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By the age of twenty-five journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses across the country, from council estates in London to car showrooms in rural Wales.
Maybe, maybe not. But Yates has me well beaten. By the age of 25, she’d lived in 20 different houses across the country. There’s the childhood flat in a car showroom that had floor-to-ceiling windows. Then there are housemate auditions in her 20s that enable tenants to discriminate on the basis of race, class, sexuality – reproducing some of the systemic disparities of our society. Prospective housemates asked me if I liked Coldplay or Pedro Almodóvar films to decipher if I was a worthy candidate’ … Kieran Yates. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Our old garden had been sold, too, and another house built on the land. Kids didn’t play on the roundabout any more, either, the owner told me; she had a six-year-old daughter and she wouldn’t let her outside with all the speeding cars. Neither did people pop in and out of each other’s houses and we speculated about why this was. She suggested that they keep themselves to themselves because of needing to rest after long hours at work. I also thought about the easy comforts of TVs and technology that turn our homes into coops in which we hide away from the world. You’ve lived in a number of homes and places across the country, spending some of your childhood living above a car showroom in Wales. Do you feel the current conversations around the housing crisis focus too much on London? He vaguely remembers his old house. I used to avoid talking about it, worried it would make him confused or despondent, but now we talk about what it had and what our new house has. I also talk about the other places where I’ve lived and the people I’ve met who now live there, people who have opened their doors with warmth and welcome.
I came up with the idea for Door Stepping when I was doing something that felt momentous last summer, although people do it all time – moving home. Maybe it felt especially significant as I was leaving the first house I’d ever bought, with my boyfriend, who was now my husband, and we were leaving it with our son, who had arrived when we’d lived there. Part memoir, part manifesto, All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In delves into the difficult realities of navigating a dysfunctional housing system. Drawing on her experiences of living in 20 different houses by the age of 25, journalist Kieran Yates reveals how her personal journey taught her about the wider housing crisis that the UK is facing.
Kieran Yates: I think that we should be critical of the dreams that are sold to us. I think we are certainly a generation who’ve grown up wanting to own, but it has been sold to us increasingly – certainly over the last decade – as such a luxury that it makes it harder to advocate for housing for all because we see it as a prize to be won. When you see [home ownership] as something that the individual has worked really hard to achieve, it’s really hard to then be like ‘all of us have a right to this!’. The stories of ownership are either yoked in hard work, or they’re yoked in these exceptional circumstances.
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There should be no “acquiring castles and raising the drawbridge”, she says. “As a homeowner, it’s important that I use that privilege to go and advocate for people in temporary accommodation, to go and advocate for a landlord register to help private renters who are dealing with disrepair claims that do not get seen.” There is a deep feeling of powerlessness at the heart of being a renter today, at the mercy of a system that often feels like landlords and letting agents hold each and every card. I recently had the experience of having my rent raised by 22 per cent, actually a negotiation down from a proposed 33 per cent hike. This forced me, heartbroken, to begin the search for home number 19, only to give up when faced with the scarcity of house share rooms available, and figure out a way to absorb this huge additional cost. As a serial renter, I had to endure months of housemate auditions, sitting in strangers’ kitchens and expected to perform an optimised version of myself. Sometimes there were group interviews, all of us shuffling in together like a Lord of the Flies-style social experiment, where the most brazen among us made loud jokes. Some candidates had the genius sales gene and discussed things that were mainstream enough to elicit positive reaction: usually The Wire. In the book you touch upon how housing ownership has become an unattainable dream for most. Do you think we should put effort towards making it a possible reality, or invest in alternative modes of housing and living? In our imaginations, our house sale also offered us a new kind of life. It let us move to a part of the world we’d always loved and allowed my husband the chance to give up a demanding job. Our neighbours aren’t night-time tube workers whom we never properly met, but a farmer in his 80s, half a mile away, and an orchard occasionally occupied by sheep.
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