Caring, Commercial, and Conflicting Roles: Managing Tenancies in Social Housing

A steady decline in social housing investment, and a subsequent shrinking in social housing stock, means that tenants in Australia’s social housing sector today face a high risk of homelessness if they are unable to sustain their tenancies. As a result of tight eligibility and targeting policies, tenants can also have high and complex support needs that make sustaining tenancies difficult without support. Not-for-profit community housing providers, which house a fast-growing proportion of social housing tenants in the state of Victoria, are required to remain financially viable while meeting a duty of care to their tenants. When tenants struggle to meet the obligations of their housing, providers may be caught between these competing demands. Little is known about the experiences of the sector’s frontline tenancy managers, who are expected to support the tenants in their care while protecting the organisation’s income. To address this knowledge gap, this thesis examines how tenancy managers at one housing provider conceptualise and navigate their role in responding to tenancies at risk of eviction, abandonment, or other exits from social housing that lead to negative outcomes for tenants. Unison Housing is one of the largest community housing providers in Victoria, and it houses a cohort of tenants who experience severe and chronic disadvantage that puts them at high risk of tenancy breakdown and homelessness. This study collected data using in-depth interviews with 14 Unison tenancy managers and conducted an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the data to reach a deep understanding of their experiences managing and sustaining, or not sustaining, at-risk tenancies. It found that tenancy managers conceptualised their role as inhering a responsibility to provide care for tenants by supporting them to sustain their tenancies, but that they faced barriers to doing so. A theoretical framework built around feminist ethics of care was used to develop an account of how tenancies managers navigated these caring responsibilities as they responded to at-risk tenancies. Three further themes emerged from the findings: that the commercial imperative upon Unison and its tenancy managers was a barrier to what I have termed ‘tenancy-sustainment-as-care’; that tenancy breakdown could be understood as a breakdown in caring relations, and that tenancy sustainment was supported by collaborative practices of ‘caring with’ other actors involved in an at-risk tenancy, including colleagues, managers, support workers, and tenants themselves. These findings have clear ramifications for practice and policy in the social housing sector.<p></p>