Tenants’ Responses to Substandard Housing: Hidden and Invisible Power and the Failure of Rental Housing Regulation

Abstract

Unsafe and unhealthy housing is a major problem in the private rental sector in a number of countries, despite the existence of regulations intended to protect people from such housing. Rental housing quality regulation often relies on tenants reporting problems with their housing, but this fails to take account of power dynamics in the tenant-landlord relationship that make it difficult for tenants to do so. Drawing on Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power, we build a new framework for analysing power at the “micro” level of the relationship between tenant and landlord. We apply this to a review of qualitative research on tenants’ responses to housing quality problems in Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States. We find that the interactions of visible, hidden, and invisible dimensions of power work to prevent the effective airing and resolution of grievances about housing quality and render current forms of regulation inadequate.

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