Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 136, November 2022, Pages 211-218
Geoforum

Rootlessness: How the Irish private rental sector prevents tenants feeling secure in their homes and tenant’s resistance against this

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.09.013Get rights and content

Abstract

Ireland’s housing situation in the 2020s is similar to many other Anglophone countries, including Australia and the UK: A deepening housing crisis, an increased reliance on the private rental sector, and a residual ideological preference for homeownership, despite this increasingly being a less viable option for ‘Generation Rent’. Using Fullilove’s concept of rootshock, we argue that tenant perceptions of landlords’ actions and beliefs can contribute to a sense of rootlessness: no or few ties to the spatial setting of the dwelling. Using work done by resistance scholars, we also demonstrate that the inability to feel fully ontologically secure in one’s residence often leads to attempts by the tenant to make roots in their dwellings or resist rootlessness to create the sense of being at home. Based on qualitative research undertaken in 2019 with renters in three Irish cities, Dublin, Cork and Galway, we examine everyday forms of resistance, to explore the possibilities tenants carve out for themselves in order to survive and exist in the private rental sector and conclude by asking how we can learn from these practices to think about how to improve living standards for tenants.

Introduction

Based on qualitative interviews undertaken with tenants in the Irish private rental sector in 2019, the authors explored the concept of ‘secure occupancy’ as a way of discussing the feeling of security or insecurity that tenants have towards their rented accommodation (Byrne and McArdle, 2020, Byrne and McArdle, 2022). The main contribution of that article was to highlight the power asymmetry between the landlord and tenant, and how insecurity in the private rental sector (PRS) was a result of this imbalanced relationship. This social relationship is produced and influenced by broader societal, legislative, and cultural factors. Landlords can view the property as an asset or as a home, depending on their attachment to and history with the property. In this article, we focus on the perspectives of tenants rather than landlords (see Rolfe et al., 2022 which explores landlords’ perspectives). Tenants live in a property but their feelings of being at home may not be clear cut or a given, tenants can feel insecure in their spatial surroundings and lack attachment or roots to the property they live within, also known as rootlessness. This feeling can be based on an ideological belief that the property belongs to the landlord, either the tenant’s belief or the landlord’s belief, and it can be based on or exacerbated by the landlord’s actions. There can also be a response to this from tenants, an attempt to embed themselves in a property and create roots for themselves, and tenants use a number of strategies to assert a feeling of being at home.

Rootshock is a concept created by social psychologist Mindy Fullilove to describe how communities in the US were left decimated by the Housing Act of 1949. This act had generational impacts on the lives and health of the people living in those communities, often people of colour. This process of displacement, or rootshock, is ‘the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem’ (Fullilove, 2004, p.11). People are embedded in the local environments in which they live and if this is torn away from them, they can have a real, physiological reaction to it akin to physical pain.

Thinking about Fullilove’s idea of rootshock, in this article the authors ask and attempt to answer the question: How does the Irish private rental sector prevent renters creating roots and feeling at home in the places they rent? In response, how do tenants resist this? In the next section, the concept of rootlessness is explored further as well as the concepts of resistance. After that in Section 3, the Irish PRS is described to provide the context for this paper, followed by the methodology. Finally in section 5 and 6, rootlessness and resistance are considered in the PRS in two ways; firstly, through thinking about the property as an asset, and the ways rootlessness is created and perpetuated, and secondly, through looking at the property as a home, and resistances against rootlessness. Both are considered from the perspective of tenants. The article concludes that learning about tenant resistance can help scholars to conceptualise how resistance can be created on an individual and everyday scale and still have meaningful impacts for the tenants involved.

Section snippets

Rootlessness and resistance

Fullilove uses her concept of rootshock to explain the emotional ties people have to the places they inhabit, and the damage that occurs in the social fabric when whole communities are displaced. Urban displacement has more than a geographical effect on where people live. She explains, ‘in cutting the roots of so many people, we have destroyed language, culture, dietary traditions, and social bonds’ (Fullilove, 2004: p.5). Urban renewal policies and the rootshock that was embedded in the 1950s

Irish private rental sector

Worldwide, the private rental sector (PRS) is growing (Morris et al., 2017) and Ireland is a prime example of this. Similar to other Anglophone countries such as Australia and the UK, in Ireland homeownership is the dominant ideological form of tenure (Bate, 2018), and the PRS is defined by light-touch regulation. Renting is now a long-term phase, not an option on the way to private homeownership. Many renters will remain renters for extended periods of time or their lives (Shelter, 2014), and

Methodology

This research is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with 24 mainly low-income tenants across three cities in Ireland: Dublin (16), Galway (6) and Cork (2). Tenant advisors were also interviewed for this project, although they are not the focus of this article (6). Tenants and advisors were recruited with the help of Threshold, which is a national housing charity focused on advocating for people at risk of housing insecurity through poverty and exclusion (Threshold, 2022). This research

Findings: property as asset

One of the main ways that tenants felt that the landlord still saw the property as theirs was through control of the property. The tenants’ views of the relationship the landlord has to the property was affected by how often the landlord supervised the property. There were numerous examples of when tenants felt landlords overstepped their boundaries, from dictating tenants having visitors over, commenting on the status of the property or even cleaning the property. From the tenants’

Findings: property as home

Although rootlessness is a widespread process it is important to note that this process is far from one-sided and there are tenant resistances to this. We now look at strategies tenants have for resisting rootlessness, and tenants do this in two ways: creating roots or fighting for their right to the home. One way that a shared space became a home and that people began to be able to put down roots was through the smaller scale of the room the tenant lived in: ‘In my bedroom I feel at home.

Conclusion

It’s my house, it’s your property (Yolande)

They don’t want somewhere living there for ten years because that’s not the culture here. ‘Oh, by ten years they’ll have more roots than I do and it’s my house.’ (Karen, tenant advisor).

The above quotes and what we have outlined throughout this article is that from the perspectives of tenants, there is a difference between a property as an asset for the landlord, and a home to the tenant. This juxtaposition creates rootlessness- a psychosocial lack of

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rachel McArdle: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Project administration. Michael Byrne: Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Project administration, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme. A special thank you to Threshold and the tenants and tenant advisors who were part of this research. Also thank you to the three anonymous reviewers who guided the revisions for this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme.

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