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Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing
How we feel about housing is political; grasping the meaning of home is crucial to solve the housing crisis
Housing is not only about bricks and mortar; the home is where our hopes and dreams play out. Housing is at the heart of much of our lives. It is where we rest, eat, relax.
Having a home is essential for our long-term survival, as well as our day-to-day wellbeing. Without a stable place to call home, people tend to experience mental and physical health issues, and often premature death. Housing also has a central role in ideologies about what it means to live a good and dignified life.
Feeling at Home grapples with the emotional questions that surround housing, from domestic labour, privacy, ownership and health. Alva Gotby proposes a new approach for the housing movement, which is ultimately about more than just creating more publicly owned housing – it is about revolutionising our everyday lives and labours.
Housing is not only about bricks and mortar; the home is where our hopes and dreams play out. Housing is at the heart of much of our lives. It is where we rest, eat, relax.
Having a home is essential for our long-term survival, as well as our day-to-day wellbeing. Without a stable place to call home, people tend to experience mental and physical health issues, and often premature death. Housing also has a central role in ideologies about what it means to live a good and dignified life.
Feeling at Home grapples with the emotional questions that surround housing, from domestic labour, privacy, ownership and health. Alva Gotby proposes a new approach for the housing movement, which is ultimately about more than just creating more publicly owned housing – it is about revolutionising our everyday lives and labours.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published January 21, 2025
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786 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 10, 2025
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).
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).
February 20, 2025
3,75 🌟
This book has several valuable insights. However, I am less than convinced by Gotby's conclusion that the way out of the housing and reproductive crises are collective living arrangements.
This book has several valuable insights. However, I am less than convinced by Gotby's conclusion that the way out of the housing and reproductive crises are collective living arrangements.
April 5, 2025
3.25
A short read on the different ways in which we can think about housing. I think that there are some strong passages in here when Gotby elaborates on just how dire the housing situation is (esp. in the UK) as well as elaborating on ideas beyond economic determinist notions on the home and building houses.
I also really liked when Gotby talked about Alice Coleman and just how bizarre and destructive her ideas have been in terms of formulating neoliberal housing policies. Or referencing Cooper and the ways in which the mortgage represented 'normative social standards.' The way in which housing reinforces patriarchal capitalist values is something that Gotby does explore throughout. Gotby is good at articulating the ideas of other scholars and applying them within the chapters and this overall theme of transforming housing.
My criticisms of the book are that despite relying on copious amounts of data and relevant literature, Gotby falls into the utopianism of promising a lot of visions and things that we 'should' and 'could' be doing, but does not go further than that. I think that more exploration of her work in tenants unions would have been useful here, as well as considering how houses are even built and the issues with housing and the construction industry (a topic that I think is strangely neglected and would have been very insightful here). Instead, Gotby's solutions run very much in line with this sort of contemporary social reproductive feminism that promises a lot, but is still a bit shy about utilising actions beyond the local and small-scale (although some of these examples are still missing, what about co-housing such as LILAC in Leeds?)
Whilst I appreciate Gotby's criticisms of the paternalism of council housing and the concerns of romanticising Red Vienna and the welfare capitalist era of council housing in the UK. She doesn't offer more socialistic solutions aside from a very brief mention of the experiments in communal living in the early Soviet Union. Where do socialist countries, despite limited resources, fit into this when they had rent capped at 10% of a household's income such as in the GDR? What about Cuba? I think even briefly considering what socialist countries have done and are doing (including their flaws and criticisms) would have helped in considering a wider scope of this transformation. Instead, the solutions mainly revolve around utopian visions of communal living and democratically managed housing and co-ops alongside more council housing.
Overall, the data and literature are valuable and this book might help people begin considering housing beyond economic determinism. But the utopian solutions do not offer much for me.
A short read on the different ways in which we can think about housing. I think that there are some strong passages in here when Gotby elaborates on just how dire the housing situation is (esp. in the UK) as well as elaborating on ideas beyond economic determinist notions on the home and building houses.
I also really liked when Gotby talked about Alice Coleman and just how bizarre and destructive her ideas have been in terms of formulating neoliberal housing policies. Or referencing Cooper and the ways in which the mortgage represented 'normative social standards.' The way in which housing reinforces patriarchal capitalist values is something that Gotby does explore throughout. Gotby is good at articulating the ideas of other scholars and applying them within the chapters and this overall theme of transforming housing.
My criticisms of the book are that despite relying on copious amounts of data and relevant literature, Gotby falls into the utopianism of promising a lot of visions and things that we 'should' and 'could' be doing, but does not go further than that. I think that more exploration of her work in tenants unions would have been useful here, as well as considering how houses are even built and the issues with housing and the construction industry (a topic that I think is strangely neglected and would have been very insightful here). Instead, Gotby's solutions run very much in line with this sort of contemporary social reproductive feminism that promises a lot, but is still a bit shy about utilising actions beyond the local and small-scale (although some of these examples are still missing, what about co-housing such as LILAC in Leeds?)
Whilst I appreciate Gotby's criticisms of the paternalism of council housing and the concerns of romanticising Red Vienna and the welfare capitalist era of council housing in the UK. She doesn't offer more socialistic solutions aside from a very brief mention of the experiments in communal living in the early Soviet Union. Where do socialist countries, despite limited resources, fit into this when they had rent capped at 10% of a household's income such as in the GDR? What about Cuba? I think even briefly considering what socialist countries have done and are doing (including their flaws and criticisms) would have helped in considering a wider scope of this transformation. Instead, the solutions mainly revolve around utopian visions of communal living and democratically managed housing and co-ops alongside more council housing.
Overall, the data and literature are valuable and this book might help people begin considering housing beyond economic determinism. But the utopian solutions do not offer much for me.
June 17, 2025
It is a wonderful introduction to how and why housing needs to be rethought. If you are someone already exposed to the topic and into the cause, then I would skip it. I wanted to read specifics about how to facilitate communal living with population trained by bureaucracies—who have limited social negotiation skills,—or how to confront HOTA associations in a way that understands people have to keep living in the community, or generally more specific tools to use as someone that already buys the narrative.
For me, it was a bit of a redundant read, but I want to rate it based on what it is: a great pamphlet.
For me, it was a bit of a redundant read, but I want to rate it based on what it is: a great pamphlet.
Read
March 11, 2025struggles with repetition like many essay collections, but overall a fine addition- more of a UK focus, but generally applicable. To make the argument for collective housing as the solution is a hard one, and not necessarily wrong, but this is more on the "we should really do this, trust me" side than the "here's a convincing argument about how that could work out and does work in other cultures" side, which hinders the book from transcending into the "useful" category of theory rather than the "pointing out" side of theory.
December 13, 2025
3.5 stars because what did that conclusion have to do with anything
February 22, 2025
Alva gotby kiss kiss now I’m depressed
November 16, 2025
A compelling analysis of current housing policy, written with a strong focus on the emotional dimension of the problem. The layer of reflection on feelings makes this book a unique and important contribution to the discourse on housing. Alva Gotby goes beyond pointing out the flaws of current systems and presents a set of solutions – both final and intermediate ones. Although I was initially skeptical about many of them, after reading the book I am convinced.
November 27, 2025
3.75. I enjoyed large segments of Gotby’s book, without agreeing with every point that it makes. I think the strongest elements of the book are when the theoretical framework of social reproduction is brought in to analyse the contemporary crisis as housing; I still think a lot of housing literature fails to bring in this analysis despite its centrality (a centrality that Gotby makes clear).
I wish there was some more depth in parts, perhaps through more material examples. She makes big and bold arguments about rejecting a simple return to welfare state council housing that had its heyday in the 1950s - and whilst I agree with this and agree that the left need a more utopian vision, I’d have like to see more alternatives suggested and more deeply explored. Communal / collective living arrangement are an interesting option, but some more historical / contemporary examples would’ve served well (even thinking to the communal wash rooms they use in Japan, or communal laundries which used to be so prevalent in Glasgow. Or universal canteens during the war. Some more historical interrogation would’ve been good!
Final chapter on tenant union politics and the doing of feeling really resonated with me, and it made me wish Gotby had drawn more on that day to day experience of organising, and perhaps brought in more anecdote to complement some of the theory / argument of the book.
I wish there was some more depth in parts, perhaps through more material examples. She makes big and bold arguments about rejecting a simple return to welfare state council housing that had its heyday in the 1950s - and whilst I agree with this and agree that the left need a more utopian vision, I’d have like to see more alternatives suggested and more deeply explored. Communal / collective living arrangement are an interesting option, but some more historical / contemporary examples would’ve served well (even thinking to the communal wash rooms they use in Japan, or communal laundries which used to be so prevalent in Glasgow. Or universal canteens during the war. Some more historical interrogation would’ve been good!
Final chapter on tenant union politics and the doing of feeling really resonated with me, and it made me wish Gotby had drawn more on that day to day experience of organising, and perhaps brought in more anecdote to complement some of the theory / argument of the book.
April 2, 2025
If there is one minuscule, infinitesimal silver lining in the culmination of Trump’s second term, it is that cynical, sour, pretentious theory-junkies such as these are blamed - as rightly they ought to be - for his victory and for the working class’ utter dissolution. Although most schools of revolutionary thought have at this point - though absurdly tardily - realized that identitariansim is no way to win over a proletariat, still some bastions of crackpot delusion cling on; proffering some bombastic new sub-genre of identity as a cause to rally behind despite losing on all fronts to a genuine grassroots movement on their right flank. This author finds it so inconceivable that these identities are but mere spectacle that she by all admission creates identities for her non-identitarian opponents simply to be able to fight them on her home turf! If I was a retard, an average American, a Russian oligarch, a rural farmer from Bengal, a single mother, or dare I say even a Trotskyist, I would discard this book for, as her lord and savior Jughashvili once said, being simply “words on paper.”
I give it one star due to the nice statistics quoted, but even that is generous considering how flamboyantly they are butchered.
I give it one star due to the nice statistics quoted, but even that is generous considering how flamboyantly they are butchered.
September 8, 2025
This was really good, I especially liked the bit on the politics of feelings, I found it so interesting and hadn’t thought about that before. I also found the bits about communal living quite pivotal, I hadn’t thought about the desire for solo family homes being driven by capitalism.
My only gripe, and maybe this is just because a lot of the left wing literature I’ve read recently has been like this, is that sometimes I get a bit fed up of books telling me to break down the system to make change. Yes capitalism is harmful in so many ways, but sometimes I just want to read a book that tells me how we can make changes to improve people’s lives without dismantling the system. Because I work in housing policy, I have some power to look at what we work on, to make proposals to the government. But I can’t be idealistic, I can’t say ‘here’s a great idea, why don’t you try socialism’. I want feasible ideas for change that can be implemented. Yes, I want to live in a different world system, but more importantly I want to make housing work for the most people as soon as possible!
My only gripe, and maybe this is just because a lot of the left wing literature I’ve read recently has been like this, is that sometimes I get a bit fed up of books telling me to break down the system to make change. Yes capitalism is harmful in so many ways, but sometimes I just want to read a book that tells me how we can make changes to improve people’s lives without dismantling the system. Because I work in housing policy, I have some power to look at what we work on, to make proposals to the government. But I can’t be idealistic, I can’t say ‘here’s a great idea, why don’t you try socialism’. I want feasible ideas for change that can be implemented. Yes, I want to live in a different world system, but more importantly I want to make housing work for the most people as soon as possible!
March 9, 2025
Good read for housing organizers and activists to think about the more fundamental issues involved in housing people. So often we are lost in the particulars of law or economics, this book gets back to the essential questions: How do we want to house people, and how can we get there?
May 21, 2025
I enjoyed it, but I would’ve liked it even more if she had gone into more detail about her research. It feels too short for such an interesting book and topic.
July 2, 2025
Capitalist critique of the social/reproductive implications of the housing market. This was pretty dense but I liked it.
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