What does it mean to truly decommodify housing? Can the home be a place that not only meets our most basic needs, but a site of our own flourishing and wider societal transformation? Feeling at Home by Alva Gotby interrogates the politics of homes, asking us to grapple with practical questions about the capitalist and patriarchal confines which constitute our homes. 

The material harms of housing under capitalism are well parsed: the urgent stress of evictions, the ill health caused by mould and damp, the longer-term legacies of serial insecurity. Even the most committed capitalist ideologues (or, not entirely separately, Starmer’s Labour) will now admit that something has gone wrong with housing. The Renters’ Rights Bill, becoming law this year, is part of that response, where these consequences become a rather embarrassing miscalculation of the natural laws of supply and demand. To solve this crisis is the columnist’s cry that we must simply build more homes. 

The tenants’ movement has made considerable gains in undermining the ideology of the free market, through notable wins of rent controls, demolition resistance, and community buyouts. But Gotby argues the movement must not concede our hopes for better housing to a reductive economism. Instead, in the tenants’ movement, we must actively challenge how our homes reproduce the systems of oppression which very much form part of the housing crisis. 

Composed of a number of short essays which cover topics ranging from feminism, social reproduction, the rentier subject, the ideology of homeownership, and family abolitionism, Gotby’s precision in addressing both the material harms and production of ruling ideology through a crisis-by-design housing system are a much needed intervention in current housing discourse. For Gotby, building more homes — even building more council homes — will fail to meaningfully end the exploitative nature of housing, and the harmful politics of our homes extends far beyond the extortionate rent we pay.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t; the scale of the crisis means we must. But to make this argument without any interrogation into the history of council housing — who builds it, why it is built — is to perpetuate the myth of the benevolent capitalist state: that is, the belief the state has historically intervened to provide good quality homes for the masses. This denies the organised wins of the working class who have forced the state into enacting better housing policies, and also rests on the assumption of council housing being innately free of harm. 

The actual history of council housing, as Gotby writes, is messier. Allocation policies and practices have sought to fracture the working class by only providing housing to those the state deems deserving (the white, heterosexual, employed working class), thus excluding migrants, the unemployed, and other minority groups. Today, social and council housing, while still not-for-profit in name, increasingly serves to create profit for lenders through a rise in consolidations, private finance deals, and arms-length management organisations. 

Council housing under capitalism has never met the needs of everyone. It never sought to. At a time where the UK has just witnessed racist pogroms, and with the media and ruling class perpetrating the fascist logic of immigrants ‘stealing homes’, making demands of a return to post-war style council housing era by adopting a homogenised and mythologised view of council housing is strategically misinformed, and at worst dangerous. The tenants’ movement, if it is indeed one that is committed to being anti-racist, feminist, anti-ableist, must make demands on how we live our everyday lives of equal importance as to where. 

For the tenants’ movement, finding balance between the immediacy of the need for safety and improvement to our material conditions and the space to imagine a housing system no longer bound by the logic of commodification means that for many, the latter seems utopian in practice. It is these radical hopes Gotby wants us to not only aspire to, but enact in our day-to-day organising. 

Understanding how space is deliberately constructed to discourage and break community is essential for those of us organising around it. It would have been interesting to have seen Gotby further explore this. The privatisation of space, alongside atomisation in the workplace and education and growing individualist social expectations, interact to not only structure our feelings but produce feelings, particularly anxiety and fear, to discipline us and erode our communities. Ultimately, Gotby’s determination to show that ideology is both produced and suffused within our homes is essential in beginning to answer the housing question. 

Feeling is the central focus in the final chapter, which offers a moment of serious reflection for the tenants’ movement. Emotional form, both in the personal and organisational sense,  are an ‘inherent part of political life.’ For Gotby, feeling is a necessary part of organising. ‘Seeing feeling as a skill, and therefore also as something that can be learnt, is a way of undoing some of these gendered divisions of labour,’ writes Gotby. It becomes the responsibility of men to train themselves in being attentive to the emotional needs of others.

If we are to make serious feminist demands in our organising — and not simply out of want, but out of necessity — we have to be feminist in practice, too. That is, our own movement needs to actively challenge the gendered labour that takes place in our own organisations. The tenants’ movement is arguably most suited to being to make the radical demands of truly communal housing, socialised care, and collective flourishing. Yet, failing to be feminist in our practice leaves few differences between us and the well-known failings of the wider labour movement. Gotby therefore urges us to see both reflection and accountability, of both individuals and organisations, as serious commitments of the housing movement. 

Gotby’s book is a welcome and much-needed intervention in our understanding of rentier capitalism and how it shapes our everyday lives and assumptions. Feeling At Home reminds us what we must keep fighting for.