Sharing Will Shelter Us
Rethinking housing strategy in the wake of the LA fires
Gone. Turned to smoke. Thousands of homes where a week ago thousands would sleep at night, would gather with those they love, whisked away in a flash.
We don’t yet know how long the situation will continue, how much pain and grief those who live in Los Angeles or those of us who have ties to the city will go through. And while there is much speculation on the matter, we also don’t yet know if this will serve as the wakeup call about the present reality of the climate crisis that many hope it will.
But I will go ahead and draw one conclusion about the current moment: I believe that the LA fires show the limit to many current strains of thinking about the housing crisis already besetting every city and town in the country. Those orthodoxies tell us there is not enough, and not enough that people can afford. In response many a planner and activist has been working to legalize higher density housing and ensure it gets built. Yet after a decade-plus of YIMBYism we still have record levels of homelessness. And now, now we know how fragile any building spree can be, how what seemed solid and secure can prove fleeting, can float up in the air and away. It's not merely the mountain towns of the West that can be undone in a moment. The extremes of wind, water, and fire are coming for the core of our cities as well.
But what if, in the heart of disaster, we are being shown a solution to our housing woes that has been hiding in plain sight all this time? The most obvious option, obscured only by the cultural blinders brought by the usual suspects—capitalism, American individualism, colonial legacies—that have told us home is something we own, not a relationship we make?
Across Los Angeles, people are suddenly living in places they didn't expect. They are in a friend’s guest room, or sleeping on a neighbor’s floor, thrust into more communal ways of coexisting than they likely did only days ago. And in finding shelter there they show us that it is not, or at least not only, a simple lack of units that prevents us from housing everyone in our communities. It gives us a moment to see how our ingrained habits against sharing, our cultural customs about the ‘appropriate’ or ‘normal’ amount of space any one individual needs or deserves, also stand in the way, along with social conventions that encourage isolation over relationship as a fundamental achievement of adulthood. Sure, many of us already know this, and we rant against McMansions, dream of co-housing or eco-villages or just a large-enough house to hold ourselves and our friends. But when has it been made so bare, so ready for all to acknowledge? It’s not the developers and builders who will house us all: it’s us. Or it could be.
Many of my generation, of course, are used to shared housing long after our college years, as economic depressions and rising housing costs have necessitated such sharing, especially if one is also trying to manage educational debt. These roommate arrangements are typically financial in nature, though—an equal sharing of the rent. But in my own family, especially on my mom’s side, I have been witness to a generosity that was so taken for granted I didn’t notice it until I left for college. It was then that I was introduced to the world of oversized (suburban) housing, and all its space for everything other than people: craft rooms and guest rooms and finished basements with devoted video game setups underneath home offices next to a den, which was not the same thing as the living room down the hall (the difference between these latter two has always eluded me).
I did not as a rule have such things while growing up because in a family of nine your extra space tends to be occupied by actual people. And somehow, even then, we saw room to share when sharing was needed.
Early on in high school, my mom invited an entire other family to live with us. There were two young boys and their mother, S.; my mom had provided childcare for them occasionally, which is how we knew them. Then came a moment when S. and her boys were losing their housing and had nowhere to go. They could have, as people do, ended up on the streets. Instead they came into our already crowded house. The youngest in my pack of siblings wasn’t yet born, but there were six of us as it was. We put the two little ones into the room with the other toddlers without much thought—we already had two sets of bunkbeds and a crib ready for use—and my older brother and I quit our competition for the one ‘spare’ room in the house, which went to S. instead.
The situation was not long-lasting. A boyfriend came on the scene with less than savory habits. S. more and more often took advantage of childcare without asking in advance; at 15, I sometimes found myself babysitting two more children than I could capably handle. They were eventually asked to leave, and off they went to live with the boyfriend whose talent for fashioning beer cans into pipes I had witnessed firsthand. We sometimes worried about the boys but we also knew that we’d made things at least momentarily easier for them.
Somehow the experience didn’t sour my mother on this practice of sharing her home; she has never ceased inviting people in. Perhaps it is that she truly understands just how precarious the economic and social reality is for most people. Most of my siblings are a good deal younger than me, and she continues to live with three of them; it’s how they manage housing costs when everyone works a service industry job. It’s not a large house, but I’m never surprised to visit and find that someone in their social circle has come to take up residence for a time. A young person will be sleeping on the couch waiting out a period of turbulence at their own home, or until they’ve secured their own apartment. Some have been there for much more extended stays, and my mom will gently push them into a job training program and then onto finding their own place, if home is somewhere they can’t return to. And so she becomes, if only for a time, family for an ever increasing number beyond her own large brood.
Housing shared through some mixture of relationship and need can be just a normal part of life. I grew up knowing that, even before S. and her boys came along.
When I was a child, there was a man whom I knew as Uncle Charlie who was not, technically, my uncle. I knew this but given the rarity with which I saw my maternal relatives maintained some confusion on the matter, for there was also a great uncle and then my mom’s actual brother and the three had all at one moment or another lived together with my grandmother, who at that period had lost two different husbands and was not yet remarried. But when you are less than ten years old all the gray haired folks seem of a similar age and so there were just ‘the uncles’ of my mother’s family.
The story, though, was this: the great uncle—my grandmother’s brother, Eddy—had been in a nursing home for a time recuperating after some kind of ailment, and it was there that he met Charlie. They became fast friends and when Eddy was well enough to return home, he refused to do so without Charlie, who had no family of his own. So Charlie came to stay, and the arrangement lasted the rest of their lives. No one has ever hinted to me of any romantic subtext to their attachment, and my immediate family members are not the kind of folks who would shy away from acknowledging such a thing. So as far as I know, it was friendship only, but friendship of the kind that blurs the lines between friends and family.
By my early teens, the uncles had become more differentiated in my mind but the situation did not come to seem in any way remarkable. Charlie was simply Uncle Charlie. Even when Eddy passed away, he stayed on with my mother’s family. Where else would he have gone?
Charlie normalized for me the practice of opting to share one’s home, of making space for those who are not—at least not at first—family, of opting to share one’s living space because you can and because it is needed.
My relationship with my family has been uneven and at times frustrating, but there are family qualities of which I remain brazenly proud and this common-sense attitude of generosity and hospitality is one of them. I have no doubt that my mother has kept multiple young folks off the streets and out of trouble, done what would take many thousands of dollars to do if we were to rely on social workers or public programs for the same purpose.
And so it floors me on an almost daily basis that those with quantifiably so much more to share are unwilling to give even a fraction of what she does. Instead, we see people yelling at elected officials to run folks out of town because they don’t want to share even that which is not strictly theirs to limit—the public space that is the only remaining refuge of those who are without their own housing. And we see people caught up in the idea that they are justified in profiting from any ‘extra’ space they own, catering to tourists rather than others in their region in need of housing.
I’m not saying the housing crisis isn’t a systemic issue in other ways, that there isn’t action to be done in the realms of policy or economics. But cultural norms and beliefs are a part of any system, and the norms against sharing and in favor of profit-seeking are a major part of the systemic problems leading to the housing crises today.
Moments of disaster often provide an opportunity for the upheaval of trends in common thinking, and specifically for the focus on profit to be pushed aside by a flood of mutuality and generosity. The orthodox text to cite at this point would be Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell; a more updated take on this idea in the era of ongoing climate disasters can be found in the podcast The Response, produced by Shareable. Mutual aid is sadly not the universal response—we already know that some landlords are price gouging to profit from the situation in Los Angeles (though they’re breaking California state law in doing so). But most people rise to the occasion. They donate, they volunteer. They share.
We know the many crises of our time are intertwined. It’s not only that we can identify matching causes (for instance, corporate hoarding and disregard for its harm on humans and more-than-human world both) but that they exacerbate one another; we turn forests into dried-out timber plantations to build more houses and then lose houses and forest both when a spark in one spreads to the other.
The fortunate flipside is that many solutions have similarly conjoined consequences. We rebuild more densely after fire, for instance, and increase the buffer between woods and the fire-prone infrastructure of modern humans, saving trees and new houses alike. Or we find that the community we build during one disaster gives us a leg up in facing the next.
My own belief is that sharing more of the space that is presently walled off for individual private use is the kind of solution that diminishes multiple problems in one go. It takes what has been counted as a single unit of housing and magically doubles it. While doing so it creates the potential for relationship and connection, attacking the ‘loneliness epidemic’ so often touted by the mainstream press in recent years. Loneliness and lack of relationship can be major contributing factors to depression and addictive behaviors, which are themselves contributing factors to someone’s risk of losing housing. Round the circle of beneficial interplay rolls. For some, sharing may feel like giving something away, but it might also be precisely what saves your own life.
Los Angeles is currently benefiting from the pre-existing presence of the Mutual Aid LA Network, which has been serving as a hub for information on resources about community-driven relief efforts. It’s not the first time radical organizers have come to play a very public and critical role post-disaster—recall that it was members of the Occupy movement who in 2012 provided one of the more robust responses to Hurricane Sandy.
It’s possible to build out such networks and infrastructure after a disaster, but it’s always harder. For those moved to take this moment to prepare your own community, there are plenty of resources all over the web (here’s one to start), and there’s also a mutual aid training series happening this February:
Elsewhere, collective efforts to promote sharing as one solution to the problem of lack of shelter are underway. HomeShare Oregon, for instance, provides structure and support for those with extra space in their homes to connect with those in need of it. You can learn more at https://homeshareoregon.org/
Do you know about good mutual aid resources, regarding housing more generally, or for those in LA right now? Please share (comments are usually limited to subscribers only but I’ve enabled them for everyone for this post).
To my friends in Los Angeles, sending much love to all of you. If you have needs that aren’t being met, please reach out. I live in a studio these days, but following family tradition, I have an extra bed even in this small space—if you need a moment away to gather yourself, there’s room for you here.
Thanks for reading Unsettling. Until next time,
Meg