Constructing housing literacy through financial literacy

Abstract

We build on previous literature regarding financial literacy in the home by turning our focus to financial literacy of the home and exploring the connection between housing and financial issues. We use a netnographic approach to investigate how tenants and landlords conceptualise their housing experiences on an online platform during the Covid-19 pandemic context. Drawing on Giddens’ concept of ontological security and the literature on financial literacy, we develop the notion of ‘housing literacy’ by examining the rental relationship between tenant and landlord. We show that tenants’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial uncertainties and exacerbated when landlords seek to maintain their own ontological security. We also show that landlords’ ontological insecurity is manifested via financial instabilities while exacerbated by tenants’ behaviours. We posit that housing literacy is constructed at the intersection of tensions prompted by ontological (in)securities of both tenants and landlords. We also posit that housing literacy comprises developing the skills to maintain the home’s use value (tenants) and exchange value (landlords), and that these skills involve much more than budgeting, making rent payments, and collecting rents. We find that the ontological security of both parties is in a constant cycle of disruption and security, linked through financial precarity and learning to ‘trade-off’ elements of security. We demonstrate how both parties use anonymous advice received through their online interactions, to become housing literate. Their housing literacy is cultivated through experience, information seeking, and learning extra-legal norms in the rental market.