Stay home: Reflections on the meaning of home and the Covid-19 pandemic

Rarely has the importance of home to each and every one of us been so clearly demonstrated. The Covid-19 emergency has shed light on the many ways in which home is a fundamental part of being human, an all too often taken for granted resource which forms the foundation of how we live. The ubiquitous injunction to ‘stay home’ carries with it an implicit understanding that this is the one place we can retreat to for some semblance of safety, a place where we can control who comes and goes and so fully practice social distancing.

This is particularly clear in relation to private renters. The emergency had only just hit, and almost instantly the spotlight fell on the potential for mass rent arrears and evictions. The sectors of the economy hit fastest and hardest are those in which young people, migrants and low-income households dominate. These groups are massively over-represented in the private rental sector. Moreover, insecurity is baked into the DNA of the rental sector, which means tenants are exposed to any major social or economic shocks.

Thankfully, the Irish government has been quick to respond. The new legislation, which came into effect on 27th March, establishes a moratorium on evictions and rent increases. Landlords will not be able to issue notices of termination during the ‘emergency period’, which lasts until 27th June (but can be extended thereafter by Government order). If done right, this will keep tenants from the doomsday scenario of trying to move house or becoming homeless during a pandemic. Underlying this immediate policy response is of course a recognition of the contradiction between a potential impending wave of evictions and the necessity of social distancing. We cannot practice social distancing without a home, and so our new found interest in social distancing tells us something essential about the very meaning of home.

Humans are social animals. We need each other to survive, quite literally. Our material economic and social reproduction is dependent on networks of relations in which we come together to work and trade. Our cultural reproduction–how we represent ourselves and the world in ways that form bonds between us an enable coordinated, collective action–also depends on social interaction, as does, of course, educating our children, in the broadest sense. And besides anything else, we seem to get bored pretty quickly without interacting with others. Viruses know this, and Covid-19 is no exception. Viruses have developed to exploit this fact, thriving on our need and desire to come into contact with one another. No doubt all of us recall how difficult it was those first few days to encounter friends and family and not shake their hand or embrace them.

But humans have another, altogether different side. No other animal forms such intense and widespread social relations, and yet humans also need to retreat from those relations. Spending time with other people is exhausting and can be stressful. It takes work, and a certain amount of performance, as sociologists have long emphasised. The space to which we retreat to escape from our own social nature is home (Handel, 2019). This is what Heidegger (1951) captures with his concept of dwelling. To dwell, he reminds us in his essay Building Dwelling Thinking, is more than merely to take shelter. To dwell is also ‘to cherish and protect, to preserve and to care for’. It is to create a sanctuary from our own inherent sociality.

As someone who researches housing, it has always struck me as paradoxical that human beings, perhaps the most intensely social of all animals, construct special spaces–usually residential buildings–within which to carry out this activity of dwelling. These buildings become our homes. They are places we control access to. They are private spaces, unopen to the public. We only let certain people into our homes. To have a stranger enter our home without our permission is one of the most threatening things a human can experience, despite the fact that we encounter strangers every day in every other type of place. Even having the people we love as house guests becomes difficult after a relatively short period; we have all experienced that sense of relief as a family member or friend’s car pulls out of the driveway and we wave them goodbye.

We control the boundaries of home, and we also exercise much more control over our homes and the organisations of objects and activities in our homes than in any other space. We arrange our things as we like them, we design them and make aesthetic choices which make them feel homely (Blunt & Dowling, 2006; van Lanen, 2020). We make them comfortable–places of comfort.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens captured much of this with the concept of ‘ontological security’, a sense of the reliability of places and things over time, a kind of fundamental regularity in the world which gives us a sense of the possibility to act, to anticipate, to shape the world and, to some extent, our future (see Easthope, 2004). Home is the paradigmatic site of ontological security: the regularity of its structures, the fact that we organise our possessions and resources there, the fact that we know where our stuff is (except out car keys) and the intensely routinised way we behave in our home, all speak to this.

The sense of safety and security tied up with home is also linked to the important work that happens in the home: the work of social reproduction, or care work (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Feeding ourselves and our family, cleaning, resting, these all take place primarily in the home. When we are sick, most of us would hope to be in our own beds, at home.

Most importantly, all of these homely qualities make us feel safe. And they do so specifically by allowing us to retreat from the social world, or, in the terminology of the post-coronavirus world, to socially distance.

For all these reasons, home is fundamental to being human. Returning to Heidegger, ‘to be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal, it means to dwell’. As a place which allows us to retreat into safety, to care for ourselves and to take refuge from the social, it a resource without which we cannot socially distance, because the creation of home is, fundamentally, the quintessential act of social distancing.

The strange atmosphere that seems to pervade everything during this pandemic, might be described as uncanny, a concept associated with Freud and which in the original German is rendered as unheimlich, or ‘unhomely’. The unhomely, as Freud (2003) suggests in the first part of his essay The Uncanny, is the opposite of the heimlich, understood as ‘friendly, intimate, homelike; the enjoyment of quite content, arousing a sense of peacefulness and security’. It is something which makes us experience unease, eeriness and a sense of creeping horror. Freud also notes that the uncanny is different to the simply scary, as it is often things that are in some sense familiar in which we encounter the uncanny. It’s hard not to think here of the experience of going to my local Tesco in the early days of the pandemic, where everything was the same as always and yet eerily different, characterised by an imperceptible tension as shoppers tried to navigate the aisles without breaching the two metres distance. And perhaps it was the very normality of crowds heading to the seaside on one of the first sunny days of Spring that made images of packed beaches so unsettling. Covid-19 is, after all, in some respects similar to the flu; something we are all familiar with, and yet something so very different to anything we have experienced before. Against this unhomeliness, we stay home.

For many, the qualities of homeliness are taken for granted. For ‘generation rent’, however, the true preciousness of home is present in much more everyday ways, because for renters ‘homely qualities’ cannot be taken for granted; every day can be a battle to preserve them (Easthope, 2014). Most obviously, in most jurisdictions (Northern European and Scandinavian countries being the main exceptions), the security of tenure enjoyed by renters is infinitely inferior, especially when compared with homeowners. We do not have precise data on the level of evictions in Ireland. But we do know that losing a home in the rental sector is, by a large margin, the leading cause of homessleness (Gambi et al., 2018). More than half of tenants remain for less than three years in their home (Byrne, 2018), and a recent survey shows that a third of those looking for rental properties were doing so because they had been evicted from their home (Frank, 2019).

But evictions are just the most tangible instance of the precarity of renting. Life in the rental sector undermines dwelling, the creation of home, in many other ways. Many tenants are subject to all sorts of injunctions, prohibitions and petty controls, for example not being able to own a pet, paint the walls or, in some cases, have guests (Soaita & McKee, 2019).

In many instances, tenants house share, often with strangers. In this case, all of the challenges of social relations are incorporated within the home: having to ‘deal with’ other people, manage conflicts, take collective decisions, etc. All of the things home is supposed to enable us to retreat from. In shared houses, tenants often retreat to their bedroom, as the one space they can feel fully at ease, at home.

Tenants, of course, will typically attempt to construct a sense of home in spite of their limited control over continuing access to, and control over, their dwelling. But in contrast to other tenures, they do so always in the context of a social relationship with their landlord, a relationship which is also necessarily a power relation (Chisholm et al., 2020; Lister, 2004). Another individual (or a company) ultimately exercises power over the home tenants create, including the power to take it away (Madden & Marcuse, 2016). Tenants typically learn to ‘manage’ their landlord, just like workers learn to manage their employers. They learn how to communicate without generating conflict, learn what rubs her or him up the wrong way, the right moment to request that repair (Lister, 2005). They do so because they know that their ongoing access to their home is dependent on their social relationship with their landlord.

Renting, at least in those countries where protections for renters are weak, can never really be a sanctuary, a retreat, a safe haven. It remains a space which is permeated by social and power relations, a space where feelings of control and security are undermined, where ontological security is always incomplete.

All of this will be familiar to renters. But the Covid-19 emergency sheds new light on it. Without a home, there can be no social distancing. For those who are evicted, or for those forced to share, there can be no social distancing. Perhaps, when all this is over, there will be greater recognition of the fact that home is something we all need when we need to retreat from the social world–to feel safe and to protect ourselves–and when we need distance from the social.