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Chapter 2 focuses on the book’s first case study, the bedroom tax. To provide some context, the chapter begins with a brief history of social tenancy in the UK, before outlining the introduction of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, which includes the bedroom tax. I go on to explore initial media and political responses to the policy, before turning focus to the financial and emotional hardships experienced by social tenants affected. The remainder of the chapter traces the multitude of ways in which social tenants are left struggling not only to remain in their homes, but also to assert their right to home in the first place. I explore how fear of forced eviction contributes to loss of autonomy and security regarding home. The chapter goes on to examine the impact of the bedroom tax on mental health and wellbeing. I then change tack slightly to consider how the Coalition government simultaneously introduced a range of welfare schemes designed to support middle-class people looking to buy their first property. I argue this is key in understanding how much rights to home differ along class lines. The chapter concludes by considering how social tenants internalise domicide, understanding themselves as undeserving of home.
Often portrayed as an apolitical space, this book demonstrates that home is in fact a highly political concept, with a range of groups in society excluded from a ‘right to home’ under current UK policies.
Drawing on resident interviews and analysis of political and media attitudes across three case studies – the criminalisation of squatting, the bedroom tax, and family homelessness – it explores the ways in which legislative and policy changes dismantle people’s rights to secure, decent and affordable housing by framing them as undeserving. The book includes practical lessons for housing academics, activists and policymakers.
The chapter concludes by examining the continued legacy of austerity in Britain today. It goes on to outline the academic and policy contributions of the book. It then provides an update on the three case studies. Finally, I argue that we have moved beyond the point of a housing crisis, to a new normal where the decimation of working-class people’s rights to homes goes largely unchallenged. The book ends with a call to reorient our understandings of the home as an essential part of human wellbeing and happiness, and fight for a right to home for all.
Chapter 4 explores the impact of the criminalisation of squatting (section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012) in England and Wales. I begin by providing an overview of squatting culture in London since the mid-twentieth century, including how anti-squatting sentiment became established as emphasis on the importance of property ownership grew. The chapter then outlines the events that led to the introduction of section 144. I go on to explore squatters’ experiences of the increasing regularity of forced eviction. The next part of the chapter examines the impact of section 144 on squatters’ mental health and wellbeing. I then look at how squatters are increasingly forced to justify their existence, for example as political and environmental activists, and how this further detaches the practice of squatting from one of homemaking. The chapter concludes by exploring the phenomenon of ‘property guardianships’, firms that rent out empty properties on behalf of landlords to ‘guardians’ to protect buildings from squatters, while at the same time appropriating squatter lifestyles. I argue that this practice signifies the ways in which squatting is simultaneously being erased and resurrected in a profitable capitalist format.
Chapter 5 turns to consider how political attacks on home over the past decade have been resisted and challenged in a variety of ways. The chapter begins by exploring how activists have used legal frameworks to fight back against domicidal housing policies, for example social tenants taking the government to court over the discriminatory nature of the bedroom tax. The chapter then turns to more micro-scale ‘everyday’ forms of resistance, focusing on the example of a squatter crew disguising their squat as a hipster shop in order to hide in plain sight in gentrified London. I go on to examine the role of language use in resistance, particularly shifting terminology from ‘squatting’ to ‘occupation’ in order to enable a range of direct action responses to domicide. Finally, the chapter considers so-called ‘banal’ forms of resistance, exploring the ways in which homeless families work to reassert their dignity and right to home through material objects.
This chapter introduces the book by first outlining why and how I came to the topic of domicide. It goes on to clarify that while the concept of home is linked to housing, it encompasses a more expansive set of feelings and relationship to place. It then contextualises how rights to home have been decimated during an era of austerity that has come to define much of the last decade or so. In particular, the ways in which austerity has been used to legitimise an assault by British governments on working-class people’s rights to home. The introduction ends by discussing the project’s methods and providing an overview of the remainder of the book.
Chapter 1 outlines the concept of home and its political relevance. I begin by drawing on the work of feminist theorists to argue that the home is a highly political site. The chapter then turns to the interrelated concepts of stigma, precarity and domicide – the intentional destruction of home. I outline how I have extended the term to consider ‘socio-symbolic’ domicide – describing how the concept of home is manipulated and moralised to create narratives of people who are ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of it.
The chapter then traces the moralisation of home in the UK context. I focus on Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and 80s. Through a discussion of Thatcher’s housing policy, I highlight how the concept of home was re-narrativised in this period, with a focus on private homeownership as the key to a successful home life, and therefore a successful nation. I go on to examine how this fundamental ideological shift continued through subsequent governments, with a focus on how this new vision of home was utilised by David Cameron’s Coalition/Conservative governments in the context of austerity. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the continued usage of the home as a political tool.
Chapter 3 shifts focus to the private rented sector and growing policy emphasis on temporary accommodation provision. I begin by highlighting the increased prevalence of private renting. I look at how precarity is built into the private sector through a lack of regulation. The chapter highlights how this is a perfect storm in an era of austerity, where rising rents coupled with falling incomes have increased evictions and subsequently homelessness. I explore the impact of this on London families. The second part of the chapter turns to look at local and national approaches to addressing these issues through purpose-built temporary accommodation. I do so through an in-depth discussion of PLACE/Ladywell, a ‘pop-up’ temporary accommodation scheme in south London. I outline its successes, as well as concerns regarding the long-term benefits of the scheme. The chapter concludes with a discussion of increasingly pernicious forms of temporary accommodation provision. I caution against overemphasis of temporary accommodation policy as a homelessness solution – even those that are high quality. I argue that focus on purpose-built temporary accommodation, even if well-intentioned, ultimately further normalises working-class and low-income people as undeserving of secure homes.
In this chapter I make the case for the importance and significance of social class to the lives of public housing tenants. Class may well provide homologous conditions and solidarity, but it is also the great divider of society into those who work and those who benefit from those who work. The Bridgetown Estate is a microcosm of class in Ireland. Class originates and is sustained in relations between groups, much more than it is something based on static positions. I argue in this chapter that class is both materially and morally significant to the lives of the people of the Bridgetown Estate. The class system produces scarcity, lack, and inequality because the material production of the society is tethered to a profit-seeking capitalist model. There is therefore a strong connection between the ontology of the estate and the frameworks and epistemologies that are used to explain why things are the way they are. My argument is that estates such as the Bridgetown Estate are effectively vehicles and containers for class relations and class processes and that this understanding leads to a very different form of explanatory critique than one based on the deprivation–disadvantage paradigm.
This final chapter brings the reader back to the place that is the Bridgetown Estate and explores the relationship of the estate to the broader city, while returning at the end of the chapter to the phenomenology of place. The Bridgetown Estate was a product of an emerging ‘modern’ Ireland along with many other similar estates in the city. But, as well as being a local place for people to live in, the estate has always been connected to the city economically and culturally. The chapter makes a connection between class history and class geography and shows how the two are intimately connected. The city is a class text of buildings and streets, but too often we don’t read it properly or don’t know how to read it properly. The ‘production of space’, as Henri Lefebvre defines, it is closely related to processes that reflect the capitalist nature of the societies we live in. The landscape is organised according to capitalist principles of power and planning. The Bridgetown Estate reflects such processes in its constitution, conception and sheer physicality on the landscape. It is a class object located within a class geography.
