Tenant Voice–As Strong as It Gets. Exit, Voice and Loyalty in Housing Renovation

Abstract

This article applies Hirschman’s model of exit, voice and loyalty to a Swedish case of housing renovation in a building with comparatively well-off tenants. Hirschman’s framework is particularly well suited for understanding the housing market with its heterogeneity and high transaction and attachment costs, and accordingly strong loyalty and voice. Our study indicates that the exit-voice-loyalty framework is a useful tool for analysing renovation processes, since these trigger both voice and exit behaviour. We argue that renovations can be considered as critical junctures to an existing tenant–landlord relation, thereby exposing power relations on the housing market. In the case studied, tenants were not able to affect the scope of the renovation directly, but tenant voice did affect the process as well as the outcome in other respects. The capable tenant group makes this a ”most likely case” for testing the limits of tenant influence in housing renovation processes.