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).
