Up to one billion tenants may be living in cities across the globe, but most governments continue to ignore them. Insofar as they recognize that tenants exist, the policy is to turn them into home-owners. Even in the UK and US, where this strategy has been underway for some years, it has not managed to reduce the number of tenants during the last decade. With the sub-prime crisis, the proportion of tenants is likely to rise. In the rest of the world, few governments recognize that renting is an essential shelter option. This viewpoint demonstrates why tenants and landlords are not likely to disappear, and explains why, for many, renting is a vital housing option. Fundamentally, it is a plea for a tenure-neutral shelter policy.

The headlines have recently been announcing that one billion people will be living in ‘slums’ by 2030. The UN, the multilateral development banks and several national development agencies have responded by launching a series of initiatives intended to limit the ‘slum’ problem (for example, UN-Habitat, 2003; 2005; UNFPA, 2007; Garau et al., 2005; ADB, 2004; Buckley and Kalarickal, 2006). A combination of settlement upgrading, titling, service provision, micro-credit and improved urban governance is the recommended course of action. And, while much of that agenda is thoroughly commendable, current approaches also make one particularly questionable assumption; that home-ownership represents the ‘natural’ tenure. Certainly it is the normal tenure in the countryside, although large numbers of rural people live in a range of alternative forms. In the urban areas, however, renting is very common and in major cities it often accommodates a majority of all house-holds. Few probably realize that most inhabitants of New York, Los Angeles, Zurich, Berlin, Lagos, Moscow, Accra, Nairobi, Mumbai and Shanghai are tenants. Indeed, it is possible that one in three urban dwellers across the globe (around one billion people) are tenants. Faced by such numbers, surely every government should have some kind of rental housing policy? In practice, they don’t (Hulchanski and Shapcott, 2004; Krueckeberg, 1999; UNCHS, 2003). Few governments are building public housing for rent, and most state housing is being sold off. In most former Communist countries, the new regimes have been disposing of the public housing stock as fast as possible.