Algorithmic Housing Precarity: Emotional Costs of Digital Landlord Control for Vulnerable Tenants
This research aims to investigate how algorithmic and digital landlord systems reshape power, responsibility, and emotional wellbeing for tenants in the UK private rented and housing association sectors. It focuses on tenants most exposed to housing precarity, examining how digital systems and the policies governing their use influence access to housing, security and relationships between tenants and landlords.
The study explores how responsibilities are distributed between landlords and tenants through digital housing management, and what this means for tenants’ everyday lives. Particular attention is given to how IT literacy and digital capability shape tenants’ ability to navigate, negotiate or resist algorithmic practices, and how these experiences affect anxiety, trust and feelings of insecurity.
By examining digital rental management through tenants’ experiences, the project seeks to connect questions of technological change and unequal power with the emotional dimensions of housing precarity. It aims to develop evidence-based recommendations for more transparent, equitable and emotionally supportive approaches to digital rental management.
Funded by the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership (WRDTP).
Supervisors
- Dr Ian Wilson (Sheffield Hallam University)
- Dr Lindsey McCarthy (Sheffield Hallam University)
