Private Renting in a Home-owning Society: Disaster, Diversity or Deviance?

Abstract

The rise in private renting in home ownership societies has been variously interpreted as increasing risk and insecurity and providing more flexible housing options for an increasingly diverse resident cohort. Drawing on an original survey and in-depth interviews with private renters in two cities in a classic home ownership society (Australia), there is clear support for the “disaster” interpretation in respect of low-income households renting in outer urban areas, with financial stress and insecurity reflecting and compounding disadvantage. For many others, private renting can be interpreted as a “constructive coping” strategy in the context of urban housing market restructuring. A sizeable cohort of private renters explicitly prioritises living in a desired inner/middle city location over owning. One – albeit relatively small group – appears “deviant” from the home ownership norm in associating private renting with greater lifestyle freedom. The paper contributes an understanding that location and lifestyle are of paramount importance to many private renters rather than housing tenure per se.

Keywords:

• Private renting
• home ownership
• social norms
• constructive coping
• housing affordability

Notes

1. Definitions of private rental vary between countries and over time. At its core, the private rental sector comprises privately owned properties allocated by the market with market rents (albeit with on-going rents subject to some form of regulation) and is the view of private renting used in this article. This approach is consistent with Haffner et al. (2010) who suggest taking a “middle way” approach to discussion of the private rental sector, taking into account both context and essential meaning.

2. ‘Creative destruction’ is from Schumpeter and refers to processes of change within an economic system that result in its transformation.

3. Even within sociology there are different definitions of deviance: statistical (deviates from a statistical average); absolutist (deviates from universally agreed rules/standards); reactivist (behaviour or conditions labelled as deviant by others); normative (actions and conditions that violate group norms which are situational and violation of a group norm) (Clinard and Meier 2011, 6–9).

4. Statistical Area 2 (SA2s) are part of the ABS standard geography that aim to represent ‘a community that interacts socially and economically’ and have an average population of 10,000 people (ABS 2010).

5. The proportion of family households in the sample was slightly higher (34% compared with 28% in census data), largely because the selected inner Sydney area had a higher percentage of renter families due to the local availability of desired schools. Whilst the sample was very similar to area Census data in terms of the third of private renters lacking any post-school qualification, there was a difference in the percentage of respondents reporting a university-level (tertiary) qualification (55% in the sample compared with 41 in the census). In interpreting the results, it may well be that more highly educated private renters have additional resources to achieve a higher level of control of their housing and other circumstances than other renters do.

6. Seventy-four per cent of those in receipt of a housing allowance felt that they could stay as long as they want and 76% of those not in receipt of this payment (authors’ survey).