Rental Housing

Housing is one of the basic necessities of life and the right to housing and adequate shelter is guaranteed in the Directive Principles of State Policy enshrined in the Constitution of India.

Cities in poorer countries are home to a heterogeneous mix of tenures: owners, landlords, tenants and sharers jostle for residential accommodation in pursuit of urban livelihoods and social well-being.

Practising social distancing and staying home to fight the coronavirus is not possible for migrant workers without housing security.

A significant proportion of the working poor in Asian cities live in slums as renters. An estimated 60–90 per cent of low-income rentals in Asia are in the informal sector; 25 per cent of India’s housing stock comprises informal rentals. Yet informal rentals remain an understudied area.

This is a diploma thesis profiling informal rental housing through fieldwork carried out in Ambedkar Nagar, a resettlement colony in Chennai. It looks at the differences between local Tamil residents and migrants from the north-eastern region of India, and analyses how financial means can affect housing pathways and the security of tenure for different income groups.

This paper examines how existing processes linked to the political economy of land and housing development shape or, in other words, are determinants of rental housing for the urban poor in the city of Guwahati in Assam.

Studies across the world have shown the presence of rental housing in almost all informal and slum settlements. This research is an attempt to understand rental housing within the informal housing and discerning its characteristics in comparison to the informal sector owner-occupied housing in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat.