Feeling at Home

Review

I picked this up for a book club at work. I’m going to try to keep my review here quite short, because I have multiple things that I want to writer longer responses to / reflections upon on my Substack over probably the next few weeks. This book has caused me to reflect even more deeply and in much more specific ways about my particular role as an agent of the State in regards to housing standards, program provision, etc. These are not new thoughts, but they are honed here by sharp criticism and by realizations that this writing sparked.

Some notes on writing. I found myself wondering who the target audience for this book is. Is it housing organizers? That is the population that the author reports to represent. Yet, there is a distinctly academic vernacular in the book. Maybe this is because the book is in such heavy discourse with particularly Marxist ideas (and I do not consider this a bad thing!). I do not actually know enough about political theory to know, which I am a little embarrassed to admit. I know that I have not read the words bourgeois and proletariat in a book so much in a very, very, long time. I also know that the word ‘imbricated’ appears twice in the text. I feel no insecurity about looking up words, I delight in opening up the dictionary app on my phone to find them. I get a little annoyed when I feel a cumbersome or overly-fancy word has been chosen where simpler language would communicate the idea more clearly. “Imbricated” seems to me a “tell me you’ve got a PhD without telling me” word. This is a petty thing to be annoyed by, and I recognize that.

I think why it occurs to me is that I want these ideas to be in discussion, and I wonder how in-discussion they will be if they are inaccessible. Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to folks. I had opened a dictionary app and surely other folks could. I don’t know.

There is quite a lot of exploration around the idea of home. Privacy, the private space as obscuring violence, and the inefficiency of single family homes re: climate considerations. I admit I have a hard time envisioning some of the proposals because the commodification of necessities are so deeply established. I found myself balking at the idea of communal laundry, thinking back to using laundromats and how absolutely miserable this experience was, growing up having to use them. Broken machines. Not enough machines. Machines that were technically working but took two cycles to fully dry (and thus cost MORE money). Not having the freedom to do laundry whenever is convenient. You can see that much of these is because the owners of those laundries have no incentive to keep the machines at their best quality, especially when there is no competition among them (I do not believe competition breeds good quality, but still). So, halfway through writing out my notes on this I sort of had to pause and think a little more deeply.

Some of the proposals are very similar to housing as discussed in Ursula K Le Guinn’s The Dispossessed. I sort of bumped on a lot in that. I’m going to reflect on this more before I write up deeper essays about them. But I am not comfortable giving up the extent of privacy that I think the author asks for a New Housing.

That said, I think many of the proposals operating in concert to other types of housing would be tremendous. This book is written from a UK perspective. In the US, the country has almost totally abandoned housing to the private sector. Landlords have no significant market force opposing them. The landlord never has an incentive to maintain high quality housing for low cost. That is in fact the opposite of their interest. I detest this. That publicly supported housing has abandoned the public housing model in favor of conversions to Project-Based Rental Assistance and Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (vouchers) is a great crime, and a heist from the landlord lobby. Now, meaningfully public housing is so limited and so restricted as to have no impact whatsoever to the landlord market. And vouchers are now in competition for the “limited” supply of housing available to the very poor. This means that localities are hesitant to apply even the most modest of standards to housing, because in most places it is perfectly legal to discriminate against voucher holders.

I can talk about this for a long, long, time. And I will write a separate piece about this (here’s another thing: during COVID, the emergency housing response even included landlord incentives. Yes, sometimes thousands of dollars as a bonus to landlords willing to accept a voucher. Landlords being paid for the honor of being paid. That is fucking crazy!). It gets me worked up.

I like these parts of the book. There are parts I really bristle at (much of the family stuff is very hard for me to envision and I’m reflecting on that a bit more before I write more about it). I like that the book inspired questions in me. That is valuable.

All of that aside, it is firmly an “ask questions” book. I am relatively unconvinced that anything in it is even remotely implementable. The cultural changes are a matter not of decades but probably a century or more. I don’t know. Much of it feels like pure fantasy, not practicality. That is a hard thing for me to deal with.

I did love the Conclusion. Pages 157-163 talks about ‘doing feeling’ and the necessity of sitting with bad feelings and harnessing them towards social good. There is a particularly good passage on page 157 about anger, and how anger is “a way of expressing that the current state of things is unacceptable, and what [sic - I think this should be ’that’?] we don’t deserve what happens to us.” I was in a protest the other day and felt that I could not raise my voice, and I have been thinking about that a lot, because it really disturbed me. I don’t get angry very easily. I got angry in a meeting at work last week, and it was a righteous anger. I liked that I had the reaction, because it was exactly as described here – it was a moral anger, not a violent anger. That is a meaningful difference.

I’ll write more about this book on my Substack in the next week (maybe the next two weeks).

Introduction

• p4 - Social housing has become almost impossible to access, as housing waiting lists have swelled and councils have to reserve their local stock for rehousing the most vulnerable residents who have become homeless.
• p5 - The state also underwrites this system through housing benefits - massive subsidies to landlords which serve to shore up the profitability of landlordism and therefore the stability of the housing system as a whole(^7). The profitability of housing as investment thus depends on the exploitation of the working class and large amounts of public money.
• p10 - Layers of outsourcing often make it difficult to determine exactly who the target of a strike should be. The fact that a large part of the workforce are now engaged in reproductive work such as healthcare and education, where the refusal of that labour might harm those cared for, means that many workers are more reluctant to take strike action.
• p12 - Today, as more and more people carry out their wage work at home, the distinction between productive and reproductive spheres is again becoming increasingly blurry.
  • TB: I’m feeling the vernacular of academia here, or maybe vernacular of this area of writing. I was not really ‘getting’ the references to reproductive work until this sentence, and it goes on throughout. This does create, in my view, a barrier to this text being easily digested by non-academics.

1. No Return to Normal

• p20 - We might even begin to question the validity of the language of ‘crisis’ when the so-called housing crisis is a more or less permanent condition, one that has marked working-class lives for decades.
• p23 - The Covid crisis led to an increase in domestic violence, often aimed at those who have been made responsible for attending to the needs of others. Queer and trans people are also vulnerable to the violence of the heterosexist nuclear family. Moreover, the idealised notion of the family serves to stigmatise many people, especially migrants and people of colour, who have been systematically excluded from the white, bourgeois ideals of domesticity.
• p27 - The current arrangement of the domestic sphere is naturalised - it appears to be depoliticised, dehistoricised, and and inherently good. The very notion of bourgeois domesticity, and the bourgeois idea of a good life, depends on a separation of the private sphere from the public. The household must therefore appear to be something separate from the society around it. This hides the labour and the violence that takes place within the home. (TB: emphasis mine.)
• p28 - The idea of home as a private space needs to be challenged in everything we do.
• p29 - TB: I’m not sure I agree with a lot of this. I never want to give up a private space. I recognize the protective elements of closer society and networks, but I also think privacy is important. The author talks about privacy often as a mask to hide violence and labour, but privacy also can be protective. If you live in a rural, conservative area, privacy suddenly becomes very important as a mechanism of safety. The author would probably say that in a world of closer social networks, things like heteronormativity and such would be challenged and spaces could be more easily queered. I am not so sure. I do not think privacy is a bad thing, and that is my major struggle with much of this book. The author does not suggest a total elimination of privacy, but as further chapters here will detail, they go further to eliminate it than I am comfortable with.

2. Housing is a Feminist Issue

• p35 - Women’s lower wages means there is currently no region in England where an average-priced one-bedroom would be considered affordable to a single woman on an average wage, whereas a single man on an average wage could afford an average-priced one-bedroom home anywhere in England except London (^7).
  • TB: I have no idea what ‘average’ means here. In the US, there is no county in the country where it is affordable to rent a two-bedroom or (I am pretty sure, last I checked) even a one-bedroom apartment on minimum wage. Which is to say that I think this is even worse in the US.
• p35 - People, and women especially, are often pressured into being part of a cohabitating couple, because the rent of even a single room in a shared flat is increasingly unaffordable in large cities.
• p41 - It is common practice, especially in large English cities, to move homeless households to cheaper areas – sometimes in a completely different part of the country.
• p41 - Working-class women in particular tend to depend on very site-specific forms of caring networks, such as the informal practices of shared responsibility for childcare that mothers on working-class estates often develop(^21).
  • TB: Author will later talk about importance of creating much more cohabitative / cooperative social housing systems where the aspect of single-family setups are ideologically abolished. Desires for shared childrearing responsibilities and a much more community-based childrearing approach in general. I think that sounds good on paper but am also pretty skeptical of getting there. Also I think US culture is gigantically distant from this being a reality. We barely trust parents to let unlicensed friends care for their children (at least when those parents are poor). If our welfare structures facilitated direct cash to people, and they could (for example) pay trusted people to help care for their children, instead of mandating incredibly expensive “licensed” childcare facilities, the dollar would go further and likely the children would be safer. The idea that childcare must be ’licensed’ is IMO a growth of racist practice and does not actually serve as a meaningful protective factor for children. I have gotten into this argument before.

3. Never at Home

• p48 - Some 21 per cent of homes in the private rented sector in England do not live up to the Decent Homes Standard, which requires that homes are free from serious risks to health and safety(^2).
• p52 - Local authorities are legally obligated to support people at risk of homelessness. But as they don’t have the financial means to do this for everyone who needs it, council homelessness teams often develop a culture of gatekeeping, deliberately misinforming renters about their rights and demanding people jump through hoops to access even minimal support.
  • TB: My experience is that similar things happen in US homeless systems. I would hope not so much the deliberate misinformation part. But certainly homeless systems can become such a collection of inconveniences as to make actually appearing homeless in things like coordinated/centralized access systems very difficult. Example: having to re-certify your homelessness weekly. This becomes basically the same level of inconvenient as weekly probation check-ins and has the same basic purpose IMO.

4. Poor Housing Creates Poor Health

• p65 - Drawing on Marta Russell’s theorisation of disability as a condition created by capital’s categorisation of some people as less productive than the ’normal’ worker,(^5) Adler-Bolton and Vierkant suggest that disability is one way that people get thrown out of the productive economy and come to be regarded as ‘waste.’ As they write, ‘Waste - surplus populations - are policed and certified by capitalist states to demarcate the boundary of who is an acceptable member of the body politic, with all who fall outside of this normative frame labelled as a burden.’(^6)
• p69 - In addition to the physical health effects of damp, mould, and cold, and the strain of having to try to make the best of a bad situation, there is the additional emotional damage of being implicitly or explicitly labelled as undeserving of a decent home. Renters I meet who live with disrepair and poor conditions sometimes mention feelings of shame, as if the conditions in which they live were an expression of their character. … The tendency to blame issues such as mould on individual behaviour also serves to stigmatise individuals and obscures structural issues.
  • TB: Thoughts about when I did inspections for CoC/ESG RRH. Thoughts about choosing standards to apply to these programs at Federal level. Knowledge that applying standards will make landlords refuse vouchers. So, in the choosing to not apply them, becoming a tool of a capitalist and landlordist state.
• p70 - TB: This whole page has a lot.
  • Here, it is useful to return to Friedrich Engels’ phrase ‘social murder’: ‘murder against which no one can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than commission.’(^16)
  • As long as these conditions are limited to criminalised, racialised, and disabled surplus populations, the state tends to adopt a hands-off approach to the housing conditions of the poor. There are laws that regulate housing standards, but these are rarely enforced. Local councils, which on paper have the power and responsibility to ensure housing standards don’t fall below a basic minimum, lack the financial resources to either improve their own housing stock or enforce standards in the private rented sector. Disabled and elderly people are regularly abandoned in homes that are completely unfit for their needs.
    • TB: US side is even worse. Housing stock has largely been captured by private interest for multiple generations. Public housing essentially non-existent or almost universally regarded as sub-adequate and scorned. Concerted movement across generations to move from public housing to landlord vouchers. This of course means that there is NO public competition to restrain landlord price gouging. There is no incentive for landlords to well-maintain housing standards. And public entities that operate vouchers struggle to apply housing standards because when they do, landlords will simply refuse to accept the voucher, either legally or illegally. This is so well known that even at the Federal level, when choosing what standards to apply federally, those making the decisions know that to apply high standards means likely preventing people from moving into housing.
• p73 - It is true that housing associations and councils are often terrible landlords. But this is not because they are public landlords - it’s because they are landlords.
• p74 - …social murder becomes more a form of doing than non-doing, but assigning individual blame is still difficult, as the ultimate source of the problem sits with successive governments that have been too interested in preserving the profitability of an increasingly deregulated building sector.

5. The Feeling of Ownership

• p78 - The increased use of design features such as homelessness spikes, preventing homeless people from sleeping on benches and in more sheltered areas, is the effect of a way of thinking that seeks to design away social issues, and make sure that people can’t meet any of their needs outside of the private sphere of the home. (TB: emphasis mine.)
• p78 - Through devices such as Ring doorbells, people are made to feel unsafe in their homes unless they can use surveillance technology to pre-emptively distinguish strangers from known people.
• p82 - As Coleman succinctly put it, some people will always be ‘sluts and criminals’,even in the most well-designed environments(^11). (TB: lol.)
• p84 - Coleman even argued that the single-family semi-detached home represents the instinctual, evolutionary end-point of the human development of shelter(^19).

6. Inheriting the Family Home

• p109 - TB: Not a note on the text, but a note on the writing. Author uses the word “imbricated” twice. I routinely look up words and I don’t worry about it. But this feels obtuse. It feels like a tell-me-you’ve-got-a-PhD word. I ask again, who is the target audience for the book. Is it Marxist theory lovers or is it housing organizers or is it both? Some of the writing is so dry that I have a hard time imagining it impacting people. Words like this don’t help. Snobbish opinion from me, I guess.

7. Demanding More, Demanding Better

• p114 - Extensive regeneration programmes, whether using SPVs or simply working with private developers, have typically led to much higher densities on the sites of former council estates, but with a loss of many social homes and the displacement of former residents.
  • TB: I would imagine there are many analogous examples in the US, re: removal of public housing or conversion of public housing to something like Rent Assistance Demonstration (RAD) programs or conversion to Project-Based Rental Assistance (I don’t remember enough about this to recall if RAD is itself PBRA or not, though I probably should). Doesn’t matter. End effect is removal of public housing and the transfer of public housing into private or semi-private ownership where a landlord and profit motive now exist. Very stupid.
• p117 - Even better, councils could simply take over vacant or neglected properties. Expropriating private landlords would be a massive step forwards in the contemporary housing struggle.
  • TB: I totally agree, but this made me depressed-laugh in the cafe reading it. If you proposed this somewhere in the US you’d be lit on fire. And that’s even with everyone hating landlords.

8. Collective Housing and the Abolition of the Family

• p137 - Revitalising this tradition for the contemporary era, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek call for a social world characterised by private sufficiency and public luxury, in which communal facilities such as swimming pools, libraries, cinemas, public transport, and so on would be located at the neighborhood level and integrated into the domestic sphere(^14). And as facilities for leisure and transport could be merged with the domestic sphere from the outside, Hayden also points out that the caring work that currently happens in the private sphere could stretch out from the domestic space into the world(^15). Kitchens, laundries, childcare facilities, and support for elderly and disabled people could be located at a community level. This dual movement would cause a blurring of boundaries between the private and public spheres.
  • TB: fair to say I had a strong negative reaction reading this. Pools and theaters at the community level sounds all well and good (actually it does not sound far off from what you often see in gentrifying neighborhoods, but we can put that aside for now). But I wonder when the last time the authors used a laundromat was. I grew up using them and let me tell you, it sucks. Broken machines, never knowing if there will be a machine open or not, machines that are shit and demand two or more cycles to actually dry your clothes. Yes, many of those complaints are artifacts of the commercialization of a basic service like laundry, and the argument from the author et. al. would likely be that in a socialized world where these machines are well-maintained by the locality and do not demand $1.50 or more per load, the complaints are nullified. I’m not so sure.
• p140 - Fourier imaged the phalanstery as a community of about 1,600 people, in custom-built housing that would provide both private rooms and shared spaces. Children would be reared communally. O’Brien adapts this vision to a contemporary model, and suggest that communities of 200 people would be more appropriate - big enough that reproductive labour and care could be carried out at a large scale, but small enough to encourage close ties between residents and democratic decision-making. This also means that existing domestic or commercial buildings could more readily be adapted, as many of them would private enough space to house a couple of hundred people. She writes:

  • Many things now done in the private home could be far better done in shared space: canteens can replace most kitchens and dining rooms; creches replacing a child's individual play room; entertainment rooms could serve as places to watch television or hang out in groups; personal studies could instead be shared libraries and co-working areas; home maintenance and cleaning equipment could be available in common space; vehicles could be similarly shared.(^17)

  • TB: Almost all of this turns me all the way off. Also, how would it be applied to rural communities? Maybe it doesn’t need to be. I don’t know. I think having things like this available for people who want to have housing like this is great. I am very wary of it becoming the defacto sardine can for homeless folks and the very poor otherwise, which is what I think would happen in the US (and in fact this does not sound that far from a shelter in general, though of course the connotations are very different).
• p143 - These attempts, [O’Brien] suggests, are doomed to fail.It is only with the overthrowing of the capitalist economy as a whole that we can meaningfully move towards building new forms of shared domesticity(^22).
  • TB: Oh, well no big deal then.
• p147 - When people are forced to share with strangers, this often leads to significant discomfort. (TB: no shit, understatement of the book.) But when people have the option of cohabitating with people they enjoy spending time with, shared housing can be both more joyful and less labour-intensive than households of one or two adults.
  • TB: Now this sounds better. I really do like the idea of this as an option. I can absolutely imagine living in closer community with people that I know and like. But I do want private space. The most important figuring in all this is that housing should not be a life defining decision. In the current system, housing is live or die – literally. It is hard to get and hard to hang onto and the idea of an owned home is a signature of the American dream and something worked towards as viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime-act (by my class, anyway). If people could more fluidly move from different housing configurations, I think a lot of my worries about setups like this would be mollified. This is not that far from Ursula K Le Guinn’s presentation of housing in Dispossessed. Though she does not make it sound very fun, either.

Conclusion

• p157 - We can also do more to sit with the bad feelings that home and housing issues currently create. Many people experience their housing situation as a central source of distress and anxiety in their lives. There are also many who experience a sense of shame in relation to their housing issues, as if their inability to access good-quality affordable, and long-term housing is an individual failure rather than a system-wide condition.
• p157 - Some of the most powerful moments of solidarity and care that I have witnessed involved turning feelings of anxiety and shame into anger - a feeling which places the source of the problem in the world, rather than in the individual. Anger is a way of expressing that the current state of things is unacceptable, and what (TB: I think this should be ’that’ ?) we don’t deserve what happens to us. It is a feeling that can be used to reveal rather than obscure social conflict. This use of feeling is not about turning negative feelings into more positive ones, but rather relocating the source of the bad feeling. A productive use of feeling for social movement is to turn anger into something that attaches to its proper object, and goes to the root of the problem. While anger is far from inherently radical, and has often been used for reactionary ends, it is a deeply social feeling. We can share anger. We can direct it at our real enemies - the government, bosses, landlords, police. The trick is to create a productive form of bad feeling that doesn’t wear us down but acts as a driving force to keep us going. There can be a certain comfort, even joy, in feeling angry together with others.
• p162 - How do we create this sense of collectivity and shared feeling without becoming a clique, or without replacing one exclusive form of intimacy with another? I think the answer lies somewhere in this openness of feeling, where we are prepared to work through difference and conflict together. When we welcome people from different backgrounds and social positions inot our movements, we make the emotional sustenance these groups offer available to an ever-wider set of people. … Emphasising politics as a way of doing feeling, as an intimate yet expansive act, does not have to mean we should only organise harmoniously with people who are like ourselves. We don’t have to agree on everything.
• p163 - Rather than affirming the notion of ‘home’ as an unqualified good thing … the housing movement could explore what home is under capitalist, sexist, racist, and ableist conditions, and how it needs to be transformed. This means interrogating our own tendencies for domestic realism and romance The ideal of home is deeply ingrained in most people’s psyches, so this is not an easy task.
• p164 - I have heard people in the housing movement insist that home is and should be a private space. But unless we can both politicise home and deprivatise it, what are we even doing?
  • TB: see, I just have no interest at all in “deprivatising” home. I think I could engage in a discussion about what it means for parts to be ceded to a public space and such (and my word choice of ‘ceded’ probably tells on me), but wow I just really want my privacy.