IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/socres/v21y2016i2p23-36.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Putting the Squeeze on ‘Generation Rent’: Housing Benefit Claimants in the Private Rented Sector - Transitions, Marginality and Stigmatisation

Author

Listed:
  • Ian Cole
  • Ryan Powell
  • Elizabeth Sanderson

Abstract

The term ‘Generation Rent’ has gained currency in recent years to reflect the fact that more 25 to 34 year olds in Britain now live in rented accommodation rather than owner-occupation. The term also conveys the extent to which age-related divisions in the housing market are becoming as significant as longer standing tenure divisions. However, this portmanteau term covers a wide array of different housing circumstances - from students, young professionals and transient households to the working and non-working poor. This paper focuses on the position of a specific category of this age cohort - those 25 to 34 year olds living in self-contained accommodation in the private rented sector who are in receipt of Housing Benefit. On the basis of survey evidence and qualitative interviews with landlords and housing advisers, the paper considers how the marginal economic and housing market position of this age group is being reinforced by the stigmatising attitudes of landlords which formerly applied to tenants in their late teens and early 20s and are now being extended further along the age band. The paper suggests that the use of a ‘housing pathways’ approach to signify the housing transitions of young adults needs to be revisited, to give greater weight to collective and creative responses to constraints in the housing market and to recognise the key role played by gatekeepers such as landlords in stigmatising groups according to assumed age-related attributes.

Suggested Citation

  • Ian Cole & Ryan Powell & Elizabeth Sanderson, 2016. "Putting the Squeeze on ‘Generation Rent’: Housing Benefit Claimants in the Private Rented Sector - Transitions, Marginality and Stigmatisation," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 21(2), pages 23-36, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:21:y:2016:i:2:p:23-36
    DOI: 10.5153/sro.3909
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.3909
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.5153/sro.3909?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John Bone, 2014. "Neoliberal Nomads: Housing Insecurity and the Revival of Private Renting in the UK," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 19(4), pages 1-14, December.
    2. Chris Hamnett, 2010. "Moving the Poor Out of Central London? The Implications of the Coalition Government 2010 Cuts to Housing Benefits," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 42(12), pages 2809-2819, December.
    3. Juliet Stone & Ann Berrington & Jane Falkingham, 2014. "Gender, Turning Points, and Boomerangs: Returning Home in Young Adulthood in Great Britain," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 51(1), pages 257-276, February.
    4. Steven Roberts, 2013. "Youth Studies, Housing Transitions and the ‘Missing Middle’: Time for a Rethink?," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 18(3), pages 118-129, August.
    5. Kim McKee, 2012. "Young People, Homeownership and Future Welfare," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(6), pages 853-862.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nick Bailey, 2020. "Poverty and the re-growth of private renting in the UK, 1994-2018," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(2), pages 1-20, February.
    2. Agustín Cócola Gant, 2016. "Holiday Rentals: The New Gentrification Battlefront," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 21(3), pages 112-120, August.
    3. Adrienne Csizmady & Lea Kőszeghy, 2022. "‘Generation Rent’ in a Super Homeownership Environment: The Case of Budapest, Hungary," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(14), pages 1-18, July.
    4. Caroline Barratt & Gill Green, 2017. "Making a House in Multiple Occupation a Home: Using Visual Ethnography to Explore Issues of Identity and Well-Being in the Experience of Creating a Home Amongst HMO Tenants," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 22(1), pages 95-112, February.
    5. Valentina Tocchioni & Ann Berrington & Daniele Vignoli & Agnese Vitali, 2019. "Housing uncertainty and the transition to parenthood among Britain’s "Generation Rent"," Econometrics Working Papers Archive 2019_07, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni "G. Parenti".

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jennifer Hoolachan & Kim McKee, 2019. "Inter-generational housing inequalities: ‘Baby Boomers’ versus the ‘Millennials’," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(1), pages 210-225, January.
    2. Elyse Warner & Claire Henderson-Wilson & Fiona Andrews, 2017. "“It’s Give and Take”: Australian Families’ Experiences of Negotiating Financial and Domestic Contributions When Young Adults Return Home," Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Springer, vol. 38(4), pages 541-555, December.
    3. Rory Coulter & Michael Thomas, 2019. "A new look at the housing antecedents of separation," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 40(26), pages 725-760.
    4. Kim Mckee & Tom Moore & Adriana Soaita & Joe Crawford, 2017. "‘Generation Rent’ and The Fallacy of Choice," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(2), pages 318-333, March.
    5. Rory Coulter, 2017. "Local house prices, parental background and young adults’ homeownership in England and Wales," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(14), pages 3360-3379, November.
    6. Brian Joseph Gillespie & Clara H. Mulder & Christiane Reichert, 2022. "The Role of Family and Friends in Return Migration and Its Labor Market Outcomes," Population Research and Policy Review, Springer;Southern Demographic Association (SDA), vol. 41(1), pages 115-138, February.
    7. Lusi Liao & Sasiwimon Warunsiri Paweenawat, 2022. "Alternative boomerang kids, intergenerational co-residence, and maternal labor supply," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 20(2), pages 609-634, June.
    8. Jie Chen & Zan Yang, 2017. "What do young adults on the edges of homeownership look like in big cities in an emerging economy: Evidence from Shanghai," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(10), pages 2322-2341, August.
    9. George Maier & Kate R. Gilchrist, 2022. "Women who host: An intersectional critique of rentier capitalism on AirBnB," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 817-829, May.
    10. McGinnity, Frances & Privalko, Ivan & Russell, Helen & Curristan, Sarah & Stapleton, Amy & Laurence, James, 2022. "Origin and Integration: Housing and family among migrants in the 2016 Irish Census," Research Series, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), number BKMNEXT422.
    11. Mark Davidson, 2011. "Critical Commentary. Gentrification in Crisis," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(10), pages 1987-1996, August.
    12. Parkinson, Sharon & James, Amity & Liu, Edgar & Hayward, Richard Donald, 2018. "Navigating a changing private rental sector: opportunities and challenges for low-income renters," SocArXiv f3h4s, Center for Open Science.
    13. Bettina Isengard & Ronny König & Marc Szydlik, 2018. "Money or space? Intergenerational transfers in a comparative perspective," Housing Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(2), pages 178-200, February.
    14. Federico Coricelli, 2022. "The Co-’s of Co-Living: How the Advertisement of Living Is Taking Over Housing Realities," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(1), pages 296-304.
    15. Francesca Fiori, 2019. "Who leaves, who stays? Gendered routes out of the family home following union dissolution in Italy," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 40(20), pages 533-560.
    16. David Byrne & David Duffy & John FitzGerald, 2018. "Household Formation and Tenure Choice: Did the Great Irish Housing Bust Alter Consumer Behaviour?," The Economic and Social Review, Economic and Social Studies, vol. 49(3), pages 287-317.
    17. Philipp M Lersch & Wilfred Uunk, 2017. "The shadow of future homeownership: the association of wanting to move into homeownership with labour supply," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 31(3), pages 522-541, June.
    18. Mara Ferreri & Romola Sanyal, 2018. "Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(15), pages 3353-3368, November.
    19. Antoine Paccoud & Alan Mace, 2018. "Tenure change in London’s suburbs: Spreading gentrification or suburban upscaling?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(6), pages 1313-1328, May.
    20. Lei Lei & Scott South, 2016. "Racial and ethnic differences in leaving and returning to the parental home," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 34(4), pages 109-142.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:21:y:2016:i:2:p:23-36. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.