Lydia Le Gros and Sebastiaan Bierema Housing, Financialisation, and Utopia in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘the Dispossesed’
Building on our previous research on housing-market financialisation, this paper explores the place of housing in Ursula Le Guin’s utopian novel the Dispossessed as a way of understanding and reimagining social housing provision in Aotearoa. The role of the built environment in constraining and shaping possibilities for action is a prominent theme in the Dispossessed. Images of walls as ambiguous boundaries are particularly noteworthy—functioning both to delineate and to bind together inside/outside and inclusion/exclusion. Just as walls translate social facts into concrete realities and stabilise social norms, housing also shapes individual and societal behaviours. We draw this link using Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method, for whom images of utopia contain both an interpretative (archaeological) and an imaginative (architectural) function. In its archaeological form, the Dispossessed highlight the contingency of a housing system designed around private property rights. This allows us to reframe the function of individual homeownership in Aotearoa as a conservative technology, and to emphasise the relationship between housing and environmental abundance/destruction. As an architectural moment, Le Guin does not so much posit a utopian blueprint as create a space for imagining alternative ways of thinking about housing provision in Aotearoa.
Jessica Terruhn and Francis L. Collins Finding the best tenants available: Discretion and discrimination in tenant selection in New Zealand’s private rental sector
Scholarship on housing inequalities has consistently documented that rental housing discrimination significantly contributes to housing precarities for minoritised households. This body of research has highlighted the intersectionality of discrimination, its complexities with respect to where, when and how it occurs, and that contemporary discrimination can be subtle and difficult to detect. An important aspect of this work, and one we contribute to with this presentation, is scholarship that has initiated debate about the very definition of discrimination in the context of discretionary tenant selection practices in competitive private rental housing markets. Our central argument is that the definition of discrimination must be widened to recognise and address the inherently discriminatory outcomes of discretionary tenant selection processes. We base our argument on two empirical research projects on housing inequalities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We juxtapose survey findings that demonstrate home seekers’ widespread experiences of discrimination and data from interviews with property managers that illuminate the ways in which home seekers’ experiences of discrimination are dismissed as unfounded. Property managers plausibly deny discrimination in tenant selection with reference to the Human Rights Act while normalising discretion in identifying the best tenants available. Such discourses not only deprecate home seekers’ experiences as erroneous perceptions but normalise inequalities in access to the private rental sector as the product of personal shortcomings in the context of competition rather than structural disadvantages in the context of rental housing commodification.
Francis L. Collins and Jessica Terruhn ‘Landlords are just ordinary people’: rental housing precarity and discourses of worthiness in Aotearoa New Zealand It is widely recognised that there is significant and growing precarity in rental housing in Aotearoa New Zealand, characterised by insecure tenure, unaffordability, poor quality housing, constant residential mobility and risks of homelessness. As has been observed internationally, this housing precarity is significantly linked to financialisation and the entrenching of private landlordism as an ideal form of investment and housing provision. In this presentation we examine the normalisation of housing precarity in Aotearoa New Zealand through discourses that differentially construct the societal worthiness of landlords and tenants. Our paper draws on interviews with property managers and the specific ways in which they articulated security of tenure, suitability for housing, rights of tenants and landlords and questions of dignity in relation to housing. Persistent through these interviews were countervailing discourses that differentially framed the worthiness of tenants and landlords. Tenants, especially people on low incomes and implicitly racialised minorities, were frequently dehumanised by interviewees in a manner that normalised permanent temporariness in housing tenure and framed housing as a privilege to be earned, and one that some people would never be worthy of. In contrast, the figure of the landlord was the focus of moral recuperation, characterised as ordinary people just seeking to get by and providing an important societal service. Our analysis of these discourses aims to extend insights into the linkages between housing precarity and landlordism, and the urgency of transformative responses that establish secure housing as a fundamental right.
