Privileged Precarity: Housing the Nomadic Middle Class

Recent scholarship has highlighted the increasingly precarious and individualised nature of work in the knowledge economy. In particular, flexibility and mobility are often expected of those pursuing careers in the technology, cultural or creative sectors. However, there exists very little literature examining how these employment arrangements are reflected in housing systems. Drawing on interviews with residents of co-living spaces—an emerging form of flexible, insecure shared rental housing—this paper seeks to demonstrate how the increasingly multi-sited and precarious nature of work in the knowledge economy is being supported by new forms of housing with similar attributes. I develop the notion of ‘privileged precarity’ in order to make sense of how co-living residents use these spaces in relation to their working lives. This describes a self-inflicted form of residential insecurity seen to offer personal and/or work-based opportunities. Rather than experiencing precarity as a state of oppression, I argue co-living enables these largely middle-class, mobile individuals to leverage their ability to live precariously to their own social and professional advantage. Whereas precarity is experienced by working class households as disabling and destabilising, my participants were able to use it as an asset and resource—a way of expanding their opportunities and privilege. I conclude by outlining the implications of privileged precarity for both housing and labour market inequalities.