Rental tenure and rent burden: progress in interdisciplinary scholarship and pathways for geographical research

Abstract

Rental housing accommodates more than a billion tenants worldwide, and in recent years, rentership has been increasing in some countries. Given reduced access to homeownership in various locations due to several causes, it is critical to focus on rentership which has received relatively less attention compared to homeownership, especially within the geography scholarship. In this review article, we identify four key themes that have naturally emerged from the close examination of recent interdisciplinary literature on rentership and rental affordability. These include: (1) rental housing financialization; (2) the proliferation of single-family rentals resulting from the U.S. foreclosure crisis; (3) the determinants and consequences of rent burden; and (4) the relationship between rent burden and regional economic specialization. We discuss these themes and propose potential opportunities for the geographic analysis of rent burden, its determinants, and their relationships with regional economic specialization. We posit that the four identified themes have been developing in apparent isolation, thus making scholarship less consistent. Moreover, research on rent burden is disjointed in itself, which makes it difficult to establish a unified narrative and interlinked subthemes within the rent burden literature. Nonetheless, we contextualize the four themes in their application to geography and frame our discussion around the central notion of this article—rent burden.

Livability vs. Affordability; Disability and Housing in the United States

“…Thus, rental burden and tenure issues intersect with broader socio-economic factors. Discrimination, unequal access to housing opportunities, and systemic issues within housing markets contribute to disparities in rental burden experiences (Desmond 2018;Colburn and Allen 2018;Sharma and Samarin 2022;Airgood-Obrycki et al 2022). Individuals facing involuntary displacement face a spiral of costs and accessibility to housing which often leads to decreasing and substandard housing conditions.…”

A typology of U.S. metropolises by rent burden and its major drivers

“…Typologies offer non-monotonic functions in relationships between independent and dependent variables, thus allowing to go beyond the linear while examining multiple patterns (Shepherd & Suddaby, 2017 ; Weustenenk & Mingardo, 2023 ). Given the lack of a solid theory or a framework on rent burden within housing scholarship, as documented in Sharma and Samarin ( 2022 ), our typology contributes towards establishing a theoretical framework by addressing the inconsistencies in defining rent burden while also incorporating regional and other socio-spatial characteristics necessary for studying rent burden geographies in a comprehensive manner.…”

Apartment Rental Market in Rzeszów and Lublin at the Turn of 2021-2022

“…The thesis addresses the issue of indicating the dependence of market characteristics, such as: the location of the property in the city, the area, the number of rooms, the storey, the condition of the flat and the age of the building, on the amount of the rental rate on the basis of the rental offer of flats in the indicated cities and refers to changes in rental rates in connection with the geopolitical situation and the influx of refugees from Ukraine, in connection with the outbreak of war in Ukraine. A geographical perspective is important when studying rental housing, since acute housing problems (e.g., low affordability, high rent burden) generally depend on local contexts that need localized investigations (Bogdon & Can, 1997;Sharma & Samarin, 2022). At present, information on the volume of housing rented on the private market remains largely unguessed.…”