Diffuse informality: uncovering renting within family households as a form of private rental

Abstract

This paper sheds new light on informal-formal renting through the integration of paying rent to families within a ‘modes’ of renting typology framework. While private rental housing has long comprised a mix of informal and formal practices dualistic conceptions of informality and formality are being challenged as housing research explores emergent family and sharing economies alongside financialized and rentier economies. Well-used concepts of property rights and tenure or de jure occupancy are expanded to incorporate more nuanced measures of de facto occupancy, particularly relating to the family economy in which we argue represents a form of diffuse informality not well captured in national data collections based on tenure alone. Applying this conceptualisation within an Australian survey of more than 2,870 individual renters within the informal-formal market, we find that informal renting within families is pervasive. Our findings are suggestive of structural changes where a sizable cohort of discouraged and tactical renters are locked out of or bypassing mainstream rental markets.