing debate beyond current de-radicalised understandings of the right to housing and towards more transformative futures (Hohmann 2013).

Clearly, participants’ demands have considered in-depth all the constitutive aspects of the right to housing, as understood in international UN treaties, and as they pertain to the UK’s PRS context, culturally, socially and economically. However, what participants notably asked for in both content and form was not a right to housing but the right to home as a grammar of justice. For my participants, an abstract right to housing was not enough as they demanded an ambitious regulatory approach not unlike those existing in other countries and in relation to all that is required to make a private tenancy home. Moreover, a right to housing normatively prescribed from above by policymakers or other entities would evidently not accommodate tenants’ assertion for self-representation in policy construction.

While I do not propose disposing of the right to housing, I wish to open it up to a new ethos. Specifically, Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the Right to the City (Lefebvre 1996 [1967]) lends conceptual substance and theoretical currency to what, inspired by participants, I call the Right to Home in order to flag a radically more participative and transformative approach. I will briefly outline what a Lefebvrian-inspired Right to Home may entail.

As Marcuse noted “the Right to the City is a political claim: a cry and a demand for social justice” (2014a p.5); “a cry out of necessity and a demand for something more” (Marcuse 2009 p.190), voiced by those materially deprived or socially and culturally alienated and discontented. The Right to the City became a persuasive device mobilised by grassroots movements (Harvey 2012; Marcuse 2014a), co-opted by (super)/(inter)national organisations (Dawkins 2020; Kuymulu 2013). Understood as an assembly of various constitutive rights to collectively shape and individually access, e.g. public space, education, health, labour or leisure, the Right to the City has framed analyses of social movements (e.g. special issues Domaradzka 2018; Staeheli and Dowler 2002) as well as urban and housing struggles around the world (e.g. special issues Aalbers and Gibb 2014; Çelik and Gough 2014).

A Right-to-the-City lens helps ‘home’-ing the right to housing. Moral claims to dignity and agency means that the marginalised or alienated are not just handed down a roof over their heads from the state based on bureaucratic judgments of deservedness—after all, my participants paid high rents to guarantee themselves a shelter—but that use (the domestic worth) and user (the civic worth) is credited above market worth. Clearly, most participants have not demanded an overhaul of the capitalist order—as some Lefebrian scholars and radical activists might argue that the Right to the City implies—but applying correctives of ethics, morality and care to that order, or in the words of Boltanski and Thévenot (1999), the basic principles of common humanity and common goods. While participants’ Right to Home is justified on moral claims, it indeed becomes political through participants’ assertion of self-representation in policy construction as well as through their demands of tackling the asset-economy of housing through rent control, security of tenure, landlord restraint on speculation, and tenant capacity to appropriate housing as home.

Purcell (2014) emphasised that the Right to the City is inescapably transformational, an opening, a beginning; it is indeed a right to a different kind of city, the just city (Fainstein 2014). One way of opening the present to a more socially just future, as Marcuse (2014b) argued, could be sector-by-sector reform in order to improve the situations of those most marginalised and alienated. Legally empowering tenants to make their private tenancy home, as demanded in this study, can mark such a beginning. By introducing a novel form of tenure, i.e. a socially-regulated PRS, a pathway towards a different, more socially just housing system opens up. This is a transformative action that is neither modest nor uncontested since a socially-regulated PRS disrupts the financialised strategies of corporate landlords (García-Lamarca 2021) and the asset-based practices of individual landlords (Soaita et al. 2017), rippling out through the housing system and far beyond.

Lefebvre insisted that transformative action leaves the future open, unpredictable. Tenants’ calls have obviously vast implications, leaving the future open in unknown ways, not only towards a different tenure balance if some landlords sell their unwanted properties, but towards novel forms of more home-friendly tenures already experimented today, e.g. tenant cooperatives, land trusts, rent-to-buy from a private landlord, self-built; local governments acquiring houses in the market. Depending on our ways of thinking, the shape and desirability of such a future could be debated towards a justified compromise, dismissed as utopia, demonstrated to be a disaster, or fully embraced to discover new, more sustainable ways of living.

Just urban futures, according to Lefebvre, will be assembled through radical democracy by ways of experimentation, meanders and detours—and not by a paternalistic state or the uncaring market (Marcuse 2014a; Purcell 2014). This is a vision of the city as oeuvre (artwork, craftwork) that certainly translates into the language of home and homemaking, across the relational scales of the dwelling, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation (Cook et al 2016). Participants’ assertions for self-representation in the public debate, both individually and collectively, locally and nationally, clearly concur with this view of direct democracy as a means of enacting just futures. However, departing from Lefebvre’s vision, the Right to Home as posited by participants would see neither the state nor the market withering down, but rather a new economy of care emerging though a justified agreement between market, state and society. With this disciplined, more human but still capitalist order wherein the society and state together codify and guarantee the Right to Home, some Lefebvrian scholars have already agreed (Dawkins 2020; Kipfer et al. 2013; Purcell 2014); others have not (Harvey 2012).

Putting centre-stage peoples’ right to participate in the provision and appropriation of housing as home is the stepping stone towards realising a Right-to-Home vision. Implications are massive and not discordant from important calls in housing studies: genuine participation in the planning process through community right of appeal (Bradley 2014); partaking in the management of rented housing, public or private (Somerville 1998); expanding the social/public housing sector (Listerborn et al 2020); reconsidering the bundle of rights between mortgagees and mortgagors, leaseholders and freeholders (Gonick 2016).

Lefebvre’s Right-to-the-City vision was certainly criticised for being (purposefully) ambiguous and utopian, a point of view this paper hopes to modestly counter with participants’ demands for a socially-regulated PRS. Participants’ regulatory and participative stance has specified ways in which the price, quality and other terms of rental housing can be justified on the worth of use (the domestic) and user (citizenship/humanity). The roles of legal approaches to housing and social rights is a debate far from ending (Çelik and Gough 2014; Dawkins 2020; Hohmann 2013) and I suggest interdisciplinary research is needed to understand the ways in which legal rights can be deliberated, made, remade and enforced, and the extent to which they influence housing outcomes and steer cultural change.

The particular instantiation of the Right to Home asserted in this study pertains to rental housing in much of the Minority World, and it can nurture tenants’ different desires of home (non)making across race, gender, age, traditional and non-traditional households by asserting the value of use and user. While legal approaches may have little currency in the Majority World, the Right to Home’s participatory and transformative ethos may empower the creativity, endurance and capabilities of people to appropriate their informal neigbourhoods as home (Simone 2018). While the everyday activism scholarship is growing in other disciplines, its potential can be explored in a range of housing contexts not least in order to observe the ways in which the Right to Home has already been crafted, deliberated, envisioned and specified through similarly concrete demands as those reported in this study.

Acknowledgment

I thank the 60 respondents who kindly typed hundreds of words in an unfriendly questionnaire, giving me rich data. My thanks also go to the first three peer reviewers who fiercely rejected a previous submission giving me thus a chance to reflect; the Urban Studies’ Monday workshop (University of Glasgow) where colleagues offered advice and encouragement; and to the editor and the new three peer reviewers for constructive comments. Finally, I thank Professor Kenneth Gibb, the Director of the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE), for backing this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The Economic and Social Research Council, Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (grant number: ES/P008852/1).

Notes

1 Rights to adequate standard of living, including housing, are recognised by 171 parties through the ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (notable exception US bar New York City). A general right to adequate housing is included in Constitution in Belgium, Peru, Portugal, Russian Federation, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay. State responsibility to ensure an adequate housing for all is included in Constitution in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey. Unrelatedly, several countries have legal provisions for housing homeless people in temporary or permanent housing by local authorities (France, Germany, Hungary, New York City, Poland, UK).

2 All bar one supporting the tenant union movement, they refrained from organised action because of: landlord retaliation (n = 3); employment retaliation (n = 1); illness (n = 1); no time (n = 2); ideological distance (n = 1); waste of time (n = 1); three have not specified.

3 Boltanski and Thévenot (1999 p.368) discuss three more orders of worth in which people ground their justification (‘Inspiration’, related to the worlds of arts, religions, creativity; ‘Renown’, applied to the world of fame and public recognition; and ‘Industry’). These are not exhaustive, the authors suggesting that ‘green worth’ and ‘communicative worth’ could be added while other orders of worth (‘familiarity’ and ‘love’) exist beyond the need of justification.

4 r32/female/18-34yo/single/Brighton/’just about getting by’

5 r41/female/18-34yo/couple/Manchester/’doing alright’

6 r58/male/35-44yo/single/Glasgow/’comfortable’

7 r4/female/18-34yo/couple/Bristol/’finding it very difficult’

8 https://www.gov.scot/policies/private-renting/private-tenancy-reform/

9 r25/male/18-34yo/single/Glasgow/’doing alright’

10 r23/female/45-54/single/Edinburgh/’doing alright’

11 r44/female/18-34/single/Sheffield/’doing alright’

12 r9/male/18-34yo/single/Glasgow/’doing alright’

13 https://www.livingrent.org/tenants_manifesto_2020_21

14 https://twitter.com/ACORNunion/status/1339288441515892736

15 13 organisations were mentioned: Acorn; Axe the Housing Act; Defend Council Housing; Eviction Resistance; Generation Rent; Greater Manchester Tenants Union; Living Rent; London Renter’s Union; Peterborough Tenants Union; Private Tenants Forum; Solidarity Federation; Tenants Union; Tenants Voice Group. Six participants have never heard of any.

16 r2/female/18-34yo/Cambridge/couple/’just about getting by’

17 r58/male/35-44yo/single/Glasgow/’comfortable’

18 r54/female/18-34yo/couple/Manchester/’doing alright’