The Housing Crisis Showed Me that Privacy is a Privilege
We accord special status to homes on the basis that they are quintessentially private. We’ve taken for granted that people have housing that affords them a measure of privacy and control.
I am working on a project to interview people about how housing is impacting their lives. But I need to acknowledge something: My interviews are by no means a representative sample. They are drawn from people in my network who are comfortable talking about something quintessentially private: their family’s home. Not everyone is comfortable sharing something so personal with the world. A few years ago, I probably would not have been either. What changed? The housing I would like to live in became unaffordable.
We’ve long accorded special legal and social status to homes based in part on the assumption that they are uniquely private spaces. As Kate Wagner has written insightfully about at Curbed, we are trained by the housing and remodeling industries to see our homes as reflections of ourselves and our tastes. Houses are intertwined with identity. But in so doing, we’ve taken for granted that people have stable housing that affords them a measure of privacy and control. For many, the reality of home is neither private nor stable, and the sentimental notions we associate with home are not possibilities.
I’m privileged. I have a house in one of America’s greatest places to live: Boulder, Colorado. But my struggle to afford that house — a house that in many ways does not fit my needs but was an acceptable choice amongst limited options — got rid of most sentimental attachments I had about housing. It’s given me a small glimpse of what it is to feel that your house is less part of your identity than a compromise and cold calculus that you hope enables your life more than it hinders it.
Living in a city engulfed in a housing affordability crisis (even though I occupy a privileged position within it), changed the conversations I have about housing. People don’t talk about the weather. They talk about housing. It is the common frustration and problem we are trying to solve. What we pay for our housing is no longer private. Zillow and similar websites have made costs (and even home interiors) transparent. Housing is a political issue, and local elections turn on whether and where to build it. Housing no longer feels private. In fact, it’s the very idea that housing and land should remain weighted towards control by private parties that is under pressure.
Thinking of home as a private matter and reflective of me personally was a luxury of housing choice and availability, as anyone who has faced limited, unstable or public housing could have told me. So now I am willing to talk about what my housing means to me.
