Rental Housing - UN-Habitat

II. The nature of the rental housing stockChapter I has shown how the relative size of the rental housing stock variesbetween countries, within countries and between cities. If diversity is the keyfeature of housing tenure across the world, the same has to be said about thenature of the rental housing stock. In some countries, rental housing is providedmostly by the public sector, in others by private landlords. Not only that, butthe forms of rental housing vary considerably. In developed countries, mostforms of renting are subject to the legal process, whereas in most developingcountries this is not the case. The conclusion of this chapter is that it isextremely difficult, and often impossible, to generalize about the nature ofrental housing. This makes it difficult to draw up a simple list of policyrecommendations.II.A. Diversity is the main feature of rental housingAlthough tenure is the subject of this report, tenure alone is a poor descriptor ofhousing conditions because the variation within tenure categories is often asgreat as that between them. Owners are as different from one another as theyare from tenants. As has been noted for Bangalore and Surat (India):“what is evident in both cities is the range of rental housing optionsavailable – by location, quality, level of services and rent.” 1Rental housing for poor families differs remarkably both within cities andacross countries. UN-HABITAT has earlier identified the following kinds ofrental accommodation:• rooms in subdivided inner-city tenements;• rooms in custom-built tenements;• rooms, beds or even beds rented by the hour in boarding or roominghouses, cheap hotels or pensions;• rooms or beds in illegal settlements;• shacks on rented plots of land;• rooms in houses or flats in lower or middle-income areas;• accommodation provided by employers;• public housing; and• space to sleep rented at work, in public places, even in cemeteries. 2Table 6 lists some of the many ways in which rental housing may varywithin and between cities and countries, in terms of its size, construction,quality, ownership, kind of contract, location, profitability, and so on.Chapter II: Nature of the rental housing stock 25