Bringing Home the Housing Crisis

Abstract

Bringing Home the Housing Crisis tells the story of the erosion of people’s rights to home in London. It does so through a focus on three case studies: the bedroom tax, the rise in family homelessness and temporary accommodation provision as its solution, and the criminalisation of squatting in a residential building. Using the concept of domicide – meaning the intentional destruction of home – it explores how who is and is not deemed deserving of home has been moulded and shaped by political rhetoric and housing policies. It does so through a classed lens, examining how the decimation of working-class and low-income people’s rights to home have been legitimised in the austerity era as decisions based on fairness. The book is about how the concept of home has ultimately shifted, from a place that is fundamental to human security and happiness, to a financial product. It is about the impacts of this shift on people’s everyday experiences of home. And it is about how they have sought to challenge and resist domicide. Methodologically, Bringing Home the Housing Crisis uses interviews, analysis of political speeches and political ethnography to centre the experiences of people living on the front lines of housing precarity in London.