Alva Gotby, "Feeling at Home: Transforming the Politics of Housing" (Verso, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm your host Louisa Hann and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Alva Gottby to discuss the politics of housing and hear more about her new book Feeling at Home which is out with Verso Books this month. Alva is a writer and tenant organiser living in London. Her first book, They Call It Love, was also published by Verso in 2023 and examines the politics of emotional care and support under capitalism.

She has a PhD from the University of West London and has written articles about Marxism, feminism, the welfare state, the family, emotion and work. She works for a tenants union and supports renters to take collective action against landlords. So thanks so much for taking the time to talk about your book, Alva. Thanks for having me. So just to give some background about Feeling at Home, it's Alva's second book and broadly explores questions of housing, domesticity and gender.

I think it might also be important to note, given our international audience, that many of the examples and references included in the book are UK related, although I think the general tendencies and conflicts you examine extend beyond this and will certainly feel familiar to those outside the UK. As a starting point, could you introduce us to your work and background? How did you come to write the book? Could you give us an idea of your overarching thesis?

Sure, yeah. So I first got involved in a tenants union, London Renters Union back in 2020. So it was just before the pandemic. And I think at that point, there had already been this new wave of sort of tenant activism and organising going on for a few years. And that just felt like a really powerful moment to get involved in the housing movement.

So I had this background in thinking about feminist theories of care and social reproduction, but I didn't always see that perspective sort of reflected in mainstream housing discourse. And I think the solution to the housing crisis that we're in right now is often

It's sort of described only in terms of building more housing or making it more affordable. And affordability is a massive problem. But I wanted to think about the sort of the impact that housing has on people's lives. So that's kind of where this project comes from. It's starting to think about not just in terms of what is the cost of housing or how many units of housing are we building, but thinking about how

what's the sort of emotional impact of living in really poor quality or unstable housing, living with the threat of eviction, sort of how does that impact people's family formation, the way daily lives care for their children. But

But also then based on that analysis, start thinking about is there a housing system that could be completely different from what we have today? Could it be reorganised in a way so it's not just more affordable, but it's actually changing people's experiences of their daily lives?

Yeah, so I think most of our audience are likely to have kind of encountered headlines about the housing crisis or have experienced some aspect of it firsthand through navigating the private rental market, for example. But I think it can be easy to forget the multifaceted nature of the crisis unless you're an expert in the field or deeply involved with the housing movement. So could you provide an idea of what the housing crisis looks like today? How do we get here and how are people organising and fighting back against these exploitative practices?

Yeah, so I mean it's hard to talk about the housing crisis today without starting with affordability and the fact that housing is so expensive is sort of a root cause of a lot of the other problems that we are experiencing as renters. So

People are sort of forced into accepting substandard housing, poor quality housing, various issues with things like disrepair. People are very overcrowded. Lots of tenants live in housing that's, you know, too small for their household.

You also have this situation with landlords are just not fixing any issues. They just accept the rent payment and then think that's it. They don't have to do anything about this repair issues.

And that's because the law has given them too much power over tenants. We also, I think, in cities like London, we see more and more people are forced to move out of the city, often move away from their work, their children's school, their family support network.

or they have to sort of commute for a very long time to get to work. I talk to people who have like spent four hours every day on buses because they are forced out of London, but they still work here.

And in terms of how this situation came about, I think this is the effect of the deregulation that happened in the 1980s in the UK, but also in lots of other places in Europe and North America. And this deregulation, I mean, the intention of that was to create a private rented sector

that was profitable. So that was quite intentional. And now we're seeing the effects of that and how that's impacting people in terms of just not being able to access stable, secure, safe housing. And yeah, that is impacting more and more people, which is why the housing crisis has become such a problem

sort of bus-wide in the last few years. Yeah, so prevalent, the number of people kind of dealing with these landlord issues and

in my experience anyway. So as you mentioned in the book, solutions are kind of offering profit for dealing with issues such as exploitative landlords and this lack of affordable housing that may seem intuitive, but ultimately kind of fail to address the structural dynamics that help reduce the housing crisis in the first place. So this is most often seen in calls to build more housing or strengthen welfare provisions.

Can you explain a little further some of the problems with these solutions, especially the return to a pre-neoliberal welfare state model? Yeah, I mean, so this is the point that I make in the book because I think it's quite common within the housing movement to sort of say, oh, well, if we just go back to the system as it was then,

before the 1980s that would like that then we would fix the housing crisis and I think that's sort of very understandable that desire to go back to a previous model it's

obviously it is much better than what we have today and it also offers a sort of concrete example of how the housing system could be organized differently so I don't mean to say we should look at to that at all or that it was all sort of bad or whatever but I guess what I'm trying to do is slightly like nuance that a little bit because I think

we can sometimes end up with this quite romanticised perspective on a previous version of the housing system and especially council housing. In council housing, it's absolutely true that it has been sort of unfairly maligned over

over the last decades and it's been massively stigmatized. But sort of trying to counter that argument, I don't think we should then suggest that all council housing was great or that there wasn't any problems with that model.

And some of council housing and some aspects of that system, like, were really good, and there were some interesting sort of political dynamics in that as well. But that doesn't mean that all council housing or all aspects of that system was sort of inherently good. So some of the council housing that was built in sort of the mids

20th century was of poor quality, like too small and it was often quite poorly managed. And that is true even before we see this massive budget cuts to council housing budgets. So I think we should be sort of be selective in terms of what we withdraw from that legacy.

I think it's also useful to understand how a lot of that housing was built for a sort of particular type of household. It was often assumed that the sort of ideal tenant was

a sort of white family. So a lot of the housing that was built is often based on a sort of quite heteronormative, like nuclear family model. And again, that's not the case sort of across the board, but a lot of the housing was based on that model.

And also there have been problems in terms of how that housing was allocated. You know, a lot of it, that sort of allocation system was massively racist. Migrant families couldn't access council housing and communities of colour often had to access really substandard housing in the private rented sector instead.

And it was sort of only as council housing became seen as the worst type of housing and it was really sort of defunded. Then it was opened up to migrants' households. But before that, those communities had really struggled to access council housing. So I think there's quite a lot

in that sort of history to be critical of as well as the aspect that we should celebrate.

So I was interested, you said beginning that you kind of joined the housing movement around COVID-ish period. Because I think COVID really illuminated some of the worst inequalities and fragilities in the housing system. It's people who are compelled to stay at home and governments were compelled to introduce these protections for those in precarious rental situations. Can you talk about how this relates to your focus on social reproduction as a key element of struggle in the fight for secure housing? So in what ways did COVID...

reveal or in what ways did it obscure domestic exploitation? Yeah, so yeah just for people who might not be familiar with this term social reproduction that just basically means all of the ways that people sort of work to take care of themselves, their family members,

like making sure that they are healthy enough to keep going to work, that their children are healthy, cooking, cleaning, those kinds of activities, but also access to childcare and healthcare. And for me, that is so clearly related to housing because of like,

If you're not living in good quality housing, you are not going to be healthy. That is quite intuitive in a way. And I can see that in my organising as well, how poor quality housing is really having an impact on people's health, both their physical health and their mental health.

And also the sort of household formation. So how people living with their family members or with housemates, sometimes with strangers. So...

Yeah, housing is so deeply connected to how people survive under capitalism and what their household formations look like. So who's able to have children and raise those children in a healthy environment? It's not like obvious that that's accessible to everyone.

And also in terms of like who is it that who lives in very overcrowded housing, poor quality housing, those things all impact on our health and especially during COVID. People who lived in overcrowded housing were obviously much less able to sort of isolate or look after the health and often people ended up infecting their family members or other people they were living with as well.

So there's also this aspect I talk about in the book a bit, which is more about the sort of domestic violence and abuse.

and some people are experiencing their homes as like a place where they're actually not safe. It's often assumed that home is the space that we sort of retreat to from the world and we take care of ourselves and we're safe there. And during COVID as well, we were sort of told, oh, you have to go home because that's where you're going to be safe from infection.

But actually for a lot of people that wasn't the case. They might be more at risk from family members and especially if you're in a situation where you're more isolated and it's harder to leave because there's a lockdown. Obviously that led to an increase in domestic violence and abuse.

And then you have those sort of, on the other hand, people who were living on their own, single person households were sort of left to fend for themselves a lot of the time. Some people were lucky and had access to

like mutual aid networks and obviously that was sort of the amazing experience of the pandemic was that people really came out for their neighbours and suddenly we could see how dependent we were on each other but some people didn't have that and were sort of left really isolated often experiencing like

sort of depression because they couldn't really, they were going through this experience that was really, they couldn't really talk to anyone about it. So in that way, I think COVID really

it really sort of put a spotlight on how our domestic conditions are really political in so many different ways. And I think it really did sort of reveal a lot of the, yeah, the sort of political aspects of housing in that way. But maybe in some ways, because people

became more isolated within their homes and domestic violence especially sort of became this like hidden issue. A lot of people couldn't leave their homes

That also, I think, is important to remember. Great. Yeah. And thank you for kind of defining social reproduction. It's an important point. So, yeah, this politics of social reproduction is obviously quite closely entwined with feminist politics, as you talk about domestic violence as a serious problem.

problem associated with housing. So let's kind of turn to your chapter that's entitled Housing is a Feminist Issue. Could you talk a little bit more about the ways in which the housing system is stacked against women? What kinds of issues have you witnessed in your organising work? Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it's important to come back to the cost of housing here. And that is really important for lots of women.

women typically earn less money. So that's also something that's from the start, like the fact that you have housing that's very expensive and becoming increasingly hard to access. That in combination with gender pay gaps already means that women are sort of in a worse position on the housing market.

If you add to that that lots of women have caring responsibilities and are much more likely to, for example, be single parents, that means that women also tend to need more space for their children, for example, and then that means higher housing costs.

And that together means that in my organising, I see lots of women who end up in rent arrears and debt. And then that leads to eviction, that leads to homelessness. And sometimes people will get evicted and they're able to find a new home. But when you're evicted and the housing market is

is sort of set up in a way that housing is completely unaffordable and you're on a low income and you don't have a guarantor, for example, that can mean that an eviction can actually just lead to homelessness. You might not be able to find a new home.

So in the UK, councils are supposed to rehouse households with children if they become homeless. But often what I'm seeing now is that councils are sort of placing homeless households really far away from where they were living before.

So households from London will get placed in smaller cities or towns in the UK, often quite far away from their support networks. And this obviously has a massive impact on people's health, their access to support networks. It might mean you have more childcare to do because you can't get a relative or a friend to help you with your kids.

And then it has an impact on children's schooling, for example. They might have to move to a different school and that's really disruptive. And a lot of the housing that these households end up in is like really poor quality as well. So there's often mold and damp, homes that are really cold.

And so that's something I see quite a lot of as well is...

Yeah, sort of households get put into these really substandard conditions and they're told, well, you have to accept this, otherwise you'll just end up in the street or you'll end up with something even worse. So that's one side, and I think that really impacts single moms especially, is that you sort of don't really have the security that you need

to sort of raise your children, to be supported with childcare. And a lot of those mums also like carried this

enormous stress of having to worry about their kids, their health. You know, how is it going to impact their children to be raised in this really unstable environment and to live in a home that's full of mold? So there's also this sort of massive psychological impact of that. And then again,

I think domestic violence and abuse is such an important way that housing is sort of related to women's issues and women's struggle and feminism. The cost of housing

and the requirements that are placed on people in order to secure housing, it makes it so much harder to leave a sort of abusive situation. So that's really something that impacts people who live in abusive environments. And again,

Local councils are supposed to help and rehouse people who are suffering from domestic violence. But what we see is a lot of gatekeeping from councils. So they sort of use illegal tactics to put people off from applying for that support they're entitled to.

Or they say again that they're going to get placed somewhere far away. And that in itself might be enough to sort of put someone off from even applying for support with housing. If you're told, oh, we're going to move you hundreds of miles away,

That might be something that actually a person who's experiencing abuse in their home might say, oh, well, I'm better off staying here rather than taking the risk of ending up somewhere where I don't know anyone or where I'm not going to get the support that I need. Another thing that I've sort of seen in my organising work sometimes is that women tenants

experienced sexist harassment from landlords and estate agents. So that happens sometimes. It's not so widely talked about. But yeah, in terms of people experiencing harassment, that is often women who are being harassed by a male landlord or estate agent. And that sort of gendered

imbalance of power, I think is really important in that sort of relationship as well, and not something that we often talk about.

Yeah, that's something I've come across with kind of friends and acquaintances actually in London. So the UK government is kind of making some sort of steps towards addressing some of the issues that we're talking about here. I think most notably the impending abolition of Section 21, which for people who don't know is the kind of no-fault evictions. Landlords can kick you out and give you kind of two months notice. So the discussions of abolishing this issue

Act have sparked quite a lot of discourse about some of the more parasitic and exploitative tendencies of landlordism, as well as maybe some optimism about the potential impacts of the move among renters. So to what extent do you think the renters reform bill will kind of shift power dynamics within the private rental sector? Will it provide opportunities for the housing movement?

Yeah, I mean, definitely. This is something that the housing movement fought for many years and won. And it has taken a long time. This abolition of Section 21...

Evictions was initially promised in 2019. And here we are many years later and it still hasn't happened. So the fact that this is now in Parliament, it's a really important moment. And that is because Section 21 is

that was introduced as part of a sort of package of laws in the 80s that were intended to make the private rented sector more profitable. And if you have lots of rights for landlords to evict people, that sort of means that other rights that we have as renters

they're sort of powerless because your landlord can just kick you out if you are, you know, trying to get them to carry out repairs or you're trying to negotiate a rent increase. Then the sort of the threat of a no-fault eviction means that as a tenant, you are sort of very powerless in that relationship with your landlord. So...

The fact that they're going to abolish Section 2.1 is really important.

And I think it will be important to think about this also as a potential sort of cultural shift or a shift in renter consciousness, I guess. I think it will be most impactful if we can translate it into renters feeling more confident to sort of take on the landlords, to challenge rent increases, to challenge this repair process.

And that could mean that Section 21, the fact that it's abolished, it doesn't just change eviction law, it changes the entire sort of landscape of renters' legal rights because we can become sort of more confident in insisting on our other rights.

So hopefully that in turn more renters feeling like actually they want to stay and fight. They want to sort of challenge their landlords rather than just moving somewhere else. That can also mean that we have a stronger tenants movement, more support.

I think the sort of, um, the way that we've been able to do this is to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to

key failure with the renters reform uh sorry renters rights bill um is that rents are not controlled um so um sort of unlike most other countries in europe um rents um in the uk can basically just increase um to whatever sort of level that um landlords and estate agency fits um

And that it means in turn that instead of evicting someone, your landlord could just increase your rent, you know, by whatever amount they wanted, basically. And then people obviously, if they're faced with, you know, the rent's going up 50%, they will just choose to leave. So that's, I guess, one of the sort of

loopholes that landlords will still be able to use. And there are some other

weaknesses in that law as well. There are some other ways to evict people. So it's not going to fix everything. But I think it's really important and it's important to use this then as a sort of stepping stone to fight for more rights for renters. And I think the next big fight in the tenants movement will be for rent controls.

Great. Yeah. And I think it's really important, Secretary, in terms of, you mentioned it in the book, talking about this kind of like ontological security, the idea that you're connected to a place and you belong in that place and feel kind of like you're at ease in that place. Yeah. So as you mentioned earlier, poor housing conditions can kind of pose significant risks to health and life with people

Recent scandals like Grenfell exposing the extent to which people are treated as disposable by the capitalist state. Can you explain how this disposability serves the broader capitalist system and how what you term surplus populations, I think maybe go into that a little bit, can fight back against state exclusion? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so surplus populations is a term that is used in some sort of political theory in order to name the people who have just been excluded from capitalist labour markets and often also like marginalised in various ways.

often don't have access to good housing, decent education, all of that that people need to live decent, fulfilling lives. So it's often people who are seen as belonging to an already stigmatised groups like migrants, disabled people, people

people who are unemployed and sort of seen as deserving of being unemployed, single mums, like all of those groups that are already living with a lot of stigma have also been told that they should be sort of grateful for even like the worst quality housing, told that they should be happy that they have a roof over their heads.

And I think the sort of wider narrative in this sort of particular phase of capitalism that we're in right now, we're sort of told that we only deserve good housing if we're able to pay a lot of money for it. So those who can't pay for the housing for whatever reason,

They will end up on the street or they will end up in the worst housing, hostels, really poor quality temporary accommodation, might have to move around a lot or might live in housing that's actively dangerous for them.

So that is affecting more and more people. After a sort of crisis of affordability, housing costs going up every year, more and more people are going to be affected by this and won't have access to good quality housing.

And that means more people affected by health risks, like living with mold, for example. It's really bad for your health, as people have sort of started to talk more about in the last couple of years.

It leads to respiratory conditions, it can lead to skin disease, it can lead to mental health issues, it can lead to death in some cases. So those sort of hidden impacts of just living with poor quality housing is really something that we need to talk more about and start addressing and start sort of developing the political tools to deal with that because we have

a housing stock that is just like in terrible condition at the moment it's too um cold it's damp um it's there's just so many issues with it um and if you are living um with this poor quality housing your risk of developing um these like health issues is so much higher and that might mean that you have to take time off work so you're losing income or you might get fired um

Children might not be able to attend school and then that has sort of longer term impacts on their lives as well.

And yeah, I think for everyone who's lived in one of these places where the sort of housing conditions are very bad, you know how much it impacts your psychological health as well. And the sort of distress of having to live with these really bad housing conditions, not being sure how to deal with them, not getting any help from, you know, your local authority or,

your landlord, the people who are supposed to be responsible for this and they are just telling you like well that's your problem basically

And yeah, this sort of sense of some people being disposable, not really being entitled to good quality housing, that is really impacting lots of people. I see it so much in my organising work. Like every day we talk to people who are really experiencing this in their daily lives and experiencing all this.

the sort of negative impacts that that has. But on the sort of more positive side, I think this is really leading people to start sort of getting together with other people in the area and saying, look, we all have this problem. And the council has just told us that they can't deal with it because they don't have the money. And so we have to get together and do something about it.

And, you know, working class renters, unemployed people, disabled people, migrants, mums, all of these groups are sort of starting to get together, starting to organise in the area, talking to other people.

learning their rights and starting to sort of build these communities where people stand up for each other and start to take on their landlords and also start to campaign to sort of improve local services as well as the national policy around housing. Great so the goal of owning one's home is very much hegemonic in society today including many on the left and I think

In some ways, I think this is understandable given all the alternatives that we've been talking about at the moment. But as you argue, it doesn't have to be this way. So how does the valorization of homeownership operate politically? How does it kind of rigidify inequalities and how can we lay the groundwork for alternatives? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important question as well, especially...

In some countries, I would say, especially the UK, the US, there has been this really strong focus on homeownership, not just since the 80s, but going back through the early 20th century, I guess.

And you have this discourse that in order to sort of be seen as successful, having a good life, being sort of fully adult or like a full citizen, you have to own your own home. And that is like, I think, really, it's really bad for the people who are excluded from that, obviously. Yeah.

Because in order to make homeownership seem like such a good option, you have to sort of make the other options seem worse. You have to make renting worse, less secure. And then people will be like, oh, actually, in order to have security, in order to have what I need, I need to buy my own house. Yeah.

And that means that if sort of rising rents also impacts people who do want to buy, for example,

if lots of renters are sort of being priced out of renting, then that will mean like a bigger pool of people who are desperately trying to buy and sort of outbidding each other. And you also have lots of landlords or lots of more people who want to become landlords because they think, oh, that's a good way to make money. And they often have the financial resources to sort of outbid people who, who,

could become homeowners or might want to become homeowners. So this insecurity of renting, it's sort of both a precondition for making homeownership possible

so desirable but it's also something that means that home ownership is becoming um very difficult to sort of attain for a lot of people um so that means that a lot of people are sort of left behind um

you're sort of told that you have to want to buy a house but you might never have the resources to actually achieve that you might be completely sort of unable to get a mortgage because of your income or because your work is not stable enough or

you're unemployed or you're a carer so you can't like get that income that you would need to buy somewhere you might not have access to like family wealth in order to make a down payment or deposit so yeah it's just a situation right now where

I think my generation feels like we've been told our entire lives that we have to sort of want to buy a home and that's the way that you sort of become a successful adult, but you sort of can't really do that anymore.

And then you have government subsidies that are designed to make it easier for first-time buyers, like Help to Buy, for example. But what they do is actually often push prices up even higher. They might help some people get on the housing ladder, as people say. But

If the government puts more money into the housing sector, that means that prices are going to increase. It's quite sort of simple maths, basically. So what do we do to solve this? I think the answer is sort of

quite simple as well. You can make public housing more desirable but also much more accessible. Currently lots of people might want the stability that, for example, a council tenancy

would sort of give them but they can't have that because you know there are like 20 000 households on the council waiting list so you know you're never going to get there so if we had a sort of public housing sector that was much bigger and people were able to live in public housing then

that might mean that more people were choosing that sort of over buying a house.

I think we also need to increase the power that renters have to shape their living environments. And I think this is really important because one of the reasons people want to buy a house is because they want to make a place their own. They want it to feel like, oh, actually, this is my home. It's not my landlord's home.

And so giving people like options for how they live and being able to like, yeah, sort of create the homes that they want. That is also like really important in order to make renting a sort of more viable option for more people. Great. So let's just kind of wrap up by just touching on what

I don't know, it might seem, seems to me maybe to be one of the greater conceptual hurdles for transforming the broken housing system that you mentioned, which is, you know, breaking down this attachment to nuclear family structures and privatised domestic arrangements. As you note towards the end of the book, the fight for decent housing is quite closely entwined with discussions about family abolition. So I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about what this term means, what kind of misconceptions exist and how it could serve the housing movement in the long term. Yeah, I mean, family abolition is,

It's often understood as, you know, the state will take away your kids or something like that's just imposed on you from above. I think those of us who are interested in family abolition as a sort of framework are thinking more about it as something that people could do to rearrange their daily lives and that would offer people the resources they need to live sort of

decent lives together with the people around them. So at the moment, people are often very reliant on their families

Because family seems like the only sort of social structure that we have that provides us with the stability that we need. So people often get very sort of confused when people suggest, oh, maybe that isn't such a good option because they're like, oh, but what else do we have other than the family?

But I guess what family abolition is sort of saying is that we could build other structures for how to care for each other, how to raise kids, how to like provide everyone with decent like food and health care and education. And we could also do that in ways that would change the way that we live together and sort of, yeah,

make sure that people who aren't part of a sort of traditional nuclear family also have access to the things they need to live decent lives. So housing is obviously a really big part of that because like if you live in you know a really small flat you know you're probably not going to like do much communal cooking or like it's quite hard to

arrange things with your neighbours or other people in your area if you don't actually have the physical space to do that. So what I'm suggesting is a sort of a vision of housing that is more collective where people have the resources they need in the local area or sort of near the housing. We could have like more communal provision of food, of childcare,

And this sort of already exists in like some places and people are already doing this in their daily lives. Like lots of single moms, for example, will set up these informal networks of childcare where they're sort of taking care of each other's kids. But that is often like

It's not provided with the resources it needs or the space that it needs, so it's often quite informal or unstable. And it sort of only works if people are able to remain in the same area for a long time, which is, you know, tricky today.

So I guess in terms of like how housing and family abolition connects is through this idea that if we had a different structure for our domestic spaces and different resources in our areas, that would also enable people to sort of care for children together outside of like traditional family standards. It would mean that like

elderly people or disabled people weren't so isolated sort of within their little units. And, you know, we could...

have things like communal kitchens and all the nice things as well, like swimming pools or libraries or whatever people wanted to create in the area, whatever they needed, and that people would have a sense of control over the spaces where they lived and that those spaces would be flexible enough as well to account for different household structures.

Sounds great. And there's some really interesting examples of kind of blueprint solutions and two common ways of living in the book. So everyone should pick up a copy and read it. So finally, what are you working on at the moment? Yeah, I mean, in terms of like my organizing work, you know, the struggle goes on. We're still fighting against COVID.

Well, housing conditions, evictions, rent increases, that sort of, as an organizer, that's always going to be a big priority.

I think what we might see in terms of like how the housing system will be impacted by the renters rights bill in the short term is that we might see a lot of evictions, a lot of section 21 evictions that sort of landlords trying to do that before section 21 gets abolished. So that's maybe something that's

people should be aware of that we might see this big wave of evictions happening in the next few months in the UK. I think that means that all of us who are sort of affected by the housing crisis just need to get together and start organising to protect your neighbours from eviction, protect yourself from eviction, coming together with people in your local area, building tenant power together. So if you're sort of...

interested in these questions like do you join a tenants union or set one up if you don't have one in your local area and yeah as a tenant organiser I'm always really happy to see people do that and always really keen to support other people doing that. Yeah it's going to be an interesting year in more ways than one so yeah great thank you so much Alva for joining me. Thanks so much.