Generation Rent and housing precarity in ‘post crisis’ Ireland

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. While a growing literature examines the conditions shaping this transformation, less attention has focused on the extent and nature of the precarities experienced by ‘Generation Rent.’ To address this gap, this paper 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.