Download - SHARED LIVING: A LIFECOURSE PERSPECTIVE
SHARED LIVING: A LIFECOURSE PERSPECTIVE
Sue HeathHSA Annual Conference 2014
The Value of HousingWorkshop 2b: Home not housing
Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives
Shared living in contextHousehold type, England, 2011
Couple (with or w/o children), no other adultsCouple (with or w/o chil-dren) with 1 or more other adults
Lone parent, with or w/o other adults
'Other' multi-adult household
Lone person
30.742.8
7.411.47.7
Source: DCLG 2013 Household Interim Projections 2011-2021, April 2013
Shared households = a subset of each of these 3 categories
Shared living in context• In the UK, shared households are most often
associated with younger people – In 2011, 15% of men and 9% of women aged 20 to
34 lived in shared housing: 1.5 million people
• In 2007, at least 212,000 people lived as lodgers in 172,000 households– believed to have increased hugely post-2008, with
changing profile of lodgers and landlords
Growing interest in forms of ‘ageing in place’ based on sharing, eg homeshares, senior cohousing
‘Intentional’ sharing: the rich hinterland
The policy context • Increasing housing costs• Extension of shared accommodation
rate to 35• Rent a room scheme• Bedroom tax• Broader debates re ‘under-occupation’• And yet… we know very little about
shared living arrangements in the UK
‘Under the same roof: the everyday relational practices of contemporary communal living’
• Our aim: to illuminate the possibilities and limits of different forms of communal living, and to advance understandings of living arrangements involving non-kin across the lifecourse
• Four contexts : private lodgings, shared households, small housing co-ops, and cohousing
• Four facets: economic, spatial, temporal, ideological• How do these facets variously interact to generate
context-specific ‘relational practices’ and with what consequences for the quality of shared living?
Research design
• 80 qualitative interviews with sharers (some as individuals, some collectively)
• Sub-sample of participants completing either an object inventory/photo elicitation exercise or a time-use/network diary
• 22 interviews completed so far, involving 32 individuals.
• To date, predominantly older sharers (ie 35+) and female
Housing pathways• ‘Patterns of interaction (practices) concerning house
and home, over time and space’ (Clapham, 2005:27)• ‘The continually changing set of relationships and
interactions that (a household) experiences over time in its consumption of housing’ (ibid: 27)
• ‘Changes in households can involve a different set of social practices as well as the more widely recognised physical changes’ (ibid:29)
• Particularly apt in case of shared households and the ‘linked lives’ within them
• Individuals v households as central unit of analysis
Shared housing pathwaysEpisodic sharers Serial sharers
Constraint
Choice
• Affordable housing (for now, but not for ever)
• Mutually beneficial arrangement (eg as a response to bedroom tax)
• ‘Living in community’: the right thing right now
• Meeting the need for support in old age
• Affordable housing over the long term
• Affordable and compatible with personal values
• Lodgers defray living costs• Sharing for company (also
cheaper than living alone, but not main factor)
• Commitment to ’living together’/‘this way of living’
• Likes having lodgers• Cohousing ethos
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/morgancentre/our-research/home-and-housing/shared-housing//
Thank you!