Introduction

In the United States, the term ‘private rental housing’ is seldom, if ever, used. This is because most rented housing in the United States – unlike the UK and other European countries – is under private, for-profit ownership. Nearly all market-rate rental housing is privately owned, as is most subsidised low-income housing. This chapter provides an overview of rental housing in the United States, focusing on key changes that have occurred since 2000, especially in the wake of the foreclosure crisis that began in 2007 and extended to around 2012. The chapter begins with an overview of the rental housing stock, its ownership and management, and its inhabitants, followed by an examination of rental housing affordability. It then turns to key changes in rental housing since 2000. These include relative and absolute growth in renter households; the increasing presence of relatively affluent renters; and the growth of single-family rental housing, which is driven in part by institutional investors. The chapter concludes with a preliminary assessment of how COVID-19 has affected tenants and owners of rental housing.

As of 2021, there were 50.7 million rental housing units in the United States, accounting for 36 per cent of the nation’s total housing stock of 139.8 million units. Ninety-one per cent of the nation’s rental housing is occupied, and 9 per cent is vacant and available for rent. Nearly 90 per cent of all occupied rental housing is privately owned. The rest consists of various forms of social housing. This includes less than one million units of public housing owned by local housing authorities, and about four million units owned by various types of non-profit organisations, cooperatives and community land trusts (Bratt, 2020). While social housing overwhelmingly consists of subsidised housing for low-and moderate-income households, subsidised low-income housing is not confined to social housing. Well over two million units of subsidised low-income housing units are under private, for-profit ownership. In addition, more than 2.5 million low-income households receive tenant-based rental subsidies (Housing Choice Vouchers); most of them reside in privately owned housing. Perhaps because most rental housing is privately owned, nearly all statistical surveys of rental housing do not distinguish between housing under different forms of ownership.

Introduction

The private rental sector (PRS) in England has undergone profound change since the turn of the century. Its market share has doubled from one in ten households to one in five, a level last seen in the early 1970s. This regrowth of the sector began around the turn of the century and accelerated after the global financial crisis (GFC). It has been at the expense of owneroccupation and social rented housing. As a result, the roles that the sector plays in the housing market have also changed in significant ways. The share of private tenants that are families has increased and that of single-person households has decreased. There are now relatively more middle-aged and fewer young adult private renters than there were before the turn of the century. Meanwhile, both the average length of occupancy in the current home and of residence in the PRS have increased. Despite this, the great majority of private tenants continue to have short-term leases and private renting in England remains characterised by insecurity of tenure.

The lack of significant change in the terms on which private tenants occupy their accommodation reflects both landlord resistance to longer tenancies and, until recently, the absence of political will to significantly update the laws governing residential leases. The result is that the sector is arguably still in a state of transition from its late 20th-century role as a largely transitional tenure for households who are en route to owner-occupation or social rented housing (Kemp, 2015). Nevertheless, the growth of private renting has given the sector a new political salience and the government has faced growing calls to improve security of tenure. Changes in residential tenancy legislation have been promised several times by Conservative governments since 2018 and seem likely to be introduced.

The nature of private landlordism has also evolved since the turn of the century, with continued decline in property companies and increasing market share by small-scale private individual owners (Crook and Kemp, 2014). In addition, the last decade has witnessed the emergence of a ‘build-to-rent’ (BTR) subsector, largely owned by large corporate landlords, which could in time partially reshape the profile of private landlordism in England.

Introduction

COVID-19 is a new SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus disease. It spread rapidly from its origins in Wuhan, China; and despite many countries having tackled previous pandemics, many were wholly unprepared. Globalisation and technical convergence have resulted in new forms of non-calculable uncertainty where cities were the worst hit by COVID-19 because their densities and interactions facilitated the transmission of the virus and within cities the most deprived neighbourhoods were the worst hit of all (Bryson et al, 2021). To cope with the threat, economies were shut down with major supply shocks followed by major demand shocks worldwide, wiping off huge proportions of global gross domestic product (GDP) in a matter of months and destabilising money markets. Fiscal and monetary policy came together as economies and money markets were put on life support by governments, sustaining businesses, jobs and incomes, and by central banks supporting liquidity through massive purchases of, mainly government, bonds (Tooze, 2021).

Housing was both part of the way the virus was transmitted and one of the consequences of the shutdowns and market adjustments that resulted from attempts to contain the spread of the virus. This chapter explores the short-run impact of COVID-19 on the private rented sector (PRS) of the housing market in the countries discussed in earlier chapters of this volume. It considers the evidence in three contexts: first, to assess if the nature of these countries varieties of capitalism and welfare regimes are related to governments’ COVID-19 interventions in the PRS; second, to examine subnational as well as national responses; and third to assess if policy interventions can be framed by ideas about path dependency and historical institutionalism.

First, this chapter examines each country’s responses to COVID-19 in the light of an earlier comparison of the PRS in developed countries (Crook and Kemp, 2014). That showed how policies on regulation of rents and security of tenure and the extent of investment by corporate and institutional landlords were related to their types of economy and welfare regimes, using typologies developed by Hall and Soskice (2001) on varieties of capitalism and by Esping-Andersen (1990) on types of welfare regime.

Introduction

Internationally, Denmark is admired by housing experts for its pioneering approach to co-housing, for the tenant democracy of its social housing estates, and for the clean lines of its modern residential architecture. Its private rented sector (PRS) is discussed mainly, if at all, in terms of the complexity of the rent-control system. Arguably, though, the PRS is now the most interesting of Danish housing tenures, as in recent years the sector has become a political battleground. Politicians have adopted measures to try to deter certain overseas investors whose activities, they say, have pushed up private rents in cities. Similar debates are taking place in other countries and the Danish experience may offer some lessons, though similar forces can have very different effects in different places. As always with housing, context is all.

The basics: tenures, dwellings, landlords and tenants

Tenure split and dwelling types

Denmark’s PRS declined steadily in size over the last half of the 20th century. The proportion of privately rented dwellings more than halved in 50 years, from 39.8 per cent in 1960 to 14 per cent in 2010 (Table 8.1). As late as 2014, a leading authority wrote that: ‘Like most other countries in Europe, the Danish PRS has been in decline for many years (and) … it must be expected that the sector will be further diminished in the years to come’ (Skifter Andersen, 2014: 99, 124). In the last ten years, however, this decline has reversed and the PRS began to grow in country as a whole and in the capital. In Copenhagen the sector now accounts for 23 per cent of occupied dwellings, up from 19 per cent in 2010.

Dwellings

Most Danish PRS housing is purpose-built and tenure-specific and tends to be older than the dwelling stock as a whole. About a third of PRS homes were built before 1920 (Figure 8.1) compared with one in six of all homes.

Under Danish law, different regulations apply to various physical types of buildings, so it is meaningful to subdivide the PRS into dwelling types. Danish experts consider the true PRS to consist of dwellings in rental-only buildings with three or more units; that is, multi-family blocks. These make up about two-thirds of the overall PRS stock and more than threequarters of the homes owned by company landlords (Table 8.2).

I would like to pay tribute in this Preface to the distinguished contribution that Tony Crook, Emeritus Professor of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield, and one of the authors of this book, has made over the past four decades.

Tony is one of the world’s leading academic experts on private rental housing. He was awarded his first research grant on the topic in 1979, to study the impact of changes in the private rented sector on Sheffield’s inner city. This was followed up, among other projects, with a pioneering study in the mid-1980s of the changing ownership structure of the private rented sector in Sheffield. More than three decades later, he continues to research and publish on the supply side of the privately rented housing market.

I have been very fortunate to work with Tony on some of that research. He is a wonderful person with whom to collaborate: an outstanding team worker, always willing to do his share of the work, utterly reliable, meticulous attention to detail, and a rare ability to see both the wood and the trees; absolute commitment to robust research methods and to drawing conclusions and policy implications that are firmly rooted in research findings; and a deep understanding and knowledge of how private rental markets work in practice.

As well as his research on the private rented sector, Tony is one of the world’s leading academic experts on planning gain: the use of planning permission obligations to fund new affordable housing and infrastructure (land value capture). Since 2000, in collaboration with academics at Sheffield, Cambridge and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and as a sole investigator, Tony has worked on 17 research grants and commissions on planning gain. This has resulted in a prodigious volume of publications on the topic, including Planning Gain: Providing Infrastructure and Affordable Housing (2016) written jointly with the late John Henneberry and Christine Whitehead. Tony authored or co-authored six of the ten chapters in the book. It won the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Research Excellence Award in 2016. In 2020, Tony and Christine Whitehead won the Sir Peter Hall prize for the impact of their work on policy and practice.

This book explores recent developments in private rental housing in the advanced economies since the turn of the century and especially since the global financial crisis (GFC). It does so through case studies of nine countries in all of which, to a greater or less extent, the private rental sector (PRS) has either grown, begun to change in fundamental ways or both. These countries are Australia, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United States. Other advanced economies have experienced similar developments. As we shall see, the timing, pace and extent of these trends have varied between the nine countries in this book. But they are sufficiently pronounced and important in all of them that private rental housing is now receiving a level of attention in public debate and government policy that it has not experienced for many decades. And the same is true for academic research and scholarship on private renting: it is no exaggeration to say that private renting has become a ‘hot topic’ in academic debates in housing studies after many years on the backburner.

It seems unlikely that many observers in the late 20th century would have foreseen these new trajectories of change in private renting or the revival of interest in the sector that has subsequently occurred. That is hardly surprising. For many decades after 1945, private renting in many, but not all, of the advanced economies was a story of long-term decline (Harloe, 1985) and one from which few commentators expected it to recover. In some countries, including Britain and Spain, it was also a story of decay as rigid forms of rent control inhibited investment, not only in new private rental construction, but also in the refurbishment and repair of the existing stock of dwellings in the sector. After 1945, many advanced economies (AEs) introduced or expanded social rental housing provision; and in some it became an attractive alternative to private renting and thereby a competitor to private landlords (Harloe, 1995). Meanwhile, homeownership grew apace and eventually came to dominate housing provision in most of the AEs; and especially so in what Richard Ronald (2008) called the Anglo-Saxon ‘homeowner societies’.

Introduction

The key features of the Norwegian housing system are a large homeowner sector, with sustained real house price increases; a private rental sector (PRS) dominated by small-scale investors; and a residual social rental sector. Even though Norway has a generous welfare benefit system, the housing sector is relatively market-oriented and housing policy is modest in terms of benefits and social housing. Low interest rates, increasing incomes, favourable taxation and a rental sector with poor housing conditions that appears not to provide an attractive alternative, have maintained a high demand for homeownership. However, increasing affordability problems have caused a cautious political commitment for affordable housing and a rental sector with long-term contracts and rents below market rent, as an alternative to the market-based housing sector.

This chapter begins by presenting the main features of Norwegian housing policy in the context of the country’s welfare regime and political economy more generally. It explores the dynamics and change within the PRS in relation to other tenures and the development of the housing market. Housing finance, subsidies, regulation and tax policy are also discussed. Further sections analyse developments in relation to the composition of the rental market, the secondary property market, housing conditions and rent levels. The chapter then takes a deeper look into characteristics of the tenants in the rental market in relation to the homeowner market. The chapter ends with an analysis of effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the housing market and the PRS.

Housing policy in context

Type of government and welfare state regime

The Norwegian economy, often referred to as welfare capitalism, has a mix of free market activity and government intervention, and a closely integrated welfare system. Norway is part of the Nordic welfare state, also classified as the social democratic welfare model by Esping-Andersen (1990). Key characteristics of this model are comprehensive, public-financed and universalistic benefits; corporatist coordination with three-party cooperation between the state, and the main employer and employee organisations; and egalitarian outcomes. Income from petroleum activity, with heavy state ownership, puts Norway in an exceptional position compared to other countries.

Hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities are potential hotbeds for covert violence, if for no other reason than the fact that many, many people die there every year. After all, patients typically check into a hospital because of serious illness or injury, and nursing homes are intended for those who need round-the-clock care. Although most of the sick and injured who seek medical care in the United States and elsewhere are treated and then released on the road to recovery, many others die on the operating table or in their hospital bed. Death is very much part of life in healthcare facilities, which unfortunately also makes them places where a killer can operate unnoticed for long periods of time without being discovered.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), diseases, illnesses, and other naturally occurring medical conditions account for more than 90 percent of U.S. deaths each year, with a large proportion of those occurring in medical facilities (although at lower rates than in the past, as greater awareness of palliative care and concern for patient preferences have resulted in more people dying in their own homes; see Shmerling [2018]). Add to that U.S. deaths from accidents (the third-highest cause of U.S. deaths), assaults, and complications of medical and surgical care—many of which also occur in medical facilities—and the death toll seems staggering. With nearly three million total U.S. deaths a year (Xu et al., 2021) and more than 700,000 people dying annually in hospitals (Shmerling, 2018), it seems reasonable to estimate that at least one million deaths collectively occur in U.S. healthcare facilities each year.

The lack of clear data related to medical deaths is an enormous obstacle preventing better understanding of the covert violence that occurs in these settings. The CDC recorded 5,329 U.S. deaths in 2019 that were caused by “complications of medical and surgical care” (Xu et al., 2021). This category includes deaths from medical devices, adverse effects related to incorrect doses of therapeutic medications, and difficulties that arose during surgical or medical care. However, deaths from accidental overdoses of a drug or from drugs administered in error are excluded here, even when they occurred in a healthcare setting and/or the drugs were administered by a doctor or other healthcare professional.

Using the Nexis database of newspapers and newswires across the United States, we collected the following 37 cases covering a three-year period (June 2017 to July 2020) in which a death that was originally classified as something other than homicide was subsequently reclassified as homicide.

David Schlachet (Vincent and Dorn, 2020)

In July 2018, the superintendent at 48-year-old Lara Prychodko’s Manhattan apartment building found her mangled body in the trash compactor after an apparent 27-flight fall down the garbage chute. Authorities said she had an abnormally high alcohol level in her system and ruled it a “fatal accident.” A year later, however, New York City former chief medical examiner Michael Baden agreed to take another look. Finding indications that Prychodko had been strangled to death before being placed into the chute, as well as seeing little bleeding from lacerations sustained in the fall, the doctor concluded that the manner of death was most likely homicide. Moreover, Baden said the fact that Prychodko’s body was found topless would be unusual in an accident scenario and might be evidence that a struggle took place. At the time of her death, Lara and her estranged husband were in the midst of a highly contentious divorce, even though 55-year-old David Schlachet’s construction company continued to struggle after a 2016 bankruptcy. He had also been ordered to pay alimony and attorney fees to Prychodko, who was favored to gain child custody and a percentage of their millions of dollars in assets.

Karl Karlsen (Flynn, 2020)

Karl Karlsen’s first wife, 30-year-old Christina, died in a January 1991 house fire in Murphys, California. When the fire broke out, she was trapped in a bathroom behind a boarded-up window and had no way to escape the conflagration. Firefighters ruled the blaze accidental, and Karl Karlsen collected $200,000 in life insurance that he had taken out on Christina shortly before her death. He then moved with his children across the country to Varick, New York and remarried. In November 2008, he killed his son by making a truck slip off its jack while the 23-year-old was underneath it, crushing him to death.

Covert violence has always played an important role in supplementing conventional warfare. In 2016, for example, British special forces waged covert military operations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya (Curtis and Kennard, 2019). However, two days after the U.K. Secretary of State for Defence stated that there were no plans to deploy troops to the Middle East, reports surfaced that British troops had secretly blown up an Islamic State vehicle carrying large amounts of explosives. Clandestine attacks by weaker operatives have also occurred, with devastating consequences in the United States, a country widely known for its military might. The most infamous examples include the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces and the September 11, 2001 attacks perpetrated by al-Qaeda terrorists; each resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives, many more injuries, and massive destruction of property.

Moreover, biological warfare has a centuries-long history around the world, as well as in the United States, such as the British colonists’ deliberate distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans in the 1760s (Frischknecht, 2003). In modern U.S. history, the worst bio-terrorism attack—in terms of number of victims—occurred nearly 40 years ago in Oregon under highly unusual circumstances. In the early 1980s, several hundred followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Indian spiritual leader who founded the Rajneesh movement, established a compound in northern Oregon, about an hour east of Portland. The Rajneeshees, as the followers were known, unnerved the residents of nearby Antelope (which has maintained a population under 100 since the 1940 Census). At first, it was because they all wore the same red clothing, participated in communal chanting and meditation, and demonstrated other odd forms of behavior. Later, it was because they began to outnumber the longtime residents and take over local politics. In fact, the city of Antelope was briefly renamed Rajneesh, Oregon, around this time.

When the Rajneeshees decided to aim even higher politically, they set their sights on the county seat of the city of The Dalles. The outnumbered group tried various strategies to sway the 1984 county election in their favor, including bussing in thousands of homeless people from around the United States who promised to vote for the Rajneeshee candidates—until that move was blocked by an emergency rule for suspected voter fraud.

On a beautiful Monday afternoon in the late fall of 2008, two men arrived at the Houston, Texas, home of their friend, a philosophy professor at the nearby university. They looked forward to the weekly discussions that focused on the theoretical traditions known as “Continental philosophy” and planned to continue their engaging dialog on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from the week before. A quick glance at their friend’s empty carport told the pair that the popular professor must be running late—most likely lingering to entertain the seemingly endless questions of his eager-minded students—but waiting together in the warm Southern sun was no bother. Plus, it wasn’t unusual for their friend to be a little late for a meeting now and then; he carried a heavier teaching load than most other faculty members in the department and always prioritized his students’ needs above all else.

After more time had passed, the men decided to call their friend’s cellphone to check on him. It wasn’t until that call went unanswered that they started to worry. Despite the professor’s absent vehicle, they thought that he still could be home and mused at how silly they would feel if they had waited outside all that time for no good reason. One of the men tried the front door and found it unlocked. When he tried to push it open, however, something seemed to be in the way. After managing to open the door enough to squeeze by and step inside, the man who had just been chatting and laughing with one friend while waiting for another, who had planned to while away the evening in debate and deliberation, suddenly realized that nothing would ever be the same again. There, at the bottom of the staircase just inside the front door, was the body of his friend—the beloved professor—now with a bluish tint to the skin and blood trickling on the floor behind his head. The man yelled to his waiting companion to dial 911.

The 54-year-old scholar was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy revealed the cause to be trauma to the back of the head—presumably from a tumble down the stairs—and the medical examiner ruled it an accidental death.

When thinking about violence against members of the mass media, the cases that tend to come to mind are those with the most famous victims, the most brazen perpetrators, and the most bizarre details. These cases involve mostly overt methods that frequently begin with an innocent-seeming initial contact before escalating over time to stalking behaviors and eventually one or more attempted or completed physical attacks, perhaps with a firearm or a knife. Indeed, numerous entertainers have been subjected to potentially violent stalkers. Media personalities are at particular risk for being stalked partly because of their high profile, but also because their role—whether they happen to be an entertainer, news anchor, radio morning show host, or politician—requires them to pander to an audience and sustain public attention (Wilson et al., 2018).

Many people have sent fan mail to their favorite celebrities and/or reached out to them on social media, and some die-hard fans pay exorbitant sums of money for backstage passes and meet-and-greet events with A-list stars. Very few would ever attempt to get closer than that, and rarer still are the handful of deranged individuals out there who develop unhealthy obsessions with famous people that may lead to dangerous—and sometimes deadly—consequences. Among the most notorious of these incidents are the fatal shootings of singer John Lennon in 1980 by an angry Beatles fan, of actor and model Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989 by an obsessed devotee, and of singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez in 1995 by the former president of her fan club. Several laws and other practices changed in the 1990s (particularly in response to the death of Schaeffer, who was shot in the doorway of her home after the killer obtained her address via California Department of Motor Vehicles records) that have helped to prevent more of these incidents, though they certainly still occur.

In a recent example, up-and-coming singer Christina Grimmie (who finished in third place on season six of The Voice) was fatally shot in 2016 by an obsessed fan while the 22-year-old signed autographs after a concert in Orlando, Florida. Stalkers have broken into the homes of Sandra Bullock, Selena Gomez, and Jennifer Lopez; have trespassed on properties owned by Kendall Jenner, Madonna, and Taylor Swift; and have sent unwanted letters and gifts to numerous others.