Housing precarity pathways, responses and meanings among Bangladeshi migrants in Dublin

This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of how recently arrived, low-income Bangladeshi migrants navigate Dublin’s inflated, undersupplied housing market. This analysis expands the ‘housing pathways’ framework by integrating insights from precarity literature to address its limitations and enhance relevance for marginalised groups. Thus, research participants’ housing pathways since their arrival in Ireland and how they were shaped by multiple and intersectional precarities (regarding legal status, employment, income, housing, and racial and religious minority status), personal priorities, and cultural norms are explored. The influence of these factors on migrants’ understanding of the meaning of home is also examined. The key insight offered here is that this combination of strong structural influences and limited agency shaped distinctive housing pathways among Bangladeshi migrants, which commonly encompass residential suburbanisation and sharing/subletting of private rented accommodation as widespread strategies to manage housing and other precarities, coupled with the sacrifice of comfort, privacy and family life. These factors, in turn, shape distinctive understandings of the meaning of home among this population, which are instrumentalist and expansive and focused on the aspects of the dwelling that support their religious and cultural traditions.