Center renters: Tenant epistemologies as research strategy

One in three Canadian households rent their home, consistently accounting for around one-half of Canadian households spending over 30% of income on shelter costs (Statistics Canada, 2011, 2016, 2022). Regardless, hard luck stories of prospective homebuyers squeezed out by rising prices and interest rates still make better copy than those of the ever-expanding ranks of renters. Media sound bites from big bank economists, mortgage professionals, and realtors proselytizing about interest rates, mortgage stress tests, and home purchase incentives keep property ownership front and center in public discourse. Renters may speak but, unless they shout (or refuse to pay rent), they are not heard. Tenant voices are drowned out both by those wishing to get on the first rung of the property ladder and well-polished messaging from real estate interests. In the last decade, the number of rental households has increased by 21.5%, over 2.5 times growth rate of ownership (Statistics Canada, 2022). Empirically, renting is quickly becoming Canada's new and evermore unaffordable normal.

While renting surges, Canadian housing research and policy lags, focusing primarily on the housing continuum's poles–-home ownership and homelessness. The continuing and pervasive “ideology of home ownership” (Ronald, 2008) is quickly becoming untenable in Canada where home ownership is widely assumed to be the pathway to financial security. Yet, there is little international evidence that prosperous societies have more owner-occupied housing (Stephens et al, 2003). In fact, varying rates of owner-occupied housing do not necessarily “reflect, still less match, changes in prosperity within countries” (Kemeny, 2006, p1). At the other end of the continuum, from the widely acclaimed At Home/Chez Soi Housing First experiment to the Observatory on Homelessness, Canadian homelessness research is world-class. While homelessness persists, there is a wealth of available evidence to inform policy. Extensive research exists on homeless persons’ lived experience (Harman, 1989; Somerville, 2013), but there is markedly less work on renters. This may fit with a more generalized lack of social scientific work on the “unmarked” (Brekhus, 1998). International evidence suggests a “persistent widespread bias against renters” (Krueckeberg, 1999, p.9; see also Rowlands & Gurney, 2000), and Canadian research suggests that “tenure stigma” (Rollwagen, 2015; see also Horgan, 2020; Rowe & Dunn, 2015) remains pervasive. Overall, despite unprecedented rental growth, the everyday experiences of the 5 million Canadian households who rent (Statistics Canada, 2022) remain poorly understood.

In Canada's hot housing market, ownership is elusive and/or undesirable for many, yet an increasingly untenable federal policy bias toward homeowners over renters persists. The pandemic sharpened focus on Canadian rental housing precarity, with over 250,000 households in rental arrears in 2020 (FINA, 2021). Post-pandemic, the ongoing global structural transformation of housing markets precipitated by housing financialization will continue to shape affordability and rental precarity (Aalbers, 2017; Fields, 2015; Kalman-Lamb, 2017). Global in scope, housing financialization impacts Canada's increasingly precarious private rental sector (PRS) in particular (August, 2020; August & Walks, 2018). “Renoviction”/“demoviction” are now everyday terms referring to landlords evicting current tenants so as to renovate or demolish rental units and subsequently charge higher rents. For example, despite Ontario's Residential Tenancy Act limiting how evictions happen, renovictions are a core mechanism for real estate investment trusts (REITs), in particular, to secure higher rents (August & Walks, 2018; Zell & McCullough, 2020). Additionally, research in Toronto shows how minor municipal bylaw changes enable “mom & pop” landlords to increase rents through renoviction (Slater, 2004; Horgan, 2018). Precarity, then, is becoming caked into Canada's private rental sector.

This contrasts sharply with the security of tenure experienced by those in non-market housing (including public housing, rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing, some housing co-operatives, community land trusts, among others), where housing costs are independent of market rates, based instead on tenants’ capacity to pay (Malpass, 2001; Morris, 2009). Canada's rental system remains dualist, with two different kinds of rental tenure; one non-market non-profit based, and the other, private and profit-oriented (Kemeny, 2006; Matznetter, 2020; Stephens, 2020). Within this dualist system, non-market rentals remain marginal, accounting for only 6% of rental housing. Canada's rental stock is overwhelmingly concentrated in the for-profit PRS, whose expansion is profoundly changing housing experiences internationally, particularly through growth in “non-linear” and “backward housing trajectories” (Bobek et al., 2021).

How did we get here? While it has been a long time coming, recent policy is instructive. Canada's Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the federal Crown corporation charged with managing Canada's housing sector, is barely involved in housing provision. Throughout his tenure (2014-21) as CMHC President and CEO, Evan Siddall was explicit about Canada's housing future shifting from ownership to private renting. So, while the 2018 National Housing Strategy (NHS)—A Place to Call Home—motions towards affordability in the rapidly growing rental sector, it centers private rental investment. For example, the single largest dollar item in the NHS is the Rental Construction Financing Initiative (RCFI), providing minimum $1 million loans to rental housing developers. While the RCFI is open to non-profits, there are serious restrictions on them, with many housing nonprofits already struggling as current operating agreements supporting earlier affordable housing initiatives, both federal and provincial, come to an end (Cooper, 2022). At base, the RCFI incentivizes for-profit rental provision, in particular. This ripens conditions for PRS expansion and housing financialization as means of capital accumulation for developers in a build-to-rent sector increasingly dominated by REITs (August, 2020). Simultaneously, municipalities scramble to regulate short-term rentals (STRs), specifically Airbnbs, which have fundamentally transformed the availability of regular rentals regulated by provincial and territorial tenancy law. In Halifax, for example, prior to the introduction of municipal regulation, STRs saw a 19.2% year over year increase (Wachsmuth et al 2019).¹

What we have then is a rental sector facing multiple structural strains, from housing financialization at a global scale with marked local effects, to ongoing state reticence to get involved in direct housing provision, alongside a national housing strategy focused on homeowners, homeless persons, and rental providers. Amidst these strains, renters themselves are largely invisibilized. Therefore, one way for housing scholarship to support and inform activism, advocacy, and policy is becoming increasingly clear: center renters.

I want to suggest that housing studies scholars—an interdisciplinary bunch of which sociologists are just one part—work collaboratively and concertedly to center renters by developing tenant epistemologies. By tenant epistemologies, I mean research that centers tenants’ standpoints, foregrounds tenants’ voices, and works with tenants’ own accounts of their experiences. Patricia Hill Collins notes that to investigate “the subjugated knowledge of subordinate groups….requires more ingenuity than that needed to examine the standpoints and thought of dominant groups” (1991: 202). Inspired by Collins and deeply troubled by the relative absence of tenants’ perspectives from local, provincial, national and international conversations around housing, It is time to highlight the “subjugated knowledge” of tenants. Here, “epistemologies” is internationally pluralized to recognize that tenants are not a homogeneous group. In addition to social positon, type and duration of tenancy may impact any particular tenant's experiences, and so also their knowledge about and understanding of rental housing. For example, those living in rent-geared-to-income (RGI) housing are likely to orient differently to their housing futures than renters who are subject to market rents. Likewise, we can anticipate differences not only between RGI and PRS tenants, but also amongst tenants, in particular those situated differently within the PRS.

While experience alone might be insufficient as “evidence” (Scott, 1991), in a context where the tenant experience is largely ignored, centering renters is essential. This then can be linked with and understood in the context of the broader structural transformation of housing markets and the rapid financialization of real estate.In order to deepen and extend housing studies centered on tenant epistemologies, and informed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore's (2007) approach to carceral geographies, analytically we can ask: what happens when we place tenants, rental units, and rental buildings and developments at the center of our studies and examine the social world that is organized around them? Think, for example, of Desmond's (2016) analysis of the devastatingly exploitative economic ecosystem surrounding the evictions industry in the US. Linking tenant experiences across buildings, streets, neighborhoods, municipalities, regions, and nations will help to build a more comprehensive picture of the transformation in housing that is well under way internationally, driven in large part by financialization. Furthermore, tenant epistemologies need not center only individual renters. The collective voices of tenants are at the core of tenant epistemologies. What might we learn by helping to convene both local and cross-Canada roundtables of tenants, where tenant voices and experiences not only inform, but direct our research questions? This requires us to not only listen to tenants, but to organize our work around tenant knowledge and experience to spur critical, informed and collaboratively produced analyses.

Research that centers renters is urgently needed, at a very minimum to provide some ballast against relentless popular media focus on homeownership. What knowledge and action might develop from tenant perspectives in a context where an ideology of ownership prevails, but is increasingly out of step with the everyday realities faced by 5 million Canadian households? Let's get to work.