"Housing at the Bottom:
Uncovering the Realities of Precarious Rental Housing in Urban Canada"
Cities are celebrated for the countless opportunities they provide, yet claims to the city space are far from equal. Today, countless stories of precarious living in contemporary cities remain untold. Anam’s research focuses on renters at the urban margins, investigating their experiences in secondary rental submarkets. For many, these submarkets represent the only feasible option, but they come with significant trade-offs, including substandard living conditions, exploitation, and limited possibilities for homemaking.
By leveraging the informational power of big data with qualitative insights into renters’ lived experiences, this research seeks to analyze rental housing quality, pricing, and spatial distribution, revealing the economic and social compromises renters make. Ultimately, by bringing the lived experiences of vulnerable renters to the forefront, Anam’s work aims to highlight hidden inequities, and contribute to developing more inclusive and equitable housing policies in Canada and beyond.
In Anam's words:
The rise of precarious renting is more than just an economic issue; it's a growing social phenomenon with far-reaching implications. However, a comprehensive picture of the sweeping shift towards renting as the dominant urban tenure and its implications for renters at the margin and for cities as a whole is missing. Existing studies have focused on broad trends in unaffordability, social housing. evictions, and discrimination, leaving the realities of private rental housing-- particularly lower-end submarkets-- unexplored. This is partly due to significant data challenges, as private renting often leaves few formal data trails. A deeper investigation into precarious private renting in Canada is urgently needed to address the worsening housing crisis in Canadian cities. My doctoral research aims to fill this gap.
I seek to investigate the housing strategies and experiences of renters at the lower end of the Vancouver rental market, focusing specifically on three lower-end rental submarkets –basement suites, rentals targeting international students, and homestay rentals. By leveraging the recent advancements in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, this research will assess the affordability of submarkets and examine the economic and social trade-offs renters make, investigate the homemaking strategies (social and material) of renters at the lower-end, and advance mixed and big data methods for housing research through groundtruthing, image and text data processing.
This research aims to make three key contributions. First, I hope for this research to contribute to generating new data on precarious renting in urban Canada, which will provide planners and policymakers with fine-grained data necessary for effective intervention in the housing crisis. Second, through its integration of qualitative inquiry with advanced computational techniques, it introduces methodological innovations in housing research. Third and most critically, this research seeks to humanize the housing crisis by foregrounding renters’ lived experiences, resilience, and homemaking practices under constrained conditions. This emphasis on human stories will spark meaningful policy debate about the true value of housing as a home, shifting the narrative beyond economic metrics towards more inclusive and just housing futures.
