My earliest memories of home are of saying goodbye. They are of moving at someone else’s request, picking up, packing up and driving away. Sometimes it was because of “regeneration” projects, demolitions or old-fashioned evictions. When I got older, the precarity of early childhood moves stayed with me, as I found home between the cracks of the housing crisis.
I have lived in a lot of different places – more than 25 by the time I was 30. I’ve lived over a car showroom, in student halls and cramped rooms with my family in other people’s houses. I’ve made my home on floors, in temporary accommodation, in a cottage in the countryside and above a Snappy Snaps shop.
As a result, I have often wondered about how we make home. Sometimes it is an interior detail, a pastel throw. Sometimes it is a postcode you remember then forget, then remember again at 3am, lying awake and wondering how everything has changed except the cracks in the ceiling.
The first address I learned was thanks to the labour of my mum. I went over it again and again, the way a child does, letting the words curl in my mouth, creating muscle memory, so if I ever got lost, I could find my way home again: W13 OSB.
This was in 1993, when my mum, my brother and I finally settled into a third-floor flat on the Green Man Lane estate in West Ealing. The exterior walls were coated in grey concrete and scratchy pebbledash. On hot days, the sun would create blurry heat lines rising from the ground, making the whole estate look like a mirage.
At seven, I was mesmerised by the small, jagged shards of the pebbledash glistening in the sun like geodes of amber and obsidian. I would imagine the building as a pulsing vessel for spiritual energy. In reality, pebbledash is a composite of limestone, sometimes mixed with sand and gravel, that is “dashed” on to external walls. It has been used in Britain since the 1890s as an insulation cladding, but mostly it is used to hide shoddy brickwork and has become an aesthetic tied to council housing. It is now so unfashionable that it can reduce the value of a property by up to 5%. While I was searching for meaning in crystal gravel, I was unaware that pebbledash conceals negligence.
It is hard to extract tender memories from my estate, which faced so many years of neglect, and as I write is boarded up, sealed and prepped for demolition. The Green Man Lane estate was built in 1977 and was one of many postwar social housing experiments, representing a time when there was a push for increased social housing in Britain.
This idea didn’t always work in practice. Almost immediately, social housing became a site of derision and neglect. One of the reasons for this is the Conservative party’s right-to-buy policy, introduced in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Housing Act, which allowed tenants in council housing the opportunity to buy their homes, with state subsidies. This privatisation of housing stock played a big part in the current crisis by creating a huge deficit of social housing, after so much was sold off and never replaced. In 2020, just 6,644 social homes were built in England, but 28,796 were lost to sales and demolitions. According to Shelter, in England, there are now 1.4m fewer households in social housing than there were in 1980.
The housing crisis we find ourselves in hollows out many communities like the Green Man Lane estate. After we left the estate, those early lessons in negligence and housing precarity followed me. I would have to memorise a postcode many, many more times in my life.
When I was 15, my family moved to a flat above a car showroom in Wales named after an invisible owner: WR Davies. The flat was framed by huge, wall-sized windows that let in oceans of light and made us – a brown family in a small Welsh town (population: 5,948) – even more exposed. We lived on the top floor, with the active showroom downstairs, and our flat had a large living room, a small bathroom and a concrete stairwell leading up to the kitchen. It felt like an extension built for use by workers that the landlord had hastily made into a flat, and we shared it with exposed wires and copper pipes. Now and again, the smell of Turtle Wax and CarPlan Triplewax car shampoo would fill the living room from below.
At WR Davies, at least light was not in short supply. The windows might even be likened to Le Corbusier’s “ribbon window” concept – a series of windows set side by side to form a continuous horizontal band. In his five-point plan for optimum architecture, the pioneering modernist architect posited that windows should run the entire length of the house, so all rooms can get equal light. Although he wasn’t exactly advocating car showrooms for all, it’s worth mentioning, because natural light is not guaranteed in homes, thanks to planning loopholes that have allowed developers to build flats without windows.
The month we moved in, my mum painstakingly sewed and hung up cheap, white net curtains with exquisite patterns of swirling tulips, to combat our visibility. She sewed for weeks, making them out of reams of polyester fabric. The curtains, gossamer-like, covered the 8ft-high sealed windows, dropping down to the floor. One of my jobs was to wash them once a fortnight: pure hell.
That flat was one of the many instances in this country of people living in places not designed to be lived in. It might be the Home Office housing migrants in the Napier barracks in Kent, local councils offering shipping containers to house homeless people, renters in “property guardianships” (where they live in empty premises, such as office buildings), houses in multiple occupation (where more than one household shares a single property), or just bed-in-a-shed-type accommodation options. Millions of people are living in unfit housing, trying to make the best out of impossible conditions, one net curtain at a time.
After a year, my family were kicked out of WR Davies to make way for a more profitable enterprise. I wondered what could replace my teen memories of UK garage music and washing Victorian-inspired curtains. Today it is a petrol station.
By the time I became a renter myself, in my 20s, I was feeling the impact of the changes in the housing landscape first-hand: negligent social housing policy, unregulated private landlords and developers, and severe undersupply of housing stock. In 2010, I huffed mould in a poky room in New Cross, south London, and joined the 3% of households in England who have damp in at least one room. I became obsessed with the creeping black patch rising up the wall. When I rolled over at night, my arm would brush against the cold, wet mould and I’d flinch.
The mould made my chest tighten and the smell of it would follow me out of the flat. I wrote long complaints to my landlord, each email getting more desperate, riddled with spelling mistakes as my fingers shook with rage. I guess that only made me easier to ignore. He suggested that I stop drying clothes in the house.
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Millennials are half as likely to own a home at the age of 30 as baby boomers were, thanks to higher prices and low earnings growth. In the 1980s, it would have taken a typical couple in their late 20s about three years to save for an average-sized deposit. Today, it would take 19. Renters are getting older, too, with a 239% increase in 55- to 64-year-olds looking for house shares between 2011 and 2022.
Marginalised groups such as working-class immigrants, transgender people and single mothers must deal with discrimination. And landlords can outsource the labour of finding new tenants to existing tenants, in a process known as “churning”.
As a serial renter, I had to endure months of housemate auditions, sitting in strangers’ kitchens and expected to perform an optimised version of myself. Sometimes there were group interviews, all of us shuffling in together like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment, where the most brazen among us made loud jokes. Some candidates had the genius sales gene and discussed things that were mainstream enough to elicit positive reaction: usually The Wire.
Prospective housemates asked me whether I liked Coldplay or Pedro Almodóvar films to decipher whether I was a worthy candidate. At one viewing at a housing co-op, I was told that everyone did one big shop on a Sunday, group dinners were mandatory, and there had to be a liberal approach to drug use – gesturing to the fluorescent green bong in the living room and (numerous) copies of Mr Nice on the shelf. Sure enough, after I looked at the (admittedly spacious) room, I was asked one last, hopeful question: “So, do you take acid?”
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There are obvious policies that we should urgently demand from the government: enforcing the (bare minimum) 35% genuinely affordable housing target set for new developments by London mayor Sadiq Khan, advocating for landlord registers that enforce codes of conduct and discourage illegal operators, banning no-fault evictions, raising the standard of all new social housing, securing a “right to return” for all residents living in estates undergoing regeneration schemes, and providing rent caps across the social and private sectors.
But we should also look for answers beyond government to how we dig ourselves out of this quagmire. The state might provide social housing, but it does not grant freedom from inequality. Policy may be a starting point for change, but it is a place rather than the place to focus our attention. We could focus on community solutions, such as joining tenants’ unions or simply teaching young people about housing admin. We should invite radical housing design solutions, through collectives such as Decolonise Architecture, the DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and initiatives ensuring our homes can commit to green targets as we face down the climate emergency.
Housing precarity is relentless disruption. But it has led me to new questions about home. I have lived somewhere and nowhere and everywhere. I have lived in places where I might have been turned away thanks to racist policy at other points in history. I have lived in unfit corners, places that taught me how to make, lose and love a bedroom. I have learned that as we advocate for something better, it is comforting to focus on the joys.
As I feel momentarily settled, I am reminded that the house I currently live in is at the mercy of my employment and the market economy, and that security, in the chronic conditions of a crisis that infects everything, is not a given. I continue to let myself dream. I remember that housing is a right, but feels like a luxury; and that home is political, transformative and something worth fighting for.
All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates is published by Simon & Schuster (£14.99) on 27 April
