The Everyman archetype: discursive reframing of private landlords in the financialization of rental housing

Abstract

This article investigates the politico-cultural processes underpinning the financialization of private rental housing. Exploring the case of Australia, it shows how debt-financed landlords have been discursively reframed as ‘mum and dad investors’ who are valorized politically as enterprising, self-reliant and providing essential housing. This article then critically appraises this depiction based on available secondary data, and finds that protagonists are, predominantly, midlife and older households with higher household incomes and higher wealth levels. Furthermore, deployment of an Everyman archetype is a politico-cultural device for normalizing this type of activity as part of the financialization of everyday life. Discursive reframing bolsters political and public support for investor-landlordism as an important contributor to asset-based welfare.

Keywords:

• Financialization
• asset-based welfare
• private rented sector

Subject classification codes:

• Financialization
• private rented sector
• welfare systems

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The US is somewhat of an exception to this since although individual investors own three quarters of the nation’s rental buildings this equates to just under half of all rental units due to the ownership of buildings with larger number of rental units (5+) by business entities such as different types of partnerships (Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies, 2017, p. 14).

2 Or 44% if refinancing for owner-occupation is included.

3 Private landlords are generally under-researched and data are rarely comprehensive (e.g. HUD 2018). Available secondary data used in this paper are household survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and data on individual taxpayers from the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

4 Individualised retirement accounts based on employer contributions.

5 Negative gearing was introduced in 1922 through a legislative provision that enabled a (business) person to deduct all losses and outgoings from their assessable income to deal with early losses on their business ventures before their enterprise became profitable.

6 These are vehicles regulated by the Australian Tax Office through which people manage their own investment for retirement instead of using industry or private superannuation funds.

7 The first apparent appearance of ‘Everyman’ was in a mediaeval morality play, The Summoning of Everyman, printed in London about 1530, (British Library, 2018). Since that time, Everyman has been a reoccurring motif not only in the arts (literature, drama, poetry and film) but also as a universal archetype in Jungian psychology and, more recently, marketing.

8 Tasmania was last to do so; its Residential Tenancy Act 1998 (Tas) alone refers to ‘owners’.

9 Calculated from Australian Taxation Statistics 2015–16, Individuals, Table 1: Selected items for 1978–79 to 2015–16 income years. The 2015–16 figures were not, however, complete and thus 2014–15 figures are reported here (ATO, 2018a)

10 2009–10 is the earliest year in which the SIH included questions about ‘how many’ other properties were owned by respondents. ATO tax data also reveal a growth in individuals with multiple interests in rental properties: in 2000, 23.6 per cent of investor landlords declared multiple property interests and in 2015–16, this figure had increased to 28.7 per cent (ATO 2018c).

11 Authors’ calculations of customised ABS Survey of Income and Housing, 2009–10 and 2015–16 data.

12 Interest-only loans are typically for five years although can be for longer terms. They enable the borrower to repay interest but not principal for that period, reducing regular mortgage payments until they ‘flip’ the property for capital gain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kath Hulse

Dr Kath Hulse is a Professor of Housing Studies at the Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne). She has an ongoing interest in the ways in which housing systems interact with welfare regimes. Her most recent research has focused on the growth of the private rental sector as home ownership rates decline, investigating the inter-connected economic, social, political and cultural dimensions of this change. She has qualifications in social policy, urban and regional studies and public policy.

Margaret Reynolds

Margaret Reynolds is a Research Associate at the Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne). Her research interests include affordable private rental housing supply, population mobility and socio-economic disadvantage. As a human geographer, examining ‘place’ and the changing spatial distributions of such housing and urban matters are a particular focus in her quantitative work.

Chris Martin

Dr Chris Martin is a Senior Research Fellow at the City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Chris is an expert in rental housing, with special expertise in tenancy law, social housing, marginal tenures, affordable housing policy, and the intersection of housing, government and social control. He has qualifications in economics, law and criminology.