Encounters with difference in the subdivided house: The case of secondary suites in Vancouver

Abstract

Chinese

Policies that encourage tenure mix as a strategy to help narrow socio-spatial distance between homeowner households and their renter counterparts have a long and controversial history in North American and European cities. Research that seeks to evaluate the merits of such policies has typically focused on the frequency of encounters between these two types of household, at the expense of the quality of this contact. Accessory apartments in subdivided houses (also known as secondary suites) provide a germane micro-scale environment to examine the content of interactions between homeowners and renters. Inspired by Gill Valentine’s work on ‘encounters with difference’ and using a series of interviews with secondary-suite homeowner-landlords and their tenants in the city of Vancouver, this article illustrates three types of encounters across tenure-based difference. These examples of conflictive, tolerant, and respectful encounter provide helpful material to reflect on the limitations of tenure mix as a macro-scale policy.

Keywords

accessory apartments encounters secondary suites tenure mix Vancouver

Introduction

Accessory apartments, known in Canada as secondary suites, are self-contained dwelling units created through the subdivision of a principal dwelling (typically a detached or semi-detached house). While they are more commonly found in metropolitan areas such as Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary, where house prices have escalated much more rapidly than in the majority of Canadian urban centres, these apartments are significant in that they exist in cities throughout the country. Some secondary suites are created directly by developers inside newly built houses, but homeowners can also create such suites post-hoc by retrofitting little used spaces in their home (most often in basements, but occasionally also in garages or attics) (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), n.d.; Mendez and Quastel, 2015). The goal of having a second unit is often to rent it out in order to derive supplementary income that is used to offset one’s mortgage payments – hence the popular moniker of ‘mortgage-helper suite’.

Secondary suites not only enable homeowners to carry larger mortgage loans thanks to their rental revenue, but they also help increase the supply of rental housing – with the added advantage that rents for secondary suites generally lie below rents for the purpose-built rental stock (CMHC, n.d.). For these reasons, while homeowners do not always obtain the necessary permits to subdivide their home in this way, local authorities are often prepared to tolerate unauthorised secondary suites (Tanasescu, 2009; Tanasescu et al., 2010). In Vancouver, where the ownership market is the most expensive in Canada and where rental vacancy rates have remained for many years critically low, it is estimated that secondary suites house approximately 20% of all renter households (CMHC, n.d.) even though the vast majority of these apartments is rented out without a license and was likely built without permits (Mendez and Quastel, 2015). The relationship between homeowner-landlord and renter, however, is regulated by provincial legislation regardless of the legal status of the secondary suite.¹ This fact, together with the lower rental cost of secondary suites compared with purpose-built rental housing and the local authorities’ tolerant attitude toward the city’s large number of non-conforming secondary suites, means that this rental submarket operates in ways that are similar to other urban rental markets in the country.

Since the early 2000s, the City of Vancouver has actively promoted secondary suites as an affordable housing strategy (CMHC, n.d.).² For example, building standards that apply to suites have been relaxed, zoning restrictions that made suites illegal have been largely removed, the permit application process has been streamlined, detailed information about applicable building standards and zoning and licensing requirements is easily accessible on the City’s website, and a policy of selective enforcement has been officially adopted (Mendez, 2016).³ Increasingly, other municipal governments in large metropolitan areas in Canada are adopting Vancouver’s enthusiasm for secondary suites, while the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) – the national housing agency – has started sponsoring research on this type of housing and publishing information on relevant municipal best practices (CMHC, 2015a, 2015b, n.d.). Given that it is homeowners themselves who assume the cost of building and maintaining such units, part of the strategy’s attractiveness is that these apartments improve access to housing at little cost to local and other levels of government.

Because real estate speculators consider houses that contain secondary suites an attractive investment opportunity (a result in part of the steady revenue stream that these apartments generate), not all such houses are owner occupied. But in cases where homeowners do occupy one part of the property and rent out the other, they find themselves living in close proximity to their tenants. Such physical proximity raises the following question: What kinds of contact or ‘encounter’ with one another can homeowners and tenants expect when living in a house with a secondary suite rental? This question is particularly relevant not only because of the eagerness of growing numbers of local governments (and the national housing agency) to promote secondary suites, but also in the context of a long-standing interest among policy makers and scholars in the potential that increased contact between renter and homeowning households presumably offers for lifting the former’s socio-economic status – an interest that has given rise to an important critical literature on the concepts of housing tenure mix and social mix (Chaskin and Joseph, 2015; Ley, 2012; Tach, 2010).

There is strong evidence that in the aggregate, differences in economic attainment between renters and homeowners in Canada are pronounced (Hulchanski, 2004). The 2011 National Household Survey revealed for example that close to 40% of Canadians living in housing owned by a member of the household had incomes below the national overall median in 2010, owing in part to Canada’s aging population and the fact that many retirees on fixed incomes live in owner-occupied housing. However, the equivalent figure for those who lived in rented housing was almost twice as large, at approximately 76%. And given that income difference is typically translated into social status difference, homeowners may see renters as undesirable neighbours – a fact confirmed by the critical ‘tenure mix’ literature that documents a variety of homeowner strategies of renter avoidance as well as the persistent stigmatisation experienced by renters when they live in close proximity to homeowners (Arthurson, 2013; August, 2014; Chaskin and Joseph, 2015; Le Galès, 2012). Importantly, such behaviours and experiences relate not only to disparities of income but also to various other dimensions of difference including race, ethnicity and age or stage in the lifecycle.

One of the key features of the tenure mix literature has been its focus on the geographies of contact at the mezzo scale of the neighbourhood. In order to generate conclusions about ‘encounters’ between renters and homeowners, a few researchers have sought to collect, aggregate, and analyse data about the experiences of contact between these two types of household living in neighbourhoods where owner-occupied housing is interspersed with purpose-built rental buildings (Joseph and Chaskin, 2010; Tach, 2010). But households in such neighbourhoods may not know all the local inhabitants and therefore homeowners may not know when they have encountered neighbouring renters (and vice-versa), introducing potential bias into the responses that researchers collect about interactions across tenure-based difference. Secondary suites by contrast create an environment in which renters and homeowners know each other as a result of the landlord–renter relationship. Reports of encounters across tenure-based difference are therefore arguably more trustworthy at this smaller scale of the individual residential lot. Shifting the scale of analysis of tenure-based difference to the micro level, the secondary suite rental arrangement provides an ideal setting to examine the nature of encounters between homeowners and renters who live in close proximity to one another.

In this paper, I discuss the geographies of encounters with tenure-based difference through an analysis of 52 interviews I conducted with Vancouver residents who have experience as tenants or homeowner-landlords of secondary suites in the city.⁴ The paper is structured into three substantive sections: the first one revisits the literature on tenure mix as social policy, the second discusses methodology, and the third borrows from Gill Valentine’s (2008) analysis of encounters across difference to discuss three separate geographies of contact associated with subdivided homes. These are: spaces of conflictive encounter, spaces of tolerant encounter, and spaces of respectful encounter. I conclude with some reflections on the limitations of the thesis of socio-economic uplifting that underlies tenure mix policy in relation to the City of Vancouver’s secondary suite policy.

The concept of housing tenure mix

The global spread of neoliberal governance rationalities in the past four decades has contributed to the reshaping of North American urban space. For example, city authorities have adopted a variety of local ordinances to regulate panhandling (Blomley, 2007; Mitchell, 1997) while enabling a proliferation of ‘interdictory spaces’ (Flusty, 2001) where propinquity is tightly controlled. Other important aspects of this urban transformation include the homogenisation of residential spaces as a result of gentrification-induced displacement (Newman and Wyly, 2006; Walks and Maaranen, 2008) and, in suburbs, the spread of the ‘gated community’ phenomenon (Low, 2003). Such changes to the urban and metropolitan spatial fabric contribute to the erosion of possibilities for contact across social difference – a preoccupation with a long history among 20th century reformers (Simpson, 1985; Talen, 2006), scholars (Park et al., 1925; Wirth, 1938), and public intellectuals such as Jane Jacobs (1961) (see Berrey, 2015; Lyle, 2014).

In the 1980s and 1990s, a string of studies of class and racial/ethnic segregation in the USA prompted a sweeping re-evaluation of the realities of social relations in the city (Jargowsky, 1997; Massey and Denton, 1993; Wilson 1987, 1996) and their implications for housing policy (August, 2008; Dooley et al., 2000; Epp, 1996; Talen, 2002). More recently, the search for effective responses to the racialised and gendered socio-spatial marginalisation of low-income households in the USA (and to a lesser extent in Canada) has led to a pronounced shift in policy discourse, with income mixing now championed as a self-evident strategy to de-concentrate poverty thanks to the belief that, as Kathy Arthurson (2008: 489) phrased it, ‘the presence of middle-income residents [would] instil a work ethic in the working classes and […] educate them with middle-class standards of behavior’. (For evidence of a similar policy discourse shift taking place in the UK and continental Europe, see Musterd and Andersson, 2005, and Young et al., 2006.)

In this context, scholars and policy makers have sought to go beyond the task of critiquing the norms, processes and practices that exclude from various urban spaces those who do not own their home, by focusing on ways to make residential blocks or neighbourhoods more socially inclusive than they currently are (Joseph et al., 2007; Ley, 2012; Varady and Walker, 2003). Housing tenure mixing has been the most commonly proposed vehicle to achieve this goal.⁵ As Ade Kearns and Phil Mason (2007) explain, four sets of benefits for low-income households and communities have been attributed to housing tenure mixing in the literature: first, an improvement in the quality and quantity of public and private services and sources of employment available; second, an increase in residential stability, levels of social interaction, and sense of community; third, a reduction in the incidence of anti-social behaviour and a raising of personal aspirations and educational attainment; and fourth, a reduction in the stigmatisation of the area and an enhancement of residents’ social networks.⁶

But as Kearns and Mason (2007) add, these arguments in support of income and tenure mixing have more often been advanced through deductive reasoning rather than empirical analysis, taking as a starting point the literature on the negative effects of concentrated poverty. Moreover, studies that have examined the issue empirically have more commonly focused on measuring the frequency rather than content or quality of contact between low-income tenants and middle-class homeowners, which is seen as being related to the social outcomes of living in a mixed tenure environment.⁷ Narrowing the analysis in this way carries critical epistemological and methodological consequences. In particular, questions of relationality have not been pursued as extensively as they could. In addition, the few extant studies on the quality of contact between tenure groups typically focused on the experiences and outcomes of low-income tenants, and only an even smaller number have examined the experiences and attitudes of the middle-class homeowners residing in mixed tenure neighbourhoods (Tach, 2010). Moreover, few scholars have sought to study responses from members of these two groups collected in the same site or neighbourhood. As a result, we still have an incomplete picture about the nature of their inter-relations.

An unfortunate consequence of these limitations is that we still lack an understanding of what actually goes on when those infrequent instances of contact do take place. In an effort to begin to address this problem, this article explores the nature of contact or encounters with difference in tenure mixed residential space by shifting the scale of analysis down from the city and its residential neighbourhoods to the dwelling unit itself, and more specifically to detached houses with unauthorised secondary suite rentals. This housing arrangement, as I have explained, provides an excellent setting for the study of such encounters.

The interviews

The 52 semi-structured interviews I conducted with homeowner-landlords and renters were part of a larger project that seeks to understand what makes possible an informal housing market in Canadian cities (Mendez, 2011). Participants were required to have current or past experience living in a property with an unauthorised secondary suite in Vancouver, either as homeowner-landlords or as renters whose landlord occupies the principal unit. None of the interviewed renters had as their homeowner-landlord somebody who was also a respondent. To count as a secondary suite for the purposes of this project, the unit was required to have a separate entrance, and to determine whether a secondary suite was unauthorised, prospective respondents were asked at the time of recruitment whether a rental permit issued by City authorities was posted in a visible location inside the unit, as this constitutes a legal requirement in Vancouver.⁸

At the outset, the intention was to interview an equal number of the two types of respondent. However, while data saturation was quickly reached in the case of the interviewed renters, this was not the case with homeowner-landlords. For this reason, 21 interviews were conducted with the former type of respondent and 31 with the latter. In both cases, the interviews lasted approximately 45 to 60 minutes each. All of the respondents but two (one homeowner-landlord and one renter) agreed to allow the interviews to be recorded, which enabled transcription and manual coding to facilitate the identification and analysis of patterns in the respondents’ described experience. Neither homeowner-landlords nor renters were asked directly to discuss their experiences of coming into contact with their secondary suite counterpart, but such encounters were brought up spontaneously by several respondents.⁹ These unprompted comments were noticed during the analysis stage as the interview transcripts were being coded, giving rise to the present article.

Because the legal status of the secondary suites that were of interest in this project is irregular, there is no register or database of homeowner-landlords or renters who occupy this type of housing. Recruitment therefore was based on a purposive sampling approach, seeded from half a dozen personal contacts who fit the requirements for each target group (homeowner-landlords and renters) and who then put me in contact with other potential interviewees from among their networks. Given City of Vancouver (2009) estimates that locate the vast majority of secondary suites in the East side of the city (approximately 81%, versus 19% in the West side), efforts were made to recruit a larger number of participants from the East side. Of all the respondents, 21 homeowner-landlords and 14 renters identified the East side as the location of their experience with unauthorised secondary suites. Nevertheless, it is important to note that there was no discernible geographic pattern (i.e. consistent East versus West differences) in the respondents’ unprompted comments about their encounters.

Table 1 further summarises the socio-demographic information that was collected about the interviewees. While an in-depth study conducted by the City (City of Vancouver, 2009) characterises the population of secondary-suite renters as highly diverse in terms of age, occupation, household composition and other socio-demographic characteristics, the nature of my sampling approach did not allow for selection of respondents in proportion to the City’s estimates of the demographic characteristics of this population. Therefore, rather than aiming for generalisation based on a quantitative assessment of the variability of secondary-suite homeowner-landlords, renters, and their mutual encounters, this article seeks to shed light on the nature of such encounters through the identification of commonalities in the reported subjective experience of respondents.

Table 1.

Interviewee characteristics.

	Homeowner-landlords	Renters
Location:
East side	21	14
West side	8	7
Not stated	2	0
Age:
20–29	1	4
30–39	11	8
40–49	9	8
50–59	4	1
60 and older	6	0
Primary occupation:
Student	2	6
Employed	26	15
Retired	1	0
Home-maker	2	0
Immigrated:
Less than 10 years ago	2	0
10 years ago or more	5	5
No	24	15
Student visa	0	1

Geographies of encounter in the subdivided single-family house

The tenure mix literature has been primarily concerned with the formulation and evaluation of policies to de-concentrate poverty and, to a lesser extent, with the analysis of unplanned instances of mixed tenure (Tach, 2010; for an example that pertains specifically to Vancouver, see Rosol, 2015). But the subdivided single-family house provides another site for the study of tenure mixing, one that has remained largely unnoticed in urban scholarship. Owner-occupied homes that have been subdivided for rental purposes become sites where people of different tenure status – with all the social and economic differences this often implies – live in close proximity to each other. With proximity comes an increased possibility of contact or encounter, such as when the tenant calls on the homeowner-landlord to pay the rent or to ask for repairs. Contact in the subdivided house, moreover, does not require an actual meeting of bodies in space: encounters between tenants and homeowners in subdivided homes can take place via sounds and cooking smells as they travel between the sectioned spaces of the house (Willis, 2010). But while recent studies of encounters across difference have examined a wide variety of urban spaces (see, for example, Laurier and Philo, 2006; Neal et al., 2015; Parks, 2015; Pikner, 2016; Wilson, 2013, 2011), this literature has paid little attention to urban residential space.

In the context of an important research programme on how to forge what she calls ‘a civic culture out of difference’ (Valentine, 2008: 326; see also Valentine and Harris, 2016; Valentine and Sadgrove, 2014; Valentine and Waite, 2012), Gill Valentine has developed a useful descriptive typology of encounters with difference in the city, alternatively conceptualising urban space as a site of conflict, tolerance, and respect (2008). While Valentine’s discussion is meant to address much broader forms of social difference in urban settings, her typology can be productively adapted to the study of encounters across tenure-based difference. As suggested by the interview quotations that follow, notions of conflict, tolerance, and respect adequately capture the nature of the uneven contact between tenants and homeowner-landlords in subdivided homes.

Subdivided houses as spaces of conflictive encounter

Combining findings from the literature and quotes taken from interviews and focus group sessions, Valentine (2008: 328) begins to describe her typology of geographies of encounter with difference ‘in the neighbourhood or elsewhere’ by introducing a first type of spatial contact: one defined by tension and conflict between groups of differing backgrounds. Houses with secondary suites can be sites for the production of spaces of conflictive encounter across tenure difference, as is the case when contact between tenants and their homeowner-landlords leads to tensions between them:

HL15: [I said to her,] ‘Please don’t compost,’ but she composted anyway … There’s no compost [pick-up service] here, so she would keep her compost [outside the suite and eventually] take it to a friend’s place nearby. And she would leave it uncovered, and I’d have to say, ‘There are rats. Please don’t do that.’ I don’t think she believed me. And so then one day, when I told her about the little rat hanging off the security bars in front of her kitchen window, she was startled. And I said, ‘I told you we had rats, right?’

Conflictive encounters between homeowner-landlords and their tenants can in some cases be linked to differences in lifestyle – in this case, a preference for composting despite the lack of appropriate infrastructure. Sometimes, such lifestyle differences may be associated – at least partially – with age or stage in the lifecycle:

HL12a: His friends were using [the suite] as a crash pad – they lived in the suburbs and they’d come from Port Coquitlam [a suburban municipality in metropolitan Vancouver] when he wasn’t there. He’d be at work and they would crash there.

HL12b: He worked at night as a security guard.

HL12a: Once, he left his key and broke in through the screen window.

HL12b: Just to get in! […] And you’d walk in and kick pizza boxes, and the door would be open …

HL12a: We’d have to clean up the garbage …

HL22: We had trouble with the noise and undergraduate students one summer when I was in [working abroad] and [my spouse] rented to them on a short term basis, and it was terrible for the house and terrible for the neighbours and the neighbourhood because they were partying all night.

But conflictive encounters are not all associated with young age. One secondary suite renter in her 40s began her story of conflict with her landlady through a description of an ill-fated encounter with her:

T10: I was sitting outside in [the front yard of the house], […] sitting in a very small corner reading and she [the landlady] came out, sat down on the step and talked to me as if I was seven years old, very, very quietly and said, ‘You can’t sit here.’ And so began an unfortunate dispute.

Katie Willis (2010) uses the phrase ‘social collision’ to describe this type of encounter, characterised by a situation in which ‘one group is viewed as “invading” the space of another group and thus being “out of place”’.

As Wilson (2017: 461) notes, the literature on encounters ‘has often tended to focus on the perspective of the majority or the powerful’. But in the case of the relationship between renters and homeowner-landlords, the experience of the former is just as instructive as that of the latter. Indeed, tenants themselves told me about conflicts that arose from incompatibilities between the landlord’s lifestyle and the responsibilities that come from renting out a secondary suite:

T08: His garden was right out in front of my suite, so [the landlord] was always right outside my window and he wasn’t shy about looking into the windows. That was really weird. I thought it would be a safe place to move into because they were an elderly couple and they wouldn’t make much noise. Well, boy, was I wrong about that. They had people over most nights of the week, and they’d stay up late and they would drink and have very animated, very loud, yelling, excited conversations.

Moreover, the potential for conflict is not limited to the relationship between the tenant and the homeowner-landlord itself. Building and renting out a secondary suite in neighbourhoods where it is not permitted may upset neighbours and create disputes between homeowners about the presence of a tenant in the subdivided property. This quotation from a former homeowner-landlord in an illegally subdivided home provides an example of such a conflict:

HL21: When we had our friends [renting our suite] there, we had a neighbour who was apparently really interested in knowing why there were so many kids and people coming into the house, and suspected an illegal suite. And later, we received a visit from a City inspector.

Conflict may also erupt with other tenants when properties are subdivided to have more than one secondary suite. Such conflicts may be tinged with racial prejudice – as the following story, recounted to me by one immigrant renter, suggests. Upon moving to a secondary suite apartment, the renter discovered that the place was infested with fleas. The landlord was unwilling to call a professional exterminator, and the problem soon reached the tenant in the neighbouring suite.

T12: And then [the neighbour] just – I think she had some racial issues, too – she said, ‘This place has always been clean, and there were never fleas till you guys moved in here. You brought the fleas.’ [Laughs] And then she put a Canadian flag and an Irish flag [on the wall between our doors] and she wrote, ‘Keep out.’

These reported incidents illustrate how, for multiple reasons and in a variety of ways, geographies of conflictive encounter with difference have the capacity to extend beyond the relationship between tenant and homeowner-landlord.

Subdivided houses as spaces of tolerant encounter

Valentine (2008: 329) introduces a second geography of encounter with difference by arguing that civil encounters in which prejudice is politely suppressed merely ‘represent a tolerance of others in shared space’. As she explains, ‘behaving in a civil or decent way in public, regardless of your privately held views and values […] does not equate with an ethics of care and mutual respect for difference’. Tolerance, she further argues, is ‘a dangerous concept’ because of the way it can ‘obscure or leave untouched [the] question of who has the power to tolerate’ (2008: 329). Given the power of the homeownership ideal in constructing tenure as a marker of difference, some homeowner-landlords may regard a tenant residing in a secondary suite within their property not only as somebody who is essentially different from them – a person stigmatised by the fact that she does not hold title to her own home – but potentially also as a threat to their own identity as masters of their private domain and absolute holders of the decision over how to use it.

But in order to obtain the benefits of a monthly rent, the landlord must incorporate the secondary-suite tenant into his private domain and allow her to use a portion of the property the way she pleases – a stipulation of the tenancy agreement which in legal terms is referred to as ‘quiet enjoyment’. The fact that she cannot be evicted without reasonable cause and due process (and especially the fact that, as holder of the title to that property, he cannot make use of that part of his house) may be perceived by some landlords as a negation of their idealised identity of homeowner. Those who feel threatened in this way by the practice of renting out their secondary suite must then adopt some mechanism to counteract the perceived loss of control while retaining the ability to collect rental revenue. An attitude of tolerance may be seen by some homeowner-landlords as providing such a mechanism.

Conflict-free relationships between secondary suite homeowner-landlords and their tenants can indeed fit the mould of tolerance in some instances, particularly in situations where home-owning households regard secondary suites as merely a contractual arrangement:

HL25: I don’t want to surprise people so I tell them directly how I live and I tell them I just don’t want them to lie to me. … And it’s always been quiet and I’ve had no problems. … They are not my best friends but it’s a good arrangement.

One of the renters I interviewed recounted her experience with a landlady who held such an attitude:

T09: [The landlady] had a porch above, [where] she mostly hung out … She didn’t hang around the back yard very much, so I’d probably see her two or three times a month. … Very separated. She was very clear about that, she actually said to me, ‘I don’t want a new best friend.’ That was fine by me.

Here, the landlady’s expressed desire for distance creates a space of encounter that is very different than a space of conflict, by communicating a willingness to tolerate the tenant’s presence in the property. But it is clearly also a desire riven with the unevenness of power that results from the landlord–tenant relationship, accentuated in the case of Vancouver by the ‘landlords’ market’ conditions prevalent in the city. Despite the tenant’s assertion that ‘That was fine by me’, the power to decide the nature of her future encounters with her landlady lay squarely on the latter’s side.

The home spaces that are produced out of encounters between homeowner-landlords and secondary-suite renters are always shaped by uneven power relations, and this unevenness is not dissolved by an attitude of tolerance toward her tenant on the part of the homeowner-landlord. As Deljana Iossifova (2010: 1) reminds us, tolerance ‘represents and manifests underlying power relations and unequal power distribution; the toleration of one group implies the existence of a dominant group holding the power to tolerate’ and, it should be added, to see others tolerate their own behaviour. Some of the homeowner-landlords I interviewed expressed their awareness of this power differential and the uneven dynamics that it occasioned:

HL02: Our tenants have been very tolerant of the noise levels generated by our three young kids. I can only chalk that up to [the fact] that there’s a power differential, the fact that we are landlords, and there’s just a feeling on the part of the tenants that have been here, that they don’t feel as though it’s in their interests to hold us to our end of the bargain.

There is in this statement an awareness of being in an awkward position – a situation in which this homeowner-landlord is able to perceive, as Valentine (2008: 330) puts it, ‘a gap’ between his values and practices. It is the presence of such asymmetries that leads Valentine to propose ‘the respectful encounter’ as a third type of encounter with difference.

Subdivided houses as spaces of respectful encounter

Valentine argues that the challenge of ‘living together with difference’ entails finding ways to enable encounters that promote respectful relations between others, rather than merely tolerant ones. There is no romantic idealisation of tenure-related difference in the words of the homeowner-landlord quoted above – no discursive flattening of the very material hierarchies of the landlord–tenant relation. But there is implicitly a willingness to see renters not simply as a source of mortgage-helper revenue but rather as full human beings. This willingness – and awareness – in turn opens up the possibility of what Valentine calls respectful encounters across difference.

My interview transcripts contained only one reference to encounters of this type, and it came from a renter rather than a homeowner-landlord:

T15: He was a lawyer, she was at home with two kids, and they were really nice. Like we would have occasional conversations with them in the front yard when they were out playing with the kids and stuff like that.

Nevertheless, the interview transcripts provided indirect evidence that a few other respondents on both sides of the rental agreement had experienced multiple respectful encounters with their renters or homeowner-landlords. To see this indirect evidence, a starting point is Helen Wilson’s (2017: 463) suggestion that if encounters accumulate, they may ‘gradually shift relations and behaviour over time’ (Wilson, 2017: 463). In my interviews, a few respondents talked about their relationship with their tenant or homeowner-landlord and how it had developed into a friendship over time:

HL09: The first tenant stayed for three years. That was [Name] and [Name] and it was a great relationship. We would barbecue in the backyard with them. We gave them a wedding present when they got married. Christmas cards back and forth.

HL11: We help each other with pet care … We sometimes end up gardening together. … She’s very good company. For example, she came to brunch on Christmas day, and I had dinner in her suite on Thanksgiving, with her family.

T07: In our relationship it is landlord and tenant but it’s closer than that, it is more of a … She asks how I’m doing, she’s met my parents, and more of a familiar interaction almost has developed. And bonding over certain activities that we both care about [like music].

T21: I’ve still got their phone numbers and they’ve got mine and you know, I’ve been invited back to barbecues or whatever.

Such comments suggest that a series of respectful encounters must have taken place in the past, enabling the contractual tenant–landlord relationship to build up over time to the level of a friendship – to develop, as this renter suggests, into a way of relating that is rooted in mutual respect:

T11: The relationship between a tenant and a landlord isn’t one of equals, there is a power there. … But I do like that we are friends and we view each other as equally deserving of respect.

In the context of the tenure mix literature, the tenant/homeowner-landlord friendships that were reported by some of my respondents point toward a need to consider not only the possibility, quantity and quality of punctuated contact between renters and owners, but also the importance of more sustained encounters (Matejskova and Leitner, 2011) across tenure-based difference.

Conclusion

Over the past two decades, political interest in mixed tenure communities has fuelled a growing body of scholarly and policy work on this topic. A key preoccupation of this literature has been the outcome of interactions or encounters between homeowners and renters in such communities. But research on this issue has typically been concerned with the frequency of encounters made possible by mixed tenure environments – a narrow focus that unwittingly plays down the importance of understanding the quality of such encounters. This article has aimed to make a contribution to this important field by examining the nature of encounters across tenure difference in residential space, and particularly in the context of the secondary suite rental relationship between homeowner-landlords and their tenants. The article also makes a contribution to the literature by taking the unusual step of encompassing in the same study the experiences of both renters and homeowners.

The secondary suite rental arrangement provides an ideal site for the study of encounters across tenure difference. As I have argued, focusing on the micro-scale of the secondary suite helps us sidestep the possibility of a bias to which research at the mezzo-scale of the neighbourhoods is potentially liable, because homeowners who are landlords-at-home do know with certainty (as a result of their contractual relationship) when they are encountering a neighbouring renter and vice-versa. Taking the secondary suite arrangement as the site of analysis also contributes to the literature on encounters across difference by focusing on a type of urban space that this literature has largely neglected, namely residential space.

Working with Valentine’s (2008) helpful typology of encounters across difference, the article has shown that the secondary suite environment can represent three kinds of geography of cross-tenure encounter. Encounters between homeowner-landlords and their tenants can be conflictive, especially as a result of differences in lifestyle (which sometimes are related to age or lifecycle differences) or landlords’ perceptions (potentially unjustified) that their tenants are ‘invading’ their home space. Landlords’ encounters with their secondary suite renters can also be shaped by an attitude of mere tolerance, which helps avoid conflict but may prevent an effective bridging of social difference through the maintenance of social distance. Finally, and ideally, encounters between homeowner-landlords and their tenants can be respectful encounters, which in some cases may build over time into an actual friendship. This possibility of encounters that effectively bridge social distance are the most encouraging from the perspective of the tenure mix policy making (Joseph et al., 2007).

However, the other two types of encounter discussed in this article cannot be ignored, for it is difficult to imagine how such encounters might favourably contribute to the goals of mixed tenure policy. To better understand such encounters and their potential effects, this article’s findings invite further research on the socio-demographic and built-environment factors that may influence the quality of cross-tenure encounters. Similarly, I have argued that future research on cross-tenure encounters in mixed tenure environments needs to consider not only the possibility, quantity and quality of punctuated contact between renters and owners, but also the role that more sustained encounters across tenure-based difference can play in advancing – or acting counter to – the goals of mixed tenure. This article offered positive examples of cumulative encounters across tenure difference, but it is also plausible that conflictive or even tolerant encounters might accumulate to produce largely negative effects. This possibility certainly deserves attention (see Matejskova and Leitner, 2011; Wilson, 2017).

In addition to questions of tenure mix policy, the timeliness of this article relates to the growing interest on the part of numerous Canadian municipalities (and the federal government) in promoting secondary suite rentals both as a way to improve access to home ownership and as a fiscally attractive strategy for increasing the supply of rental housing. The findings I presented about the quality of encounters between homeowner-landlords and their tenants, particularly the finding that such encounters can be conflictive, should serve as a warning to policy makers interested in promoting this type of housing arrangement. At the very least, municipal and federal governments should produce (and make widely available) information about the challenges of being a landlord-at-home, the legal rights of secondary suite renters and landlords, and the possibility of negative experiences which may derive from various attitudes or behaviours on the part of either side of the rental agreement.

In closing, it is worth noting that the pertinence of Valentine’s typology in the case of encounters across tenure difference invites reflection on her broader conclusion about the social potential of encounters. To her, the possibility of social transformation through respectful encounters across difference is doubtful when the structural context for such transformation is marked by economic inequality (Valentine, 2008). If she is right, then the scaling up to the level of the neighbourhood – let alone the city – of individual respectful encounters across tenure difference would have to be dependent on the one hand on a radical shift in Canadian housing policy – which for decades has subsidised private home ownership while divesting from social housing (Suttor, 2016) – and, on the other hand, on a radical shift in the state’s welfare policy so as to provide citizens with a sense of protection regardless of their housing tenure status at any point in their life.

Footnotes

Funding

The following is acknowledged: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship Award.

Notes

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