February Lunchtime Talk
Tuesday 25th of January
February Lunchtime Talk – “Generation Rent and Housing Precarity in ‘Post Crisis’ Ireland”
Date: Wednesday 16th of February
Time: 1pm
Recent years have witnessed the rapid decline in homeownership across a number of developed societies and the growth of an increasingly unaffordable and insecure private rental sector. This presentation connects debates within the Generation Rent literature with more recent work on housing precarity, or the uncertainty arising from the experience of insecure, unaffordable and poor-quality housing. The article develops and applies a Housing Precarity Index (HPI) to data on private renters in Ireland to provide a nuanced account of the extent and severity of precarities in the Irish rental sector among differing sub-groups during a housing market crash and dubious “recovery” period (2008 – 2016). The article identifies the key drivers of housing precarity and assesses their contribution to further declining living standards among renters into the future.
Speaker:
Dr Richard Waldron, Queens University Belfast.
Richard Waldron is a lecturer in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University Belfast. His research relates to the intersection of urban planning policy, housing markets and strategies of urban economic development. His work has been published in leading journals, including Housing Studies, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Environment and Planning A.
Respondent:
Dr Rory Hearne, Maynooth University.
Rory Hearne is an Assistant Professor/ Lecturer in Social Policy in Applied Social Studies at Maynooth University. He has researched and published in academic and policy fields of housing and social housing, spatial disadvantage, housing rights, economic inequality, neoliberalism and the welfare state, social justice, and social movements. Rory is also a published author, and regularly contributes to discussion of contemporary social, economic and political issues on national media.