There is so much to say about a system that increasingly treats housing as a means to accumulate capital, never as a home. A creeping worldview that only understands the value of housing as a commodity, as something to be bought and sold, speculated in, land banked. To them, where you live is only a piece of property subject to global markets, real estate whose value is tied to location and status rather than its conditions, the wellbeing or stability of its tenants, its impact on the neighbourhood. By this system, boarded up and empty houses with front yards full of weeds are somehow worth more than deeply-loved homes that have witnessed the joy and pain of generations and yield harvests, or seasons of flowers.

a surfeit of luxury homes while everyone else crams themselves into shared flats and ever-more constrained lives

their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

What will happen now if our growing resistance does not create change? The housing policies of the Tory government will inflict ever-deeper violence of both kinds on the most vulnerable, shored up by moralising around cheap ideas of self-help and responsibility. On 24 June a Guardian headline said it all in quoting a new report from Shelter: ‘Housing Crisis Threatens a Million Families with Eviction by 2020’. There is little that is ‘new’ in this new housing crisis, just new depths to the cuts to benefits already cut to the bone, new breadth to their reach to tear away basic necessities from more and more people. We are watching a car crash in slow motion. [...]

The mass building of council houses, the removal of restrictions on councils building, regulating the private rented sector to secure tenancies, restrain rent raises and ensure adequate conditions, housing-first provision for rough sleepers, reversing benefit sanctions and caps, changing a planning framework that guarantees obscene profits to developers and so much more … the holistic nature of the proposed changes is inspiring. It undercuts the idea of housing as something to generate profits, housing as commodity.

This is the first thing that must be done. Stop the worst of the violence, clear the way to what matters.

We must start there, though, only that we aim higher, do better. That we think about how to make of housing not a commodity nor just a shelter, but a home. That we think of how that process happens, how we are able to take space and make it our own as households, and more collectively in our buildings or estates or neighbourhoods. That we take seriously how home nurtures our selves and futures. That housing associations and councils rip up the petty rules and regulations that treat their tenants as the enemy. That we look at sweat equity, self-build, cooperatives and land trusts. That we transform our unused and unloved spaces to permanent benefit to the community. That we think about how sustainability connects to the wealth of local and natural materials that could be used to retrofit and build or the integration with green space and gardens or the green jobs that could be created. That we think about how we each connect to our home and through it to a vibrant hybrid culture and to a broad and welcoming community where we can grow old gracefully while space remains for our children and their children. Ownership is not necessary for this; rather, secure tenancies and management structures granting the ability to shape our spaces according to needs and desires, to try new things, fail and try again, to build and paint and transform. It sounds utopian until you remember we are conditioned to think of housing as an asset to be managed, not a space that to support our passions and our dreams. Knitted into communities, houses should redefine sustainability and living well upon the earth. [...]

[...] These are only a handful of inspiring spatial movements I am aware of. There are so many more. All this is possible.

But we live under logic that justifies buildings boarded up, left to fall apart, investment flats built to sit empty, while crisis rages and people must choose between housing they cannot afford, housing that could kill them, and no housing at all.