The Rental Market in Early Imperial Rome.

In early imperial Rome most of the residential population lived in rented apartments. Those who didn't were the especially privileged. The rent of the time was very high and while the range of accommodation did vary, the range was limited by wealth and social characteristics. The Ostian urban rental market had primarily two types of accommodation; Cenaculum and Cauponae.

Cenaculums were a higher class apartment and was made up of two sitting rooms and three bedrooms in between them. These rooms could be rented in portions to various tenants in a similar way to subleasing today. The lease would typically conclude after a year to several with the shortest being half a year. The tenant would pay at the end of the period which suggests that an element of trust was involved and implies that a degree of social status was also involved in taking a long-term lease.

The majority of Ostia's tenant population lived in mezzanines, backrooms of shops where they worked, or small one or two room flats. The poor lived in Cauponae which were made up of long rows of crudely partitioned, poorly lit cubicles. These buildings had different uses based on if they were located in the country or the city. In the country these buildings worked as inns for travelers while in cities they were for travelers, but primarily they were for poor residents. The poor residents would have had very short-term leases due to their lack of social status and unreliability of income.

The Roman rental market was economically wasteful. Entrepreneurial middlemen drove up rent, delayed-payment leases were risky for landlords and made the rich pay more, and the poor paid more because of the shortness of their lease. Regardless of this inefficiency, there was no evidence of improvement and no concept of public housing ever established. Part of the reason for this lack of change is because there was little regulation of the renting market, regardless of any hardships. The market was left to function "freely".

In Rome we explored the city a lot. While wandering around we passed houses that may have been used as rentals in early imperial Rome. Also, the contracts used in the long-term rentals were very progressive. The contracts included a warranty of continuing habitability on the part of the landlord which included circumstances that weren't within the landlord's control. This was so progressive that in the Common Law, this general warranty wasn't implied in rental contracts until 1970.