Housing Tenure 101: A Where We Go From Here Explainer

The housing subject with the worst name is too important to keep ignoring

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Ten·ure (Noun)

1. The conditions under which land or buildings are held or occupied.

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Housing tenure is an awkward name for something very important. We talk about a lot of things in housing, but we don’t talk enough about tenure. 

Tenure is one of the most important and most ignored parts of housing, both of which are reasons I have spent the past decade thinking and writing about it. Next month, I will release a new report with my partner and client California Community Builders (CCB) on multifamily homeownership (MHO), a set of important and generally underappreciated and undersupported housing tenures which includes condos, CLTs, intergenerational housing and much more. As CCB’s Adam Briones and I say in our new blog post on MHO, “while MHO may sound like a dry, academic term, it simply means what is says: two or more families owning a portion of the same residential structure.”

I will feature this report again soon on this site - including a Housing After Dark conversation with Adam and links to the report. In anticipation of all this, I wanted to put out an explainer of sorts - one that I hope gives people a bit of a guide to this corner of the housing world, and hopefully convinces more people to join me in devoting more of our housing energy to these pesky conditions under which we hold or occupy homes.

I’ve included links at the bottom of this post to some of the pieces I have written on tenure generally or specific tenures like single family rentals, including a post from last year on why Ownership Matters.

Tenure Basics

Tenure, in housing terms, is the set of legal, financial and often social and cultural relationships that bind you to your home or your land. It is just like the Oxford definition - tenure is [all] the conditions under which land or buildings are held or occupied. Another way to think of tenure is that it’s the glue that binds you to your house.

In 21st century California, there are a lot of different conditions - a lot of different types of glue of different strengths and properties. Some of us are basically fused to a place, with all the legal, financial, social and cultural binding we need to stay rooted. Others of us are hanging on by a thread or barely tied down - some of us purposefully so, some of us not. (Not everyone wants or needs strong tenure - at least not in every stage of their life.)

And those conditions can change from city to city and even block to block. In a study of Oakland, we found 56 different housing tenures. (Click here for a full list of each tenure and its definition.) If you walk outside in your city and town, I promise you that you will walk past a number of different housing tenures, even in places with zoning and other rules to prevent this diversity.

These informal and even illegal tenures are part of what makes it so important. So how do we understand tenure a bit more completely? Let’s start with 3 basics:

Number 1. Tenure can be formal or informal. It can even be illegal.

Sometimes you have paperwork, sometimes you don’t. Just because you don’t have formal or legal tenure doesn’t mean you have no tenure. There are illegal tenures that are still tenures, and come at times with rights. For example, under Martin v. Boise, someone sleeping in a public park - which is often ‘illegal’ - may not actually be able to be moved by the City unless there is shelter available. Similarly all manners of subletting, crashing on couches, illegal ADU conversions, or just renting a room in a house in a Planned Unit Ddevelopment (PUD) where it is not allowed is a form of tenure.

Number 2. Tenure goes beyond you and your unit. It is also about the rules, regulations, politics and institutions in your jurisdiction.

The rules, regulations, politics and institutions that govern your specific type of tenure in your specific jurisdiction combine with you and your unit to make tenure. Your tenure can change because of a decision made at City Hall, in Washington, in a boardroom, at an Homeowners Association (HOA) meeting, and many other places. For example, if your rental unit is rent controlled, you have a very different tenure than if it is not. This can change even if you and your unit do not.

Number 3. Tenure goes way beyond renting and owning.

We tend to think of housing tenure as renting v. owning, but it is not that simple. There are different types of renting, and different types of owning, and plenty that fall somewhere in between, like community land trusts (CLTs) or limited-equity co-ops. Buildings can be mixed tenure (and in a better housed California, more and more will be). Unhoused and informal tenures – crashing on a couch, sleeping in your car, living in a squat or a settlement – may be precarious, or even illegal, but they are still tenures. 

Tenure’s devil is in the details. For example, if you own a home in a Homeowners Association (HOA) with strict CC&Rs (Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions),  you can have different rights as to what you can do to the house – even down to the paint color or plantings or hanging your laundry out to dry. You can lose your house to the HOA if you don’t pay your dues or follow rules. Thus living in a home you own with an HOA is a different tenure than living in home you own without one. Living in a home with an active and aggressive HOA with tons of rules is different from living in one with just a few basic rules and a chill board. 

One way that my colleagues Jake Wegmann and Deirdre Pfeiffer think about tenure is along a two-dimensional plot. Tenure in the US is very much a two-dimensional plot, not a line between renting and owning.

• One axis is equity - to what extent do you have legal and financial equity in a unit? This isn’t as simple as renting or owning - you may have shared equity, or only own a portion of a unit.

• The other axis is control - to what extent do you have control over decisions with you unit, including the most important decision - whether to leave it.

Tenure and Vulnerability: Who Supports Your Tenure?

Tenure is particularly important to vulnerability - the question of whether or not you are at risk of losing your home (it's the glue after all). Vulnerability isn’t just about the person or the place, but about the tenure - and whether or not a person or organization is out there who can help people in your specific tenure.¹

A common myth about tenure and vulnerability is that owning is less risky than renting, but this is not inherently true. We saw in the 2008 foreclosure crisis that homeowners can lose their home very easily. On the flip side, rent controlled tenants with strong just cause eviction rules often have a lot of protections against displacement.

The most important thing to understand is that vulnerability is tenure-specific, i.e. how you are vulnerable depends in part on the specifics of your tenure.

• If you rent, what kind of rental tenure do you have? Rent controlled? Do you have just cause eviction protection?

• If you own, is there a 3rd party besides the bank that can foreclose (i.e. a HOA)? What happens if your home is destroyed by fire or flood? Do you have the right to move back?

This depends on your tenure.

Our Oakland Tenure Study was done as part of the design of Housing Vulnerability Analysis, our nascent tool to understand the ways in which someone is vulnerable to losing their home.

We designed it to look at both the legal rules of tenure, and the organizational and political structure to support that tenure. A wise approach to tenure goes beyond the formal rules, and also asks about the specific support network that can help you keep your home, or the ecosystem of predators that will try to exploit you or take your home. 

Many things in housing - good, bad and ugly - are tenure-specific, i.e. you only get them if you have a specific tenure. Some forms of assistance for instance, are only available to low-income tenants, not low-income homeowners. The mortgage income tax deduction is only for homeowners, not renters. And the sharks in the real estate industry who prey on people often target specific tenure - whether types of renters or types of homeowners. 

Tenure and Opportunity: Embracing Tenure Diversity

Tenure isn’t just wonky rules that can or cannot protect you from losing your home. It also represents the most creative possibilities we have when it comes to changing our housing system.

Tenant ownership, community ownership, mixed tenure buildings, new ways of reimagining nonprofit housing, ways of buying out corporate landlords - increasingly their own form of tenure - are all tenure-based. So much of what we hope for in housing comes down to tenure, and the more we start to think about it with more depth and complexity, the better chance we have of realizing our housing ambitions.

Multifamily homeownership is a critical part of this new tenure imagination, and I can’t wait to share the report with folks later this month. One important part of this work is that I hope it brings a different vibe to conversations about changing our housing system. Multifamily homeownership is a group of very diverse tenures - ideal for a very diverse California. This tenure diversity isn’t just a good thing - its the world we live in.

We highlight the diversity of tenure because it pushes back against one of the fundamental problems with housing in America - the tendency for housers to advocate for one specific tenure as somehow better. Tenure in America is often an ideology. People and organizations fight for their preferred housing tenures - which also tend to be the one’s they build or buy or support. Fee-simple homeownership, CLTs, deed-restricted rentals, Planned Unit Developments in HOAs - each have strong advocates, and rightfully so in many cases.

But these tenures are not mutually exclusive, and don’t need to be pitted against each other in the ways that they are. We make tenure into political divisions, rather than seeing tenure as something we all have, a place where we all need support to make sure our housing tenure works for our household and our house at any given moment in our lives and the life of the building and community. We can make radical tenure changes possible, but only when we start to see tenure as a set of choices, not a political litmus test.

Our approach to tenure should be to identify ways to reduce vulnerability and risk on as many tenures as possible. We should make real tenure choice possible, so that people are really choosing the right option for them, as opposed to whatever they happen to be able to get. Tenure isn’t about finding the magic housing type, but about making all housing more secure - and finding the right relationship to equity, wealth building, and control for every household.

More Tenure Reading + A Request!

It’s a common theme in these pages that we need to embrace housing diversity and push beyond dichotomies and debates that don’t need to happen. Tenure is a perfect example of this. I welcome any fellow travelers who recognize how central tenure is to our housing future and want to talk more. I’m looking for partners to help the next steps of development of Housing Vulnerability Analysis. I also need help with one thing: what can we call this besides housing tenure? 

If anything ever needed a rebrand, it’s tenure. Let’s leave that word for academics.

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Reading List

General Tenure

• 2016. Jake Wegmann and Alex Schafran. A New Perspective on Housing Tenure. Shelterforce, September 28, 2016

• 2016. Jake Wegmann, Alex Schafran, and Deirdre Pfeiffer. Breaking the Double Impasse: Securing and Supporting Diverse Housing Tenures in the United States. Housing Policy Debate, pp.1-24.

• Ownership Matters

Housing Vulnerability Analysis (a tenure-based approach to housing vulnerability)

• 2019. Alex Schafran, with Steve King and Maeve Elise Brown. Housing Vulnerability Analysis: A Discussion. Shelterforce, July 10, 2019

• Housing Vulnerability Analysis

• Housing study of Oakland

Specific tenures: Single Family Rentals

• 2020. Deirdre Pfeiffer, Alex Schafran & Jake Wegmann. Vulnerability and opportunity: Making sense of the rise in single-family rentals in US neighbourhoods. Housing Studies, 1-21.

• 2017. Alex Schafran, Desiree Fields and Zac Taylor. Wall Street landlords are chasing the American dream – here’s what it means for families. The Conversation, 7 Sep., 2017

• 2016. Desiree Fields, Rajkumar Kohli and Alex Schafran. The emerging geography of rental-backed securitization. San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank Working Paper, 2016-02, January 2016

1. Housing Vulnerability Analysis is still in development, and we hope to add other forms of analysis to it, including climate vulnerability. Anything that can separate you and your home is a vulnerability.