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!