Dancing together? Housing pathways and strategies of property-based welfare in the UK private rented sector

Ongoing neoliberal policies have structurally altered the links between housing and welfare. This has underpinned a range of new strategies to provide for family welfare, including buying-to-let. Drawing on interviews with landlords and tenants in the UK, we argue that new and complex patterns of welfare and vulnerability have been emerging within and between tenants and landlords, which are permeated by insufficiently recognised generational, geographical and class inequalities. Tenant’s and landlord’s marginality at the bottom end of the sector may create extreme housing vulnerabilities whereas entwined affluence at the top end of the sector sustains a privileged segment of real choice. Between these two extremes, the private rental sector may be seen as a field that intertwines very diverse housing positions and property-based strategies of saving, investment and business activity which significantly contribute to the raising inequality between the ‘housing-have-not’ and those ‘property-rich’.