Urban hostels and other precarious housing: The case of the parallel precarious sector in the UK's housing crisis

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Good housing is essential for flourishing human lives but housing options areinevitably enabled and constrained by socio-economic conditions. In the UK thelast decade has witnessed a growth in precarious and insecure housing toaround 8 million people (Tunstall 2013, Minton 2017). The academic responseto this so called 'UK housing crisis' has ranged across issues of social housingprovision (Robertson 2016) and unaffordable and substandard private housing(Danewid 2019). Recent commentary, however, indicates new priorities forresearch in reporting phenomena such as 'hotelised' or 'parallel' social housing(Birch 2019; Nowicki and Brickell 2019) and multiply occupied or 'suppressed'housing (Bramley 2018, 2019). Nevertheless, there remains a lack of qualitativeresearch that engages substantially with the experiences of those in theseprecarious housing types (Heslop and Ormerod 2020; cf Ferreri 2016). Thisresearch will close the aforementioned research gap on precarious housing andbuild on current knowledge of the UK 'housing crisis' in a detailed qualitativecase study of precarious housing. In doing so I use ethnography, interviews andinnovative documentary analysis to examine a potentially new type ofprecarious housing in the shape of two 'tourist' hostels in London that havespontaneously offered sub-market 'rent' for people to live semi-permanently. Inaddition I explore bed and breakfast recruitment by the UK's social housingsystem and a large state subsidised/private landlord run housing facility.