Seeking Shelter in the Risk Society: The Costs of Housing Searches for Negatively Credentialed Renters

• In Event: 1264 - Persistent and Evolving Patterns of Discrimination in the Housing Market

Abstract

This qualitative case study documents the housing search experiences of renters with criminal conviction records, past evictions and/or damaged credit histories in Seattle, WA; a setting that is emblematic of the housing affordability crises plaguing many of the nation’s cities. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews to construct a descriptive picture of how respondents with discrediting rental credentials navigate a competitive private market for housing, largely without state assistance. This study contributes to the nascent literature on how poverty and inequality are reproduced in the private rental market in three respects. First, its findings highlight the economic, social and health-related costs associated not only with the substandard housing options that renters with negative credentials are relegated to, but with the housing search process itself – which is often a prolonged and arduous one for this population. Second, the study illuminates how the context of unprecedented unaffordability of and competition for housing, in tandem with the retrenchment of the public sphere in providing housing for the poor amplifies the barriers to housing stemming from an applicant’s negative credentials and frustrates regulatory efforts to ‘lower barriers’ to housing. Third, in demonstrating how contact with a variety of systems (i.e. criminal justice, housing, education, credit, healthcare) can mark low-income individuals with stigmatizing records that degrade their housing prospects, the housing search experiences of this population offer important insights into how the cumulative effects of recent historical shifts across a variety of institutional spheres reproduce poverty and housing insecurity.

Author

• Anna Reosti, Northwestern University