All The Houses I've Ever Lived In: Finding Home in a System that Fails Us

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A powerful, personal and intricate tour of our housing system ... exposing who it works for and who it doesn't' -- Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is at once a rallying cry for change, a gorgeous coming-of-age story and a love letter to home in all its forms.

Maybe, maybe not. But Yates has me well beaten. By the age of 25, she’d lived in 20 different houses across the country. There’s the childhood flat in a car showroom that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Then there are housemate auditions in her 20s that enable tenants to discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexuality – reproducing some of the systemic disparities of our society. By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales.

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Kieran Yates: London has a large population plus a huge disparity of wealth and access to open space, so I can see how it is easily used as a framework to think about these things. But this is a conversation that is national – even global. I’m somebody who understands that because I’ve lived in lots of different places around the UK outside of the cities. There’s no way that you can talk about gentrification in our cities – whether that’s Manchester or Birmingham or London – without talking about rural gentrification too, and thinking about the impact of second homes or Airbnbs on smaller local economies. All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In is at once a rallying cry for change, a gorgeous coming-of-age story and a love letter to home in all its forms. All the Houses I've Ever Lived In is at once a rallying cry for change and a love letter to home in all its forms.

Rent strikes are controversial but guess what, people win,” she says. “And bailiff resistance is controversial, but guess what, people win. And confronting an estate agent or a racist landlord is very precarious work, but guess what, people win.” As a result, I’d expected cooler-than-thou tenants to be occupying our old rooms and, indeed, they were two interesting musicians, living with their three-year-old son. Six months earlier, however, they’d all been made homeless, only relocated here after a spell 10 miles further away, in Ilford, far away from their family and friends. Six years later we sold our first house for more than two-and-half times what we paid A moving and urgent expose of the housing crisis' -- Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project As a serial renter, I had to endure months of housemate auditions, sitting in strangers’ kitchens and expected to perform an optimised version of myself. Sometimes there were group interviews, all of us shuffling in together like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment, where the most brazen among us made loud jokes. Some candidates had the genius sales gene and discussed things that were mainstream enough to elicit positive reaction: usually The Wire.

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That voice from the floor reminds us all where we’re living. Brighton and Hove differs only in degree in a nation where, as Grenfell made obscenely clear, property policy can be criminally callous. This could have been just another piece of investigative journalism, citing the many ways in which the housing system here in the UK fails, but in fact Kieran Yates gives us a fascinating insight into her own personal experience of the system that let her, and her family down on numerous occasions. In the book you touch upon how housing ownership has become an unattainable dream for most. Do you think we should put effort towards making it a possible reality, or invest in alternative modes of housing and living?

Marginalised groups such as working-class immigrants, transgender people and single mothers must deal with discrimination. And landlords can outsource the labour of finding new tenants to existing tenants, in a process known as “churning”. I had to endure months of housemate auditions. Sometimes there were group interviews like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment Yates writes with clarity, warmth and passion and leaves the reader wanting to march on Whitehall immediately' A beautiful exposition of home and what it means. Yates infuses such gentle care and humanity into the exploration of race, the failings of society and government ... Stunning' -- Bolu Babalola, author of 'Love in Colour'Millennials are half as likely to own a home at the age of 30 as baby boomers were, thanks to higher prices and low earnings growth. In the 1980s, it would have taken a typical couple in their late 20s about three years to save for an average-sized deposit. Today, it would take 19. Renters are getting older, too, with a 239% increase in 55- to 64-year-olds looking for house shares between 2011 and 2022. And when I lived in a mouldy room, I thought that was completely normal to be demonised and to be told that you should just open a window. As humans, we project who we are through our homes. When this connection becomes hard to locate, our identities drift away from their foundations. In The Making of Home, Flanders writes how “we believe instinctively that ‘home’ is a concrete thing, unchanging through time in its essentials”. Our old garden had been sold, too, and another house built on the land. Kids didn’t play on the roundabout any more, either, the owner told me; she had a six-year-old daughter and she wouldn’t let her outside with all the speeding cars. Neither did people pop in and out of each other’s houses and we speculated about why this was. She suggested that they keep themselves to themselves because of needing to rest after long hours at work. I also thought about the easy comforts of TVs and technology that turn our homes into coops in which we hide away from the world.

Yates is a tenacious reporter and covers a great deal of ground, from the politics of interior design and soul-crushing “housemate interviews” to the discriminatory practices of landlords up and down the country. One of the strongest sections hinges on the still unfurling tragedy of Grenfell.

Summary

Creative Access book club at Simon & Schuster office! The author Kieran Yates joined us for an interview and Q&A before our wider book club discussion!