Perceptions and problems of single-young adult household housing in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

Housing is more than shelter as it includes attributes of comfort, convenience, and amenities as essential for the emotional and social well-being of households and individuals. This research deals with the specific rental housing sub-market where single young people aged between 18-34 years old either students or workers living in a shared premise. People in this group are transitioning from youth to adulthood, representing a formative stage in their life-cycle and demographic stratification at the societal level. These single-young people come to the city to fulfill their vision of earning knowledge with higher education and an excellent job when most of them are economically full or partial, supported by their parents or family. In Bangladesh, like other developing countries, the formal housing market in Dhaka is generally unresponsive to addressing these single-young people's housing needs due to their independent lifestyle. As young people in Dhaka are excluded from any direct state welfare supports while a few government hostels provide their accommodation, most of them live in the formal and informal rental housing sector through diversified sharing forms. This rental housing sometimes provides a poor living environment and becomes tougher within social and political difficulties. By noting a gap in knowledge, this research wants to describe the current scenarios of single-young household housing in Dhaka to increase and potentially improve the existing rental provision with two objectives. First, to profile the group of single-young people living in shared rental houses and the owners who rent their houses to them by knowing their socio-economic characteristics as a basis to outline owners’ perception of their tenants; Second, to investigate the housing circumstances of shared rental houses by knowing the overall living experiences within the nature and extent of the multifaceted problems with which they live. A convenient random sampling method is used to investigate the research objectives. Three areas in Dhaka are selected, and multiple cases from each of the areas are identified by following a convenient random sampling method for a qualitative field survey. Data are collected through interviews, observation, documentation, and questionnaire surveys. The significant findings are: first, single young tenant, living independently away from the family environment with feelings of independence, undergoing different lifestyle than family households which sometimes raises misperception about them toward house-owners, but today some house owners seem them as a scope of a profitable rental business; second, shared living benefits the tenants economically as much as makes scopes of social interactions while some social and physical problems arise mainly because of converted family housing toward shared living rather than a designed house for sharing. Still, single-young tenants are minority groups in Dhaka, but the current trend indicates their growing number not only in Dhaka but also in many other developed and developing societies. The increasing number of these households creates new demand for the housing market, especially in the rental sector, with emerging challenges at the policy level. There remains a considerable research gap at the national and international levels, which is the primary need to exercises with multiple scopes of work toward their housing provisions.