Housing Vulnerability Reconsidered: Applications and Implications for Housing Research, Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT

Social housing policies in neoliberal contexts have become residualized. The notions of housing vulnerability and vulnerable populations emerged as a new organizing principle for the housing policy agenda and interventions in many countries. However, there is no cohesive and shared understanding of the characteristics and types of vulnerable households and housing situations, nor the drivers and consequences of different forms of vulnerability. This leads to questions about how to apply the concept to address people’s right to housing. This special issue presents research into what housing vulnerability means in different world regions, what structures and systems may be driving it, and the variety of experiences of housing vulnerability. These studies use different theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and empirical contexts to examine factors and initiatives that drive or counter housing vulnerability, fostering a dialogue towards critical housing research and policy agendas that meet our expectations of housing as a human right.

KEYWORDS:

• housing vulnerability
• housing theory
• just housing policy
• human right
• capabilities approach

Introduction

Access to adequate and decent housing is an essential building block of a good life. It is a powerful predictor of well-being of individuals and society, contributing to mental and physical health, education, employment success, and social cohesion. In contrast, insecure and inadequate housing creates intersectional vulnerabilities to external risks. Over the past several decades, the global rise of actually existing neoliberalism, i.e. variegated forms of market-oriented regulatory transformation (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore 2010), has led to an international synchronization of housing commodification and financialization, transforming housing from a primary social good to a primary capital asset (Aalbers 2015). To varying degrees across different geographies, the market-oriented restructuring of housing regimes that decoupled housing from welfare systems has had profound impacts on access to secure housing, wealth and other life opportunities for people in many countries, from the global North (e.g. North America and Western Europe) to the South (e.g. China). The congruence of welfare retreat, growing employment precarity, and unequal housing access introduced pervasive new social risks (Beck 1992; Esping-Andersen 1999) and subjected households to new vulnerabilities, especially among those who were already precariously housed (Zhu et al. 2023). According to the 2018–20 Gallup World Poll, 12% of residents of countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had experienced housing insecurity during the past twelve months. On average, this rate increased over the past decade (OECD 2020a).

This deepening sense of global housing crisis has resulted in an increase in research and policy that aim to understand and address housing needs, rights and potential solutions. One artefact of this renewed attention has flowed from the recognition that at an individual level, the difference between being in housing crisis or not is more than just the difference between being homeless and having a roof over one’s head. A new policy focus on the notion of housing vulnerability has emerged, recognizing the need to shift from considering housing as a have vs. have-not binary to seeing it as something more complex and qualitative. We see evidence of this focus shift in, for example, Europe (Council of Europe 2008; Government of U.K. 2018), the United States (USHUD, 2014), and Canada (Government of Canada 2019).

The new focus on housing vulnerability is consistent and concurrent with the move towards recognizing housing as a human right, as well as in line with the recent call from scholars for a critical normative approach to housing policy (e.g. Kimhur 2020; Lawson 2020; Taylor 2020). One standout example is in Canada, where the 2017 National Housing Strategy (NHS) and 2019 National Housing Strategy Act established housing as a human right, grounded in principles of inclusion, accountability, participation, and non-discrimination (Government of Canada 2019). In doing so, Canada moved closer to the many other states that recognize the right to adequate housing within their constitutions or core legislative frameworks (Rolnik 2013), including (among others) Finland, a country featured in this special issue. Whereas China has not legally affirmed the right to housing, it ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which entails a commitment to take steps to instate these rights, including the right to adequate housing (United Nations 2024). Charting its unique course, the U.S. saw a Housing is a Human Right Act introduced as a bill in Congress in 2020. In California and other states efforts are being made to enshrine the right to housing via amendments to state constitutions (Tars 2020).

The Canadian NHS merits some additional discussion, as this special issue of Housing, Theory and Society is edited from Canada, with numerous articles referring directly to this context. In Canada, the most egregious forms of housing vulnerability have become more visible, and recognition of the need to address these has grown. The introduction of the NHS in 2017 was a significant and promising moment. Key to the NHS’ approach is the notion of vulnerable groups, as a set of groups with certain characteristics that must be considered when implementing a right to housing. Vulnerability is conceived as a characteristic of certain populations whose chances of having their housing needs met is reduced. Policy responses are driven by a perception that housing vulnerability is inherent to certain groups, due to their deficiencies and circumstances. This notion creates a problematic blind spot in housing policy by ignoring structural conditions and risk factors that can disproportionately affect different groups in intersectional ways. Fundamentally, this categorical conceptualization of vulnerability risks a residualist application of the right to housing, which Lévy-Vroelant (2010, 449) defined as “a function of eligibility according to needs/risks.” A residualist approach to the right to housing is the antithesis of a legitimate application of housing as a human right and universal entitlement.

The links between lack of access to housing, unaffordable and poor housing, on the one hand, and adverse social, economic, health and psychological outcomes, on the other, have been well documented (Desmond and Gershenson 2016; Holden et al. 2024; Tam 2017; Zhu and Holden 2023). Despite these connections and the legal recognition of housing as a human right in a growing number of jurisdictions, so far that recognition is still mainly rhetorical. One of the obstacles to enacting a human right to housing is the fuzzy understanding of the risks and conditions that drive housing vulnerability. Simply put, the concept of housing vulnerability lacks conceptual resolution, leading to confounding questions of how to apply it in ways that would help enact the right to housing. Applications of the housing vulnerability concept in public policy typically revert to the classification of specific “vulnerable groups” that warrant targeted housing support (e.g. Council of Europe 2008; Government of Canada 2019; Government of U.K. 2018; USHUD, 2014). Groups are often classified as vulnerable based on their inability to meet specified basic housing needs. These groups vary somewhat by cultural and political context but often share some characteristics such as age (e.g. seniors), household type (e.g. single-parent households), income group (e.g. low income), and ancestry or ethnic origin (e.g. Roma, Indigenous peoples). This approach results in addressing housing vulnerability in terms of a set of specified basic housing needs (such as the number of rooms or windows, or indoor temperature thresholds) and ignoring cultural meanings, social relations, and residential autonomy embedded in housing (Zhu and Holden 2023; Zhu et al. 2021). Beyond formal public policy design, targeting housing support services and subsidies to vulnerable groups defined in this way has also been widely used by non-profit organizations and advocacy groups calling for housing justice (Homes for Women 2013; Inclusion Canada 2020; Levy-Vroelant 2010).

Although such categories offer some welcome recognition of differences in both households and housing, which may inform durable policy solutions, questions remain about how this categorical approach to addressing housing vulnerability affects the prioritization of needs among different segments of the population over different stages of life and within different communities and neighbourhoods. For example, what does it say about policy intentions in addressing the housing needs for households designated as “the short-term poor, the long-term poor, or the most vulnerable among the poor and the non-poor” (Duclos 2002, 7)? Fair, equitable and just housing solutions depend on conceptualizing housing vulnerability in ways that go beyond reductionist demographic and socioeconomic categories. Adequate system-wide action depends on effective research to better understand housing needs across the spectrum of causes, consequences and contingencies of housing vulnerabilities (e.g. Paradis 2018; Schwan and Nadia Ali 2021). The complex concept of housing vulnerability stands to play a role in operationalizing rights-based housing governance and provision. To that end, a richer theorization of housing vulnerability is needed. This special issue presents a selection of new research using different theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and empirical contexts, and focusing on different factors and initiatives that drive or counter housing vulnerability. We aim to contribute to broader and deeper dialogue and debate that fosters critical housing research and policy agendas based on normative approaches that meet our expectations of housing as a human right (e.g. Kimhur 2020; Lawson 2020; Porter, Steele, and Stone 2018).

Existing Conceptualizations of Housing Vulnerability

The concept of vulnerability has been developed and employed to explain a host of situations and outcomes, including in sociology (Ranci 2010), disaster studies (O’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner 1976), development studies (Moser 1998; Prowse 2003), environmental studies (Cutter, Boruff, and Lynn Shirley 2003), and research ethics (Bracken-Roche et al. 2017), among other academic areas. Despite this variety of applications, the concept of vulnerability is often associated with risks and generally refers to “the potential degree of exposure to risks of negative outcomes resulting from external risk factors, conditioned by an entity’s ability to respond to the risks” (Zhu et al. 2021, 12).

Vulnerability is also often conceptually confused with precarity and precariousness. Butler (2004) offers one way to effectively differentiate between the conditions of vulnerability, precariousness and precarity. In Butler’s way of thinking, vulnerability is an encompassing concept that captures a range of situations where people are subjected to precariousness, precarity, or both. As such, we can distinguish between the vulnerability that is a condition of life (equivalent to precariousness) and vulnerabilities that are embedded in power structures (equivalent to precarity) (Cole 2016). This distinction translates well into the domain of research on housing, in which housing vulnerability is sometimes conflated with housing precarity and/or precariousness.

In housing research and policy agendas, conceptualizations of housing vulnerability vary in the understandings they offer of vulnerable characteristics and situations with regard to who is vulnerable, vulnerable to what (negative outcomes), what drives housing vulnerability (risk factors), and how housing vulnerabilities manifest (measurement). In contrast, the concept of housing precarity is more consistently related to uncertainties in one’s housing situation such as tenure insecurity or residential instability, usually driven by the threat of eviction, displacement or unaffordability (Bobek, Pembroke, and Wickham 2021; Clair et al. 2019; Jowers et al. 2021). Therefore, housing precarity may be understood as a specific manifestation of housing vulnerability, under certain circumstances.

The concept of vulnerability is also linked to individual autonomy and capability. For instance, Anderson and Honneth’s (2005) conception relates to one’s susceptibility to various disruptions in social relations of mutual recognition that support individual autonomy and capabilities. Remedying these vulnerabilities by repairing access to social relations is argued to be a central matter of justice. The potential linkage between vulnerability and capability suggests that the concept of housing vulnerability may be employed not only to identify negative conditions that are best avoided but also to present opportunities for empowerment and autonomy (Cole 2016).

Most importantly, we argue that housing vulnerability as a notion opens a conceptual space that allows housing scholars to critically engage with neoliberal public policies wherein the reductive labelling of vulnerable groups is used as a convenient way to justify and achieve the marketization of social goods and welfare residualisation. Vulnerability is a common human condition; that is, we are all vulnerable, although some of us are more vulnerable than others.

As critical vulnerability and equality scholars argue, “designating only certain individuals and groups vulnerable transforms our shared vulnerability into a personal liability and renders the individuals so designated susceptible to alienation, stigma or demonization” (Fineman 2012, 1750). By recognizing our constitutive vulnerability and interrogating our existing understandings of who are (more) vulnerable, how and why, we open a door to new understandings of the fundamental factors underpinning housing inequalities and injustice. It may also lead to opportunities to enable policy responsiveness and expand the reach of state responsibility for housing.

Studies included in this special issue specify and differentiate conceptual understandings of housing vulnerability for individuals, families and communities – i.e. how it is manifested, what drives it, what remedies it provides, and in what contexts. Among the conceptual groundings of housing vulnerability available in social science research, we can recognize at least three (Zhu et al. 2021).

The resource-based approach views housing vulnerability as a situation in which individuals or households are vulnerable to losing their homes or housing status (Taylor 2020; Zhu et al. 2021). In this conceptualization, the primary negative outcome is substandard housing conditions in economic and material terms, ranging from extreme situations of housing exclusion, such as homelessness, to moderate-to-severe housing precarity (e.g. tenure insecurity) or inadequacy (e.g. crowding, poor housing quality, etc.) (Zhu et al. 2021). However, when applied, this approach often implies that the end goal of housing policy is the provision of bare minimum housing and post hoc policy responses to negative housing outcomes. Examples of this approach include policies that address extreme housing vulnerabilities, such as homelessness, through “downstream” emergency responses (e.g. providing transitional housing and homeless shelters), instead of upstream or preventive approaches (Gaetz and Dej 2017; O’Regan, Gould Ellen, and House 2021). Although homelessness scholars have recognized the essential role of stable and adequate housing as a building block of a functional life, as exemplified by the Housing First approach, the post hoc and temporary policy rationales consider the homelessness problem to be resolved once people are sheltered with integrated social services. This arguably leads to the institutionalization of homelessness, rather than its alleviation (Gaetz and Dej 2017). Overall, the resource-based understanding of housing vulnerability underscores the designation of “vulnerable” populations and circumstances based on minimum standards of dwelling (e.g. the Canadian concept of Core Housing Need). Whereas this approach has the benefit of being relatively easy to implement in policy, it has been criticized as paternalistic and culturally blind, and for masking highly heterogeneous housing experiences and needs among different households and groups (Zhu et al. 2021).

A different, risk-based approach, which primarily appears in disaster, environmental and public health studies, conceives of housing vulnerability as the inability of households or communities to manage explicit risk factors like hazards, food insecurity, or illness. Prescribed solutions following this approach focus on building resilience to these risk factors (Porter, Steele, and Stone 2018). Instead of treating substandard or insecure housing conditions as the negative outcome to which people are vulnerable, this approach focuses on the probability of exposure to adverse outcomes (e.g. poverty, poor health) that are contingent on current housing situations, although not directly about housing status. Housing, therefore, is understood as a critical resource or asset that households use to cope with external risk factors, and those in substandard or precarious housing are considered more vulnerable to those risks. Recognizing that housing is the means, rather than the end, of better policy outcomes, this approach is forward-looking and implies proactive instead of reactive policy prescriptions. This risk-reduction rationale is also reflected in the homelessness prevention framework, which calls for a policy shift from “opening the back door” to “shutting the front door” (Gaetz and Dej 2017).

The third, capabilities approach, draws on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s work. It incorporates housing vulnerability as a component of social vulnerability, which indicates a deficit in the freedoms and opportunities to pursue well-being and a desirable life (Kimhur 2020; Martino, Mansour, and Bentley 2023; Ranci 2010). In this conceptualization, housing is viewed as both an effect and a cause of various aspects of vulnerability, which are mutually reinforcing. Poor housing situations negatively impact one’s life opportunities and social relations and may expose one to risks of unemployment, financial strain, and social isolation. Such events may further entrench housing deprivation and precarity. The OECD’s framework of life quality and well-being (OECD 2020b), the U.K.’s human rights evaluation framework (EHRC 2017), and World Health Organization’s (WHO) framework of social determinants of health (WHO 2010) exemplify the capabilities approach. They all imply the embeddedness of housing vulnerability in social vulnerability, with a focus on the structural and systemic factors that subject people to various social, economic and physical harms. While this capabilities approach is encompassing and conceptually powerful, it presents challenges when it comes to quantifying vulnerability.

These three different conceptual approaches – resource-based, risk-based, and capabilities –lay the groundwork for the debate in this special issue on conceptualizations, measurements of, and potential policy solutions to housing vulnerability.

Articles Included in the Special Issue

Articles included in this special issue are theoretically informed and empirically grounded. They cover a wide range of socio-political contexts, including Canada, the U.S., Finland, mainland China and Hong Kong. After a summary of each article, we will discuss their collective contribution to addressing three questions that are essential to the conceptualization of housing vulnerability — its manifestations, drivers and consequences.

McDowell and Collins (2023) adopt a theory of intersectionality as a frame that permits a deeper understanding of why and how the designation of specific vulnerable groups fails to ensure the right to housing. In an initial policy analysis, they point out the failures of the province of Alberta’s housing policy to recognize LGBTQ people as experiencing housing vulnerability differently, even after Canada’s 2017 NHS acknowledged gender and sexuality as characteristics that should designate those groups as housing vulnerable. As a second point of failure, McDowell and Collins point out that identifying groups that experience housing vulnerability is not the same as identifying the specific needs of those groups. To address this failure, they argue that vulnerabilities exist in intersecting, combining and compounding forms of marginalization, rather than ones that remain in siloed groups, and that these intersectional vulnerabilities can be used to identify the supports and services that do, or do not, help. The authors demonstrate the effects of the failure of this understanding of housing vulnerability to recognize intersectionality by examining the situation of LGBTQ refugees. Through interviews with service providers and people with lived experience of this type of housing vulnerability, they demonstrate the value of housing research and policy that considers the causes and consequences of multiple vulnerabilities.

Malenfant and Brais (2023) pursue the longstanding “housing question” (Engels 1995/1872) in socialist thought. They argue for the value and role of anarchist thought in understanding the housing question, the problems in the way this question is being posed and responded to in contemporary policies and possible emancipatory solutions. From their anarchist perspective, the assumption that the housing crisis can be solved by bringing all people into the market housing economy is an error. Indeed, by this anarchist logic, the notion of a right to housing is in fundamental contradiction with the expectation of full participation in the market housing economy. Instead, Malenfant and Brais argue that the presumption that those who experience housing vulnerability can be brought into the financialized housing system and obtain housing stability is merely an invitation to become complicit in perpetuating the housing crisis inherent within this system. For the Government of Canada, as a capitalist state, to position its NHS as establishing and securing housing as a human right can in fact be read as a political move to smooth over the difference between the capitalist trajectory of the housing system and that of the democratic government, whereas recognizing this difference is crucial to the pursuit of human rights, including the right to housing.

The value of anarchist theory does not end with this critique of capitalist housing systems. In addition, Malenfant and Brais draw from the key anarchist concepts of solidarity, non-hierarchical organization, direct action, and mutual aid to present alternative, solidarity-based responses to housing precarity. Such alternative solutions value justice and harm reduction in both the means and the ends of housing provision, both of which explicitly are not delivered within the market production of housing. To demonstrate that such solutions can co-exist within dominant state systems, Malenfant and Brais discuss the MARSS program in Marseille and the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign as examples of potentially justice-serving community housing alternatives.

Evans and Wikander (2023) offer the conceptual contribution of the “housing vulnerability deadlock” in their article. They borrow the idea of deadlock from computer coding where it refers to a situation in which a process cannot proceed while it awaits necessary resources from another process, which is itself in a stalled, waiting state. Evans and Wickander apply this notion to the relationship between housing policy and electoral politics, and the seeming intractability of addressing housing vulnerability by democratic political means, when homeownership is the norm. In asking the provocative questions – how did Canada become a prosperous homeownership society with a seemingly intractable housing vulnerability problem and why has this problem persisted? – Evans and Wickander suggest answers lie in electoral political shifts. Harkening back to a variation of Engels’s housing question also invoked by Malenfant and Brais, to Weber’s (1904/2002) conversion thesis and to the contemporary notion of residential capitalism (Schwartz and Seabrooke 2009), Evans and Wickander suggest that the expansion of homeownership tenure has served to entrench housing vulnerability via changes in political preferences for measures that would reduce social vulnerability (e.g. welfare spending) as well as those that would provide affordable housing options for those unable to compete for market housing (e.g. non-market housing).

The deadlock in responding adequately to housing vulnerability can be explained by the politically conservatizing effects of a growing sense of individualism within a society, such as Canada, that is transitioning to higher levels of homeownership. The authors argue this results in the proposal of policies across the political spectrum that address housing vulnerability in ways that are palatable to the homeowning majority, who exhibit a decreasing appetite for social spending and tend to be sensitive to property values and tax rates. The deadlock can also be explained by households’ locational choices. Evans and Wickander trace some significant shifts in the social geography of Canada’s urban centres and suburbs that also contribute to understanding the intractability of housing vulnerability. They point to the role played by suburban localities, in particular, as advocates of capital switching from manufacturing and provision of goods in the secondary economic sector to fixing capital in the built environment through the financialization of housing and mortgage securitization. Evans and Wickander’s political analysis prompts renewed questions and debate about the spatial dynamics of housing type and tenure choice and about the relationship of these dynamics to current trends in social policy options, as well as about whether Canada’s NHS has had any impact on shifting this political deadlock.

In addressing housing vulnerability in the Canadian housing regime, MacDonald (2024) draws upon feminist theory to problematize the implicit housing policy goal of achieving a universal state of invulnerability. Feminist theory, by compelling an investigation of the negative space of a crisis, offers a different view of universal and systemic vulnerability, although this state of vulnerability is experienced by some more urgently than others. Like Malenfant and Brais, MacDonald situates housing vulnerability and precarity as resulting from the structural conditions of contemporary life. She presents and describes a range of sites of production of housing precarity in Canada, such as the precarious employment situations of those who work in forward-facing positions serving people accessing shelter services, which sometimes results in those workers being driven to housing precarity themselves. Arriving at a conclusion very similar to that of other authors in this special issue, MacDonald considers the injustice suffered by those who are less likely to have their housing needs met, and by those who are rendered more vulnerable by solutions to housing vulnerability that do not fully take into account the structural nature of housing vulnerability.

Looking at a temporary accommodation service for homeless people, Ilmoniemi (2023) presents an institutional ethnographic account of the day-to-day workings of the Housing First policy model in Finland. The Housing First model, referenced by Malenfant and Brais in this issue as well as by many others in progressive housing policy, was launched in Finland in 2008 as an approach to reduce the vulnerability of people lacking a permanent home by, first, providing them with permanent accommodation, and next, bringing them the services they need. Ilmoniemi undertakes an observational and interview-based analysis of life at a temporary accommodation service (TAS), where, in practice, people who arrive as clients may end up living for years. Despite the overall benefits of the statutory right to housing guaranteed in this model and the sincere and well-meaning behaviours of TAS staff, flaws emerge for those to whom the promised new start in life remains out of reach. The analysis shows in vivid ethnographic detail how clients’ vulnerability is used as a justification for widening social control over their lives and misrecognition of their essential autonomous humanity. Building on the theoretical efforts of Anderson and Honneth (2005), Ilmoniemi illustrates the deleterious implications of the TAS service model for the vulnerability, autonomy and relationships of clients, both psychologically and social-ontologically, due fundamentally to the compulsion to be always making plans for housing transition.

In examining race, bankruptcy, and foreclosure in a Deep South U.S. county, Lichtenstein and Weber (2023) reveal cumulative disadvantage and risk responsibilization through bankruptcy law as dual, racialized processes that have produced vulnerability to foreclosure-induced home loss, disproportionately experienced by Black homeowners. This study focuses on Tuscaloosa County in Alabama, a U.S. state that has had higher than average rates of mortgage delinquency and personal bankruptcies. Through spatial analyses of foreclosure activities from 2016 to 2019 in relation to homeowners’ race and ethnicity, Lichtenstein and Weber show that Black homeowners are more vulnerable to foreclosure, while also less likely to receive a fresh start through bankruptcy. The authors demonstrate two interacting institutional processes that exposed Black homeowners to higher risks of foreclosure. On the one hand, the 2005 reform to U.S. bankruptcy law, known as the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), was a risk responsibilization model, underpinned by neoliberal ideologies of personal freedom and self-empowerment. Under this model, the authors argue that Black debtors are more likely to be steered to more costly and burdensome repayment plans, due to a neoliberal rhetoric deployed by bankruptcy lawyers that position Black filers as “irresponsible.” Then, the authors employ the concept of “racial cumulative disadvantage” to describe the effect of racism that has perpetuated inequality in early-life education and other opportunities, as well as in subsequent income and wealth accumulation. It was racial cumulative disadvantage that has subjected Black homeowners to the risk responsibilization model of bankruptcy which in turn shifted the responsibility of risk management from lenders to consumers, regardless of individual circumstances.

Moving beyond the Global North, Ley (2023) applies the concept of residential alienation, i.e. the psycho-social experience of fear, stress, anxiety, and disempowerment, to understand the subjective dimension of vulnerability experienced by young adults in Hong Kong. He examines how residential alienation contributes to the political activism of this group. Drawing on attitudinal surveys and housing market indices from various sources post-1997 (when Hong Kong returned to China) from various sources, Ley traces a theoretical linkage of objective and subjective housing vulnerability to grassroots politics, progressing from impeded access to homeownership, to a growing sense of injustice and disempowerment in tandem with a solidified Hong Kong identity (localism), and to the political activism of young adults. The author acknowledges that these analyses only point to theoretical and correlational, rather than causal, relationships. Indeed, the interplay between housing and political outcomes is not straightforward and deserves more study. Evans and Wickander in this issue describe the housing vulnerability deadlock precipitated by the electoral politics of a homeowner society in Canada. In Hong Kong, by contrast, the electoral system has lost its functionality for democratic and political expression. Young Hong Kongers can be seen as taking recourse to the common experience of housing alienation to solidify their social and political identities, as well as to express a politics of resentment against the growth machine and an oppressive political system. This study shines a new light on the psycho-social aspect of housing vulnerability and deepens the understanding of the interplay between housing situations, housing grievances, and political dynamics.

Along the lines of younger generations, Harten (2024) investigates the housing experiences of an understudied group in China, i.e. recent college graduates, and discusses a less visible form of housing vulnerability, i.e. room sharing. Drawing on a survey of over 3000 recent college graduates across Chinese cities, Harten found that high-density room sharing with two or more people per room is a common strategy for these young adults to cope with precarious employment and housing unaffordability, especially in big cities. While the practices and duration of room sharing are shaped by income, migrant status, and gender, most of these young adults sacrifice space, comfort, and privacy in exchange for affordability and location for their first accommodation, or second for some, after graduation. Through a critical lens of informality, Harten demonstrates that room sharing as an informal strategy to cope with external social risks and meet housing needs further compounds housing vulnerability.

Conclusion: Housing Vulnerability Reconsidered

Articles in this special issue present a host of manifestations of housing vulnerability experienced by diverse population groups across various contexts. These include homelessness and temporary accommodations in Finland (Ilmoniemi 2023), precarious housing situations of LGBTQ refugees (McDowell and Collins 2023) in Alberta, Canada, multi-layered housing stresses facing Canadian renters (Evans and Wikander 2023), the disproportionate loss of homes among Black homeowners due to foreclosure in Alabama, U.S. (Lichtenstein and Weber 2023), the unattainability of homeownership for young Hong Kongers (Ley 2023), and room sharing as a less visible form of housing vulnerability among recent college graduates in China (Harten, 2024).

Housing vulnerability extends beyond precarious housing conditions. Authors in this issue also explore vulnerability in relation to the lack of recognitional autonomy experienced by clients receiving temporary accommodation services in Finland (Ilmoniemi 2023), residential alienation as a subjective experience of housing vulnerability for young adults in Hong Kong (Ley 2023), and housing precarity as a shared but unevenly distributed condition that results in and from unequal life chances (MacDonald, 2024). This broad spectrum of experience challenges the conceptualization of housing vulnerability as a mere lack of shelter or basic housing functions resulting from individual deficiencies such as poverty, physical disability, or mental illness.

Using different theoretical lenses to critique the individualized and reductionist approaches to housing vulnerability, the authors in this issue all land on common ground that recognizes variegated structural drivers of housing vulnerability. For Malenfant and Brais (2023), structural oppression of autonomous community life by the state structures of capitalism, as well as government policies that elide the crucial difference between a well-functioning democratic government and capitalist growth, lie at the root of housing precarity. Viewing the challenge from a feminist perspective, MacDonald (2024) characterizes the colonial and patriarchal roots and the framing of the housing system and of vulnerability as fundamental problems. Housing vulnerability is also rooted in systemic racism and compounded by neoliberalism. Lichtenstein and Weber (2023) articulate the neoliberal process of “risk responsibilization” which transfers debt management responsibilities from lending institutions to individual consumers and entrenches the cumulative disadvantages of Black households, leaving them at higher risk of being classified as “irresponsible” debtors and exacerbating their housing precarity.

The conservatizing effects of homeownership perpetuate political solutions that promote the interests of homeowners at the expense of those who suffer under market-based and financialized housing provision systems. They entrench housing vulnerability while limiting the scope of available and palatable policy solutions (Evans and Wikander 2023). The political economy of housing financialization and the property-centred growth machine also underpin residential alienation – a sense of fear, stress, anxiety, and disempowerment – experienced by young adults in Hong Kong who are excluded from access to homeownership (Ley 2023). Contributing to the understanding of housing stress facing young adults, Harten (2024) reveals room sharing as a commonly adopted strategy by recent college graduates in China in response to housing unaffordability against the backdrop of economic restructuring and employment precarity.

As predicted by the capabilities approach, intersectionality further compounds individual vulnerabilities. McDowell and Collins (2023) demonstrate the risks of isolating particular groups based on their vulnerability characteristics, using an intersectional lens that examines the layering of multiple vulnerabilities.

The systemic failures that produce housing vulnerability render individuals and households at risk of not only housing deficiencies and precarity but also deprivation of life opportunities and capabilities. The housing vulnerability deadlock, according to Evans and Wikander (2023), describes how renters lose opportunities for wealth and asset-building, and meaningful participation in political decision making, because they cannot afford to buy a home. Ley also argues that the deep sense of disempowerment felt by young Hong Kongers due to unattainable homeownership has reinforced a sense of localism and the widening gulf between “us” and “them”, fuelling youth activism against a political system that oppresses them.

McDowell and Collins (2023), MacDonald (2024), and Ilmoniemi (2023) all point to the important role played by those who work in housing and social service provision for those in precarious housing situations. However, these workers are often in situations of housing precarity themselves. They are in key positions to empathize with and resist structural oppression and stigmatization of those seeking help with housing in situations that are effectively designed to exclude them.

Using different structurally informed perspectives, authors in this special issue critique the neoliberal, paternalistic policy approach to housing that relies on individualized housing responsibility. To meet the test of radical feminist, political economy, or anarcho-socialist critiques, respectively, for these authors, a structural approach to defining the right to housing is the only means to ensure that the right is attainable. In other words, effective policy responses to housing vulnerability should not stop at providing basic housing. Instead, they should build on a holistic understanding of housing vulnerability and a recognition of the effects of various forms and degrees of housing vulnerability on economic prospects, physical, mental, and social well-being, as well as on capabilities. Many layers of understanding and many policy levers are needed to make a lasting impact on individuals, households, and communities at risk.

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grants [ID: 430-2021-00887] and Partnership Grants [ID: 890-2018-1013].