The institutionalization of shared rental housing and commercial co-living

In context of diminishing housing affordability, shared renting has acquired new salience in recent years, especially for single young-adults. Public discourses often pose shared renting as a potential solution to the ‘housing crisis’, with new regulation and investment stimulating conversions to multiple-occupancy and growth in co-living developments. This paper addresses how Amsterdam, a deeply regulated market, has approached affordability concerns through transformations in the shared rental sector. Drawing on secondary data and stakeholder interviews we analyze developments in the institutional features of shared housing, focusing on the regulatory context under neo-liberal pressures. We identify shifts from ‘traditional’, relatively informalized sharing arrangements towards a more complex and institutionalized sector featuring growth and diversification in co-living provision. Beyond illustrating interaction between changing real-estate investment practices and Amsterdam’s socioeconomic and regulatory context, our analysis innovates a rough typology of sharing and co-living and seeks to contribute to understanding of emerging forms of housing and precarity characteristic to the experiences of young urbanites.