Housing Insecurity Among the Poor Today

Recent events have brought attention to the millions of Americans who struggle to find and pay for housing. Housing has historically been of interest to sociologists, but it has long been subsumed within research on crime, residential mobility, and neighborhoods. In the past decade, there has been a surge of scholarship in an emerging sociology of housing that focuses on housing insecurity, forced moves, landlords, shared housing arrangements, and the stratification effects of housing policy. While other fields typically define housing insecurity as affordability, this new literature shows how housing insecurity is not only rooted in financial constraints but also situated within social relationships that create or dissolve housing arrangements, and is exacerbated or remediated by supply-side institutions and policy. This work makes clear that housing insecurity is not a one-time discrete event but a dynamic process, and that sociologists can contribute not only to measuring housing insecurity but also to understanding the social forces that shape it.