Commentary
A house is not a home: housing disadvantage, homelessness, and modern slavery
, , , , ,Abstract
This commentary focuses on the underexplored links between housing disadvantage, homelessness, and modern slavery. Despite significant anecdotal evidence, there is a pressing need for proper theorisation of the connections between housing situation and vulnerability to modern slavery. This commentary combats this lacuna by focusing on four types of (un)housing: homelessness, safehouses, social housing, and the private rented sector. While each site has its own relationship to modern slavery, be it cause, consequence, or potential solution, commonalities emerge. Modern slavery is a form of ‘hyper-precarity’, and the ‘ontological security’ of a place to call home is crucial when combatting this. But a house is not a home, and security of tenure alone is insufficient – in fact in some cases tenure security can actually increase vulnerability to modern slavery. A sense of home can act as a bulwark against modern slavery, but poor housing and bad policies increase precarity, homelessness, and exploitation.
Keywords
Modern slaveryhomelessnesssocial housingsafehouseshousing crisisCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2023. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Clare with Iafrati, Reeson, Wright, Gray, Baptiste (2023), ‘A house is not a home: housing disadvantage, homelessness, and modern slavery’, Journal of the British Academy, 11: 083 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/011.083No Data Found
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Many of the UK’s current economic and social problems, including its housing affordability crisis, can be traced to decades of land and housing policy failures. The role of land markets is strongly dependent on institutions, including land use regulation, financial regulation and property taxation. Transformative but deleterious changes to the institutional framework in the 1980s, that have persisted until recently, have resulted in high and volatile land prices (with several booms and busts in credit and house prices). The associated speculation diverted financial flows from more productive investment, damaging growth and competitiveness, and increasing financial instability risks. Policy remedies require a holistic package. This includes planning reform, land-value capture, expanding the social housing stock and reforming a dysfunctional property tax system.
British housing systems seem trapped in a ‘perfect storm’ of rising costs, declining choice, affordability stress, and unmet need. Housing outcomes are increasingly polarised, with implications for intergenerational conflict, economic and social inequalities, and environmental sustainability. There is no easy explanation, and no quick fix. These six short reflections, shared during an interdisciplinary meeting of Fellows of the British Academy, on the origins, impacts, and future of the present housing `crisis' are thus timely provocations adding momentum to key debates. This article accompanies another in this issue, ‘The UK housing emergency: personal reflections’, by Shani Dhanda, Susan J. Smith, and Jessie Speer.
