SHARED LIVING: A LIFECOURSE PERSPECTIVE Sue Heath HSA Annual Conference 2014 The Value of Housing Workshop 2b: Home not housing Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives

Shared living in context Source: DCLG 2013 Household Interim Projections , 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 pathways Episodic sharersSerial 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

research/home-and-housing/shared-housing// Thank you!