Pathways Through Housing Precarity: suburbanisation, sharing and self-sacrifice among low-income Bangladeshi Migrants in Dublin

This paper presents the results of ethnographic research on the strategies that recently arrived, low -income Bangladeshi migrants use to negotiate the highly inflated and undersupplied housing market in Dublin, Ireland. This analysis draws on Clapham’s (2005) widely used ‘housing pathways’ framework but extends this to incorporate insights from the literature on precarity. Thus, research participants’ housing pathways since their arrival in Ireland and how these were shaped by multiple and insertional precarities (in terms of legal status, employment, income, housing and racial and religious minority status), personal priorities and cultural norms are explored. The influence of these factors on migrants’ understandings of the meaning of home are also examined. The key insight offered here is that this combination of factors shaped distinctive housing pathways among Bangladeshi migrants’ which commonly encompass residential suburbanisation and sharing/ subletting of private rented accommodation as widespread strategies to manage housing and other precarities, coupled with the sacrifice of comfort, privacy and family life. These factors, in turn, shape distinctive understandings of the meaning of home among this population, which are instrumentalist and expansive and also focused on the aspects of the dwelling that support their religious and cultural traditions.