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

Good housing is essential for flourishing human lives but housing options are
inevitably enabled and constrained by socio-economic conditions. In the UK the
last decade has witnessed a growth in precarious and insecure housing to
around 8 million people (Tunstall 2013, Minton 2017). The academic response
to this so called 'UK housing crisis' has ranged across issues of social housing
provision (Robertson 2016) and unaffordable and substandard private housing
(Danewid 2019). Recent commentary, however, indicates new priorities for
research 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 qualitative
research that engages substantially with the experiences of those in these
precarious housing types (Heslop and Ormerod 2020; cf Ferreri 2016). This
research will close the aforementioned research gap on precarious housing and
build on current knowledge of the UK 'housing crisis' in a detailed qualitative
case study of precarious housing. In doing so I use ethnography, interviews and
innovative documentary analysis to examine a potentially new type of
precarious housing in the shape of two 'tourist' hostels in London that have
spontaneously offered sub-market 'rent' for people to live semi-permanently. In
addition I explore bed and breakfast recruitment by the UK's social housing
system and a large state subsidised/private landlord run housing facility.