COVID-19 and the meaning of home: how the pandemic triggered new thinking on housing

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced profound and substantially unexpected implications for how we think about, value, and experience housing. This is perhaps evident, not only for housing scholars and housing industry players, but for many citizens who have lately witnessed resulting rapid appreciation in their housing wealth, as well as for numerous others who have grappled with stark challenges in accessing or retaining their own affordable housing through the crisis.

Unprecedently in modern times, many housing processes came to a rapid standstill in early 2020. At least in some jurisdictions residential construction, property transactions and tenancy terminations suddenly ceased. Yet within months, with the pandemic still raging, sharply rising housing costs widely took hold. The effects of central bank action to ward off recession through rock bottom interest rates was widely compounded by factors such as low supply, and behaviour characterised by a fear of missing out (Li & Zhang, 2021; Subaşı & Baycan, 2022). In some countries, direct government housing market stimulus initiatives poured petrol on the fire (Pawson et al., 2022; Clun 2022).

Blakeley (2021) argues that, compounding the financialisation of UK housing initiated in the 1970s, the pandemic will exacerbate wealth inequalities tied to housing assets and push people into poverty and homelessness.

New ways of thinking about housing

It is not simply that housing has become widely more expensive since COVID-19 hit. The pandemic has served as an impetus for many to think about the meaning of their home in new ways. Indeed, this novel mode of thinking about the significance of housing is as much about people reflecting on what life means and how they want to live well. The pandemic, and the risks it has thrown up, have pushed people to recognise all the more starkly that their housing plays a key role in how they would like to live.

Crucially, thanks to the residential lockdowns that became wearingly familiar to many during 2020 and 2021, we have seen arguably fundamental changes to housing and to the meaning of home vis-à-vis home working. For many employees and employers alike, necessary adaptation to suddenly imposed movement restrictions prompted a fairly rapid realisation that reporting to an office five days a week was, in fact, not the necessity previously imagined. This has created two far-reaching repercussions for how we think about and value housing. Indeed, two implications for what many of us now want from our housing.

First, the revelation that home working could be both effective and time efficient ended the necessity of living within a commuting distance to our place of employment. The longstanding belief and practice that we choose our housing on the basis of the workplace convenience was ruptured.

Of course, this rupture did not apply for all. Some in the economy, whether privileged and wealthy medical practitioners or less prestigious but equally essential cleaners and delivery food drivers, enjoyed no home working option.

Nevertheless, despite the unevenness of who could and who could not do so, the pandemic-spurred home working revolution meant that people both imagined and realised housing in desirable locations beyond commuting distance to their physical place of employment. In many countries, we observe population flows out of densely populated cities to live in coastal, mountain, regional, and rural locations (Li & Zhang, 2021). Working from home introduced the possibility that we could live in locations that were desirable and unfettered from the constraints of proximity to an employer workspace. It is almost certainly no coincidence that, at least in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the height of the pandemic saw both house prices and rents increasing disproportionately in less densely populated regions, away from established employment nodes and also distant from the threat of the pandemic (Li & Zhang, 2021; Pawson et al., 2022).

The second profound implication for housing consumer behaviour that stems from home working during the pandemic relates to the configuration of our housing, or at the very least, how we now aspire to a certain type of housing configuration and housing amenity. For many of us the novelty of working in our own dwelling has raised expectations on the need for the home to comfortably accommodate activities previously confined to a business office. In many parts of the world, the stay at home orders that mandated home working in 2020 and 2021 similarly required our children to home school. In addition to spaces in our dwellings for work and study, the pandemic has invited us to think about how our housing can provide the amenity we need to live well when required to spend extended time behind our own front door. In housing demand terms, all this has demonstrably contributed to the so-called ‘race for space’ that, across a number of countries, saw larger houses subject to disproportionately increased sale prices and rents through the height of the pandemic, while the costs of apartment living rose more modestly (Pawson et al., 2022).

During the crisis those with the means to do so have tended to dedicate more money to renovating or beautifying their domestic spaces. Without the opportunity to dine out, go to work or school, or even into shopping centres/districts, the necessity for our home to provide a place of sanctuary and enjoyment increased. This is not just making the home more desirable, or even valuing garden and outside space. The extended time in housing and fewer opportunities to leave housing has meant people value separate spaces in housing to achieve privacy. The importance of our housing to provide the spaces and amenity – such as separate living rooms – for privacy has taken on new meaning during the pandemic (ibid). We might even argue that, at least briefly tempering the dominant financialization trend of the recent decades, the COVID-19 experience has forced us to rediscover the home for its utility, rather than its exchange, value.

Our new relationships with housing

Our response to the pandemic thus altered our relationship with housing in various ways that are positive. Some research suggests how spending more time in our housing has changed and indeed strengthened relationships and family closeness (Radka et al., 2022), and even improved family communication (Sheen et al., 2021). This is, however, only part of the story about what the pandemic has meant for how we occupy housing. The enforced domesticity required during the crisis has been a force of despair and oppression in the lives of many. The intention to reduce physical interaction that sits at the centre of stay at home orders is associated with depression, anxiety, and distress (Benke et al., 2020). The research of Amerio et al., (2020) from Italy is significant for teasing out not only the mental health impacts of being locked down in housing, but also the way housing form and quality influences health. They found that poor housing, such as extremely small apartments, poor views, and low quality, is associated with increased risk of moderate-severe and severe depressive symptoms.

Being locked down in housing can have even more negative consequences. In a systematic review from multiple countries, Piquero et al., (2021) found that stay at home orders and lockdown restrictions implemented to slow virus spread increased the reported incidence of domestic violence. Being in close contact with family may be a benefit to many, but for some [women and children], it increased exposure and limited opportunity to avoid violence.

Housing and social control in the pandemic

And it is not just about domestic disorder. Perhaps most notoriously in China, the pandemic also saw housing more centrally positioned as a key site in which the state has exerted control over citizens, even violence (Li & Lu, 2020). Our houses played pivotal roles in the state enabling the control of citizens to achieve public health objectives. The isolation and lockdown policies relied upon people having access to housing. Although it was never framed as such, housing was the critical private resource that enabled the state to dictate citizens’ movements to achieve population welfare goals.

Another stark example of the state’s use of extreme control over citizens in their housing was found in Melbourne, Australia. In 2020, the state government controversially and without warning forced the lockdown of 3,000 tenants of nine high-rise social housing blocks. This was enforced with a 500-armed police officers outside the buildings. The action exclusively affected the social housing tenants, and no similar exclusive lockdowns were directed towards residents of privately rented or owned housing. It was a public health intervention that coupled social housing tenancy status with health risk. A subsequent analysis of this event by the state Ombudsman described the move as incompatible with human rights (O’Keeffe & Daley, 2022).

The Melbourne towers lockdown is an extreme example, but it nevertheless reflects a more widespread approach observed during the pandemic of an interventionist role of the state towards housing. Some of the increased housing prices, for instance, were produced through government interventions in central banks to make money cheap, which in turn was used to fuel housing speculation. At a broader social policy level, Béland et al., (2021) observe that states across the globe intervened to protect markets, whereby they abandoned fiscal constraint and adopted emergency programs to protect people from the risk of unemployment. States too, of course, intervened to protect citizens from mass housing failures. Many nations, including Australia (Parsell et al., 2020), the United States (Benfer et al., 2022) and the UK (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022), initiated widespread moratoria on evictions and/or large-scale emergency housing for people experiencing homelessness (Pawson et al., 2022). Another crucial but slightly more subterranean housing market intervention deployed in some countries was the support provided by central banks and financial regulators for home owner mortgage deferrals (ibid).

The pandemic has thus served a powerful reminder of what states can do to protect citizens, not only through the kinds of housing-specific measures summarised above, but via unprecedented employment and income protection measures including so-called furlough schemes, cash payments and social security supplements (Pawson et al., 2022). Housing became a key plank in public health policy. The pandemic likewise illustrates the salience of scholarship on the meaning of home (Easthope, 2004; Mallett, 2004). Lockdowns showed exactly what autonomy and control mean. For those lucky enough, these were an impetus to imagine and even achieve housing that had the size and amenity to realise these core aspirations for ‘home’. On the other hand, the consequently increased exposure to violence and inability to separate oneself from perpetrators of violence during the pandemic shows just how valuable housing that provides safety is in enabling one to be at home, to be safe, and to live well.

This short focus issue of Housing Studies contains five articles that all engage with the way people have experienced and the state has intervened with housing.

This housing studies focus issue

In this collection we showcase a group of Housing Studies papers on different ways that the pandemic has affected housing policy, housing and social behaviour, as well as housing processes and outcomes. Originating from different parts of the world and concentrating on varied aspects of the housing studies agenda, the papers variously argue that COVID-19 triggered new developments in the way housing is governed and/or viewed (Parsell et al., 2020; Izuhara et al., 2022; Kuskoff et al., 2022) or that, in contrast, the crisis substantially accentuated existing inequalities (Kajta et al., 2022; Waldron, 2022).

It is still too soon to know how far the myriad pandemic-triggered housing system phenomena emergent in 2020 and 2021 will endure. As this focus issue hints, however, housing will likely form a key vector in future public health crises, and a well-housed population is indisputably a good preventative public health measure. An optimistic reading of this focus issue may be that the COVID-19 experience could yet propel citizens to push governments harder to ensure provision of the safe, secure, and affordable housing that is a key pre-requisite for individual wellbeing and societal functioning.

In the first of our focus issue feature articles Parsell et al. review Australian government responses to homelessness during the pandemic. They show that COVID-19 was a clear motivator for several Australian state governments to invest significant new money into enabling people who were homeless to access high quality accommodation. Accordingly resourced, the not-for-profit homelessness services sector went into overdrive working to help transition people out of rough sleeping, dormitory-style shelter accommodation, and even overcrowded housing. They argue that the government intervention directly benefited many thousands in the homeless population through the provision of often high quality accommodation. However, the article proposes that the swift intervention and millions of dollars in new homelessness funding was not solely driven by an ambition to benefit the recipients themselves. In the context of an established body of knowledge that homelessness is deleterious to health, the authors argue that, instead, the prime motivator ‘the risk that [homeless people’s] heightened vulnerability to contracting and spreading the disease pose[d] to the health of the housed population’ (pp. 2–3). The population previously excluded from adequate housing became a policy priority because their exclusion was framed as a health threat to the masses.

Next, drawing on a media analysis also from Australia, Kuskoff and colleagues examine the stigmatised position of social housing in society and how representations differ in the years leading up to the pandemic onset compared to the two years when the pandemic was in full swing in 2020 and 2021. Pre-pandemic, and indeed consistent with a long line of research on the stigmatised position that social housing represents in Australian and other neo-liberal societies, the article demonstrates that the media tends to represent social housing tenants as problematic, and the state as problematic for enabling tenants to misuse this public asset. As such, media representations both perpetuate the idea of the moral failings of social housing tenants and the illegitimacy of social housing as a resource in (home owning) society.

These depictions of social housing, however, changed significantly during the first two years of COVID-19. The dominantly negative framing of the pre-pandemic era was substantially reversed during the first two years of the crisis. Indeed, during this time, media stances towards the case for more social housing notably softened. However, the important contribution of Kuskoff and colleagues is in demonstrating that although the media began to represent social housing positively during the pandemic, what really changed was the portrayal of who should benefit from it. Thus, the need for social housing was ‘no longer positioned as a serious risk and benefitting just the lazy and unemployed; rather, it [was] now seen as a critical risk for the ‘good’ and ‘hardworking families’ … facing economic challenges beyond their control (p. 14). The housing affordability crisis brought on during the pandemic, along with revitalised expectations of the state’s role in protecting citizens, provided a framework for the media to present public and not-for-profit housing as a legitimate means of state intervention to address market failure.

Meanwhile, drawing on qualitative interviews with 35 young adults from Poland, Kajta and colleagues examine how housing transitions were impacted by COVID-19. They seek to understand how young people experience housing transitions given the shifts in life that the pandemic has represented. Their article is situated in the Polish context where home ownership is the norm, yet where the pandemic era has seen extreme price increases, more so than in other central European countries. For some, COVID-19 created constrained economic conditions (housing and labour market) that compelled young adults to remain in the family home, which was a source of frustration. Young Polish people who experienced successful housing transitions, were enabled to do so by a combination of optimal structural conditions and parental support. Central to many young people’s housing transitions was a state of waiting: waiting for the impacts of the pandemic to subside so that they could re-engage with what they valued as normative housing careers. More broadly, it is argued that ‘the pandemic [acted] as an accelerator of the previously existing structural challenges in the housing market’ (p. 15). Beyond this, an important contribution of the article is to demonstrate that COVID-19 compounded the disadvantages (and advantages) that have long existed in the Polish housing market that mediate young adults’ housing transitions and in turn their life stage transitions.

Izuhara et al. by contrast focus on the pandemic response of individuals and communities rather than governments or housing providers. The starting point is that, by the nature of collaborative housing communities, they were affected by COVID-19 lockdowns differently to the wider community. The authors argue that ‘lockdowns made people re-evaluate the importance of social relationships and reconsider whom to trust, putting community life in the spotlight’ (p. 4). Thus, they focus on ‘how lockdown affected the mutuality of collaborative housing: the practices of mutual support; the mediation of residents’ diverse attitudes and behaviours; and groups’ decision-making processes, commitments and trust’ (p. 4). Within the context of collaborative housing communities in England and Wales, the pandemic shock was seen to have stimulated a re-assessment of community governance arrangements that ‘for some brought positive and sustainable outcomes’ (p.16).

Finally, echoing many of the contributions cited above, Waldron emphazises the accentuated importance of home that resulted from pandemic restrictions and, for many people, the new experience of working as well as residing in the dwelling. This Irish research looked to build on existing work on the resident experience of private renting by probing in greater depth, and under pandemic conditions, ‘how renters experience the various dimensions of housing precarity’ (p. 2). This refers to the precarity concept that ‘captures the distribution of risks within society and explores how an individual’s exposure to adverse events might be amplified by their economic and social circumstances’ (p. 3).

Lived experiences of renters during the early pandemic reportedly ‘amplified’ the precarity of their situation when faced with novel difficulties such as the inability to replace flatmates returning to the family home during a public health crisis. More broadly, the research is argued as having demonstrated that ‘the experience of housing precarity cuts across traditional socio-economic lines, as even those from more middle-income backgrounds experience precarity in the rental sector, thereby adding to existing work on the experiences of more vulnerable renting groups’ (p. 19).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.