Making rent: how forced migrant families access private rental housing in the Biqa’ Valley, Lebanon

Abstract

The private rental market is a key provider of housing to forced migrants. This paper examines qualitative data from case study research in rapidly urbanizing towns in the Biqa’ Valley, Lebanon, focusing on Syrian forced migrants’ efforts to access housing through the local private rental sector. Building on literature about landlord–tenant relations and anthropological work on kin, I argue that rental agreements ought to be understood as both financial and social arrangements, which involve family members, landlords and middlemen ( shaweesh) in complex rental ecologies. I find that young Syrians are caught up in evolving financial and social obligations, which make inhabitation possible, but which perpetuate gendered and xenophobic forms of dispossession. I argue that humanitarian and development actors advocating for the right of forced migrants to settle in urban areas ought to avoid perpetuating reliance on an inequitable private rental sector.