Landlords’ and tenants’ pathways into renting: the case of Romania

Taking the case of the emerging private rental sector in the world’s top homeownership society, the paper proposes two theoretical expansions of broader interest to international housing studies. First, by drawing on insights from visual-elicitation, life-history interviews, I return the housing pathway framework to its original social-constructivist cast in order to expand beyond occupants’ tenure-applications to a broader, more dynamic perspective of pathways into renting of both tenants and landlords. Second, by showing how landlords and tenants became to rent one or several homes, the paper offers an empiricallygrounded reading of rental housing as a service infrastructure of being and becoming along life-projects of personal/family welfare, social reproduction/mobility, identity searching and geographical explorations. Describing a social world in which extractivist relations are marginal, the paper unravels some of the diverse economies of renting in which ways of being and becoming are enmeshed in the long-term concerns of creating a safe future through education, employment, ownership and social embeddedness.