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The word ‘rent’ first appeared in English around the twelfth century. In this original usage, rent meant income received by landlords and paid by tenants for the use of land. The word probably came from the French rente, meaning income, derived from the Latin, rendere, meaning to give back or give up.¹ The word ‘land’ was used synonymously in this context with the things that could be done with land, like housing and farming. Rent was therefore taken to mean the periodical payment by tenants to landlords for the use of land and for what could be done on and with the land. One interesting connection is to the word ‘farm’, which meant ‘payment as rent’ in thirteenth-century English. Its Latin root is firmare, meaning ‘to fix.’² There appear to be instances where the word ‘rent’ was used to mean tax in reference to various forms of property, but these were rare compared to the usage of the term to refer to the income derived from ownership of land. These discrepancies may well come down to the fact that in order for something to be given back, rendere, it first needed to be rent, torn apart, from its possessor. Rent as payment for the use of land remained its dominant meaning until the late nineteenth century.

It is around the 1880s that the word ‘rent’ begins to be used to refer to things besides land and its associated uses. Economists at this time begin to describe elements of the incomes of businesspeople as the ‘rent of rare natural abilities’, for example.³ This shift in how rent is conceived, within the context of broader debates in economic theory, opens the door for expanding the list of things to which the word ‘rent’ can apply. Rent comes to bear on a raft of different types of ‘property’ from this time, making the meaning of rent more ambiguous.

More recent examples of rent conceived in this generalized form could include the periodical payment for housing or the fee paid for the temporary use of a car or some other piece of expensive machinery. People holidaying in Bali or Mykonos might well rent a motorized scooter rather than buying one because they require its use for the duration of their stay only. Purchasing a scooter might be prohibitively expensive, given it would be used solely for the purpose of commuting from their bungalow to the beach for a few weeks. The same might apply for the purchase of a gym membership in the months leading up to embarking on a beachside getaway. Monthly instalments are paid to use weights and treadmills rather than purchasing loads of expensive gym equipment that may well be neglected upon returning home from warmer climes.

Paying rent for housing is also a familiar experience for many today. The latest OECD data suggest that homeownership rates are high in most member countries, with 68% of people across the OECD owning homes either outright or with a mortgage, compared to 28% renting either privately or in subsidized housing.⁴ There are two countries only, Switzerland (55%) and Germany (47%), where renting through the market is more common than homeownership.⁵ The population of the OECD is around 1.3 billion people, according to latest figures, which is roughly 17% of the global population of around 7.6 billion people.⁶ This means that about 364 million people living in OECD countries live in rented housing, almost one in every three people.

Recent increases in the renting population are also worth noting. The United Kingdom, for example, led the world between 2010 and 2015 in numbers of people becoming renters, with a 22% increase according to OECD figures.⁷ The United States in comparison had 6.2 million people join the ranks of renters, with a 9.3% increase over the same period.⁸ So while homeownership remains the dominant form of gaining access to housing on average in high-income countries, the rise in the renting population is significant and there are certainly enough of the population who do rent housing to make this form of rent a familiar arrangement for most people.

Just as with rents for scooters in Kuta, the rental payment for housing appears to be a relatively straightforward matter. A homeowner, or landlord, charges periodical fees, a rent, to those who require housing but do not own, or choose not to live in, a home of their own. The choice not to live in a home of one’s own might seem strange but it does occur in places like the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany and Japan, where laws allowing investors to recoup losses on rental properties through income tax deductions make this choice profitable in some cases.⁹ The conditions of the rental arrangement are usually set out in a tenancy contract whereby things like the amount of money to be paid for rent, how frequently this payment occurs, the length of the lease, the types of use permitted for the property and the rights of the tenants and landlord are spelled out in detail. This is why lawyers refer to ‘contract rent’. Responsibilities of each party are set out in these contracts according to general principles that are fairly intuitive. Landlords, as owners of the property, are generally expected to ensure that it is fit for the purpose of habitation. In return, it is expected that renters do not destroy what is not theirs and that they leave the place in decent condition. But, just like the horror stories of tourists who have been duped by shonky operators in holiday destinations or caught out by the fine print in insurance policies, the housing rent issue is also more complicated than it might first seem.

The UK-based homeless charity Shelter conducted a tenant survey in August 2017 that found around a quarter of a million women in England had been offered the opportunity to substitute sex for rent in the previous five years, with 140,000 being propositioned in the previous year alone.¹⁰ This survey prompted media reporting that brought some of the sordid details of these experiences to light. Evictions for refusing to have sex with landlords and the lowering of rent in exchange for sex are two examples.¹¹ Journalists went on to conduct undercover investigations, impersonating prospective tenants replying to advertisements posted by landlords online that used coded language to imply a sex-for-rent arrangement. More cases of sexual harassment were revealed by these investigations in both the United Kingdom in 2019¹² and by similar investigations in the United States in 2020.¹³ In the case of the United States, a survey conducted in May 2020 by the National Fair Housing Alliance of more than a hundred fair housing organizations found that 13% registered an increase in complaints about sexual harassment since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.¹⁴

The executive director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women remarked in April 2020 that there had been more cases of sexual harassment of tenants by landlords reported in the last two weeks than in the previous two years.¹⁵ Renee Williams, a staff attorney with the National Housing Law Project, said that ‘landlords have all the leverage in the landlord–tenant relationship and in these types of situations they especially prey on women who are vulnerable, who are housing insecure, have bad credit or who don’t have anywhere to go.’ Williams went on to claim that ‘We’ve already seen that the pandemic is exacerbating a lot of systemic issues and sexual harassment targeted at tenants by landlords is likely to be one of these issues.’¹⁶

Rent strikes are another example of systemic social issues flaring up during the pandemic. As the name suggests, rent strikes are coordinated refusals to pay rent with the aim of putting pressure on landlords to address problems to do with the rental arrangement. There were calls, for example, for coordinated rent strikes to begin on May Day 2020 across the United States, with catchcries like #CancelRent and #CantPayMay doing the rounds on social media.¹⁷ Democratic Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly endorsed the proposal, claiming that ‘People aren’t striking because they don’t feel like paying rent; they’re striking because they can’t pay rent.’¹⁸ Organizers of the May Day rent strikes in New York claim that while rent strikes are usually aimed at getting landlords to improve conditions for tenants, these are intended to prod lawmakers into offering up rental assistance to renters struggling in the course of mass unemployment during the pandemic.¹⁹ In the week prior to May Day, 3.8 million Americans became unemployed, joining the 30 million who had lost their jobs since the pandemic started.²⁰

Across the Atlantic, rent strikes have been organized in London, Dublin, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Athens throughout 2020.²¹ Mortgage holidays and a moratorium on evictions are some of the policy measures that have been implemented in the United Kingdom as a means to deal with mass unemployment in the midst of the pandemic. Even with these measures in place, there have been instances reported of eviction notices being served that come into effect as soon as the moratorium ends. Tenants of 170 privately rented apartments in Hackney, East London, were served eviction notices by their landlord, Simpson House 3 Limited, in June 2020. The mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, called them ‘revenge evictions’ that targeted tenants who had signed an open letter calling for rent decreases for those hit hardest by the pandemic job losses.²² The billionaire property entrepreneur John Christodoulou has been identified as the key stakeholder behind the evictions and who is also the person responsible for funding the purchase of 75,000 care packages that have been delivered to the homeless and struggling families in the areas of London where his properties are located.²³

University students have also coordinated rent strikes across the United Kingdom in late 2020. Their grievances include being treated as ‘cash cows’ by universities in the midst of a pandemic where in-person teaching and campus life is limited. Cambridge student Laura Hone claims the colleges ‘are so rich they absolutely have the means to make rent cuts and ensure staff are not laid off . . . yet they continually put profit ahead of the welfare of students and staff’.²⁴ Hone went on to say that ‘the education system should prioritize the welfare of students and staff, but universities are not going to come to this conclusion on their own. Students have to make them listen and rent is the most powerful leverage we have.’²⁵

While the basis of housing rent is simply the fact that people require housing to live, and that those who do not own it must procure it, these examples demonstrate there is nothing simple about the matter. In the case of the sex-for-rent scandal, gendered violence and the power structures that facilitate it seem to be aggravated by the financial hardships caused by increasing unemployment during the pandemic. Those calling and organizing rent strikes are doing so out of desperation, facing the very real prospect of deteriorating living conditions due to the pressures of having to pay the rent. It is clear also that there are financial imperatives constraining the benevolence of landlords, who might themselves be shackled to mortgages. The debtor, staring at an outstretched hand awaiting money they do not have, is probably not overly concerned about whether the appendage belongs to a financier or a rentier. What appears as a simple matter of payment for the use of housing is undergirded by several issues that extend beyond the individual actors to their societal context with very real and immediate consequences for all involved in the rental relationship.

While rent remains an income to landlords, it has also come to apply to lots of different types of property. Like any word, the meaning of ‘rent’ depends upon the context of its use. But unlike most other words, rent has become the subject of contention in economic theory, whereby its usage by those concerned with the subject matter of economics is loaded and requires some understanding of what is at stake in defining rent. Put simply, rent either must relate to land or it does not. Each leads to a different path for understanding what rent means today. This chapter is about working through some of these tensions, particularly in relation to this initial problem, of the relationship between rent and land. The next section looks at how and why rent is enjoying something of a renewal in interest across the social sciences and popular discourse.