Re-conceptualizing housing tenure beyond the owning-renting dichotomy: insights from housing and financialization

Housing tenure has often been taken-for-granted as consisting of dichotomous tenure types of owning and renting. This article critiques the owning-renting dichotomy through the lens of housing finance. It critically engages with three housing research programs wherein the owning-renting dichotomy is deep-seated: (a) the bundle of rights thesis, (b) comparative housing and welfare research, and (c) the ideology of housing. For each of them, the article first provides a brief recapitulation of the literature. It then explicates how they are constrained by the owning-renting dichotomy and why abandoning this dichotomy is necessary to transcend their limitations. Based on this, the article reveals a dialectical relation between owning and renting - the binary-oppositional attributes of owning and renting can be resolved with the changing relation of the occupant to financial markets. The article further proposes to re-conceptualize housing tenure as a relation of the occupant to financial markets and discusses the implications for reframing housing studies.