Renters Without a Home: Shared Renting as Residential Alienation in a Financialised Housing Market

This article analyses shared renting among young adults in Barcelona and the experiences of residential alienation it can produce. Drawing on 16 in-depth interviews with participants aged 21 to 28, it examines how rising rents, contractual insecurity, dependence on landlords, lead tenants or flatmates, and limited control over domestic space can weaken the conditions that allow a dwelling to be made into a home. The notion of renters without a home designates this relational condition, in which access to shelter is retained yet security, continuity, domestic control, intimacy and the capacity to project a future become fragile. The analysis identifies four registers of residential alienation: material subordination to rent; symbolic disconnection and chronic provisionality; intimacy, autonomy and unequal domestic control; and ontological insecurity and suspended futures. The article argues that the youth housing crisis is not only a crisis of access, but also a crisis of habitability.