The Residualization of Rental Housing

Abstract

It will be recalled that the division of rental housing into two unconnected systems is a core of the explanation about Britain as a ‘home owning society’. On the one hand stands the experience of the private rented sector (PRS) with its century-long history of decline and on the other hand is the legacy of council housing which grew to accommodate nearly one-third of households at its zenith in the early 1970s but then it too declined to about half that level currently. The story of the last decades of the twentieth century is of these two residual rental housing tenures unable to compete against home ownership, the preferred option of almost everyone, including most tenants should they ever have the opportunity to buy.