Our two main political parties have just spent 40 years creating and nurturing the housing crisis. Is it realistic to expect them now to fix it? Or are we all going to have to get into DIY? People are already coming up with their own domestic solutions. The most obvious one is that adults, young and not so young, are moving back into the family home. The insurance company Aviva estimates that by 2025 3.8 million people aged between 21 and 34 could be living with their parents (compared with 2.8 million in 2015).
What’s most surprising about this is that people don’t even seem to mind that much. Maybe it’s just that these guys know they’re luckier than many because their parents have a home large enough for them to move back into while they save for a deposit. But the survey suggested that they were finding many other advantages in multi-generational living. And this view was a lot more prevalent among those who were already doing it.
For me, moving back in with my parents would have been like bunking down in the seventh circle of hell. They didn’t believe in sex before marriage. They had the phone in the living room so that they could monitor conversations and their duration – privacy not being something the children of a family should seek to extract from their parents. They considered it to be utterly decadent to accidentally leave the bathroom light on. They didn’t like eating “foreign muck”. The vacuum cleaner was on for what seemed like eight hours a day – which may explain concerns about the electricity bill. Staying out after midnight remained, until they died, something that may be considered at New Year, fair warning given. They were socially conservative in the extreme.
But it’s not like that any more, broadly speaking. Many of the parents accommodating their children now are far more socially liberal. My parents were children of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. These parents are the children of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Intergenerational chasms aren’t so great, so it’s more easy to see advantages in communal living – extra hands to look after children or the elderly, more people to share the tasks of cooking and cleaning, doing the shopping and paying the bills, more company around the house …
I have to admit that I found this train of thought disturbing. Good things coming from the housing crisis? Anathema! Luckily my nephew, Jack Self, was on hand to disabuse me. He’s a writer and architect, deeply engaged with trying to think through the implications of the housing crisis on how people will live in the near future. He points out that it’s precisely because people were able to stop living with their parents, thanks to the postwar welfare state, that our society was able to liberalise. A society in which there isn’t much intergenerational autonomy can’t help being socially conservative, repressed and repressive. Which doesn’t sound like fun.
He has put the British Council’s money where his mouth is. He’s a curator at the British pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale, which opened last week. The British contribution, Home Economics: Five New Models for Domestic Life, examines new, more flexible ways of addressing housing need. He’s written a good summary in the Architectural Review.
The five new models focus not on accommodation according to the stage in your life – such as student residences, single and couples’ flats, family homes – but on the time you intend to spend in the home. The exhibition creates a home for hours, for days, for months, for years and for decades. It’s fair to say that as the periods lengthen, the ideas become more serious.
The home for hours is a little deceptive. The idea is that many more communal items are attached to the home, so you’d rent not just a room in a house with some communal space, but many more communal items would be available too, in an extension of the sharing economy.
The home for days is a big, hollow, inflatable ball, that you could take along anywhere to hang out in while you attend to a bit of business, like a comfy tent or a literal domestic sphere.
The home for months resembles those Bloc hotels at airports – a bathroom below a bedroom in a boarding-house arrangement, so that you could have cheap accommodation in the city where you work while your main home is somewhere more affordable – a high-density version of the club in town.
The home for years is a really practical concept. It strips everything out of a home except the things that are necessary to raise a mortgage. Property developers tend to make a lot of money on fittings – kitchens, bathrooms, and the like. A home that simply has a water and gas supply, and basic equipment for personal cleanliness, is much cheaper.
The home for decades is essentially flexible – modular rooms within an apartment complex that are designed so that they can easily be extended or partitioned. Big rooms can become small rooms as the family grows; can become two homes when the family’s grown up; or three if space next to your place becomes available. Older people don’t have to move. They can simply redefine the space they’re living in, as elderly people sometimes do, informally, when they can’t manage the stairs any more, or can’t afford to keep the whole house heated, but can’t bear to lose their home.
Among the many startling facts that Jack and his colleagues have highlighted in their exhibition is that “if London had the same [population] density today as it did in 1815, it could accommodate nearly 35 million people”. London, at that time, was the largest, most diverse city in the world.
This very high population density, no doubt, was in part achieved through intense intergenerational living, but also because of economic hardship in other parts of the country creating migration to the capital. The period, of course, is also known for a good deal of social and political repression.
The parallels between the challenges faced then and now are sobering, although the consequences of economic and social inequality today play out at a considerably more global level. We’re used to economic cycles of boom and bust, and the difficulties they cause. What we need to think about now are the booms and busts in social and political development that bob along in their wake.
• This article was amended on 31 May 2016. An earlier version called the home for days, the home for hours, and called the home for months, the home for days. This has been corrected.
