Housing tenure is one of the central social institutions in the field of
housing. It is the institution through which the consumption of housing
is organised in a society. Tenures provide users with rights and burden
them with duties concerning housing they are using to satisfy their
housing needs. From a comparative perspective a great variety of housing
tenures can be found in the world. Moreover, tenures evolve and
transform through time. Tenures should be approached from two different
perspectives: that of general types and that of specific forms. Types of
tenure are constructed by abstracting an ideal type of contrasting
housing tenure from the variety of empirically and historically existing
tenures. This analytical construct distinguishes only two major
tenures: owner-occupation and renting. These differ in terms of the
rights of use, control, and disposition provided to the resident.
However, in actually existing tenure the differences are qualified by
specific institutional arrangements. For example, there are systems of
owner-occupation where the right of disposition is much more restricted
than for owner-occupiers in general, or there are systems of rental
housing where residents are allowed a degree of control over their
housing that comes close to what owners usually enjoy. Moreover, there
are intermediate forms of tenure that combine characteristics of
owner-occupation and renting. These differences from the ideal type
exist at the level of forms of tenure, that is, the tenure arrangements
that are empirically and historically found in different societies and
eras. The ideal type serves as a yardstick to analyse these tenure
forms. Over the years, housing researchers have had doubts about the
usefulness of perspectives focusing on housing tenure. However, if the
limited scope of what tenure concepts refer to is properly taken into
account, housing tenure remains an indispensable concept in social
analysis of housing.