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Citation

Serpa R (2025) Bringing home the housing crisis: politics, precarity and domicide in Austerity London: Mel Nowicki, Bristol, Bristol University Press, 2023, 158 pp., ?24.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781447361862.. Housing and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/08882746.2025.2469392

Abstract
First paragraph: Since at least the neoliberal turn of western economies in the 1970s and 80s, housing activists and scholars have called for a right to housing, often citing inhabitance as a point of convergence for various struggles over urban space – displacements, evictions, and insecurity of tenure. Geographers, Porteous and Smith (Citation2001), identify “domicidal policies” as drivers of such precarity among an ever-expanding group of marginalized people, ranging from extreme cases such as colonial geopiracy to more common forms such as state-sponsored gentrification. Given the large scale and visibility of such examinations into the intentional destruction of home, calls for a right to housing often intersect with – and at times become subsumed by – demands for a right to the city and broader human rights. The specific calls for action which typically follow urge a radical overhaul of a system of commodified housing whereby inequality and precarity is a necessary output. Writing in 1970, Frank Michelman reflected upon 50?years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared housing a “necessity of life” to which the state owed individuals a minimum existence. He concluded that a right to housing “takes us into territory which as yet remains morally uncharted, philosophically murky, and legally baffling” (p. 211). More than a half a century later, this difficulty remains true, except, perhaps in Scotland and France. Elsewhere a legally enforceable right to housing remains frustratingly elusive and fundamentally incompatible with neoliberal ideology.

Journal
Housing and Society