For many, the experience of homelessness is marked by compromised access to energy, associated with a circumstance referred to as energy precarity. Energy precarity describes a situation where individuals cannot afford or access sufficient energy services to meet their social and material needs, including staying adequately warm and cool. This study explores the intersection between energy precarity and homelessness in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada, a small regional community particularly marked by both issues. We rely on secondary analysis of qualitative data collected in the context of a larger study. Analyses are conducted on data from semi-structured interviews with a sub-sample of ten individuals with lived experience of energy precarity and housing insecurity, and of three local community service providers. Results describe energy precarity as a contributor to the loss of home through strained household budgets and contentious relationships with landlords, and as an element prohibiting an exit from homelessness if debts to utility companies compromise access to certain housing options. Energy precarity also emerges as one characteristic of homelessness. While homelessness and energy precarity literature has largely remained distinct from each other, these findings indicate that energy costs should be considered as a factor contributing to the risk of eviction and homelessness, and, accordingly, for homelessness prevention programming to account for the role of energy precarity. Results further highlight the need for policy to recognise the right to both housing and energy.
The technological boom concomitant to the Global Financial Crisis has enabled platform capitalism and provided tools to break with the illiquidity of real estate, while stimulating the emergence of new rental segments to capture increasingly mobile labour and capital flows. We frame these short-term, flexible rental housing segments catering to young expatriate workers, supplied through online platforms and managed by professional companies as Hyper-Commodified Housing Products (HCHPs). We investigate how their instigators - and the digital instruments they use - contribute to the hyper-commodification of housing. To do so, we explore the development strategies, behaviours and interactions of new market intermediaries, in light of Deleuze & Guattari's twofold movement of de- and reterritorialisation underpinning capitalism. Drawing on the recent development in Luxembourg of two main types of HCHPs - co-living and corporate short-term rentals - and using mixed empirical material, we show how HCHPs and their instigators work to capture and reconcile decoded flows of labour and capital, by channelling tenants into predetermined housing pathways in dedicated rental segments. We thus argue that HCHPs are the artificial reterritorialisation of increasingly decoded capital and labour flows under platform capitalism in a digitally-enabled, 'unavoidable' asset, which incrementally pushes hyper-commodification one step further.
Australia's housing crisis is prompting first home buyers to increasingly rely on parental support. This paper contributes new insight into the determinants and motivations of that support, and the role fairness plays through quantitative analysis of a novel national survey of Australian parents. We distinguish parents by whether they expect to help and whether that help is altruistic or comes with expectations of reciprocity, identifying which models of fairness are most influential. We examine characteristics of the children, the parents and the parent-child relationship. To enable clear comparison between siblings, we focus on two-child families, reporting on children who have yet to make a first-home purchase. Applying a fairness framework, we find strong evidence of equality within families: when one sibling is supported, the second is also likely to receive support. Parents are also influenced by perceptions of each child's absolute wealth, indicating a desire to provide greater help where need is greater. Assistance is more likely where emotional bonds are strongest, while evidence of a traditional preference for assisting older sons with younger sisters is limited. Fairness influences not only the likelihood of support, but also whether support is altruistic, with altruistic support for one child almost always mirrored for the second. Our study shows that parents are actively involved in their children's home ownership journeys and seek fair outcomes for their children. Thus, support for holistic financial planning across the family could help parents implement solutions consistent with their own concept of fairness. Governments could support parents who are at the margins of assistance through improved savings vehicles with tax benefits, but this must be accompanied by stricter prioritisation of direct government funding for supporting those who lack parental help.
This paper examines the deepening infiltration of the logics of finance and global capital into domestic housing policy, specifically in the sphere of social housing as a new global asset class. We explore the conflicting values and logics between the accumulation requirements of financial capital and the non-commercial, needs and rights, based logic of social housing. The emergence of state-led financialisation of social housing has called for attention as this newest frontier for the financialisation of housing. Grounded in critical political economy and institutional logics, we identify the intersecting market and state rationales underpinning the process of the financialisation of social housing in Ireland. We find that financialised leasing erodes tenant security, precaritises social housing into a temporary welfare mechanism, and shifts the state's role from provider to commercial facilitator. In addition, we trace the full policy lifecycle, demonstrating how an initial adoption of long-term leasing as an austerity off-balance-sheet mechanism gave way to an official policy pivot to phase out the scheme, driven by state value-for-money evaluations and public resistance, even as municipal capacity deficits create ongoing path dependency.The paper argues for de-financialisation to restore the human right to secure, affordable housing, emphasising direct state involvement over reliance on private capital to support sustainable social housing provision.
