All the Homes I’ve Ever Lived in by Kieran Yates Review: Piercing the Housing Crisis with Vigilant Fury

For millions of people in the UK, moving is not a matter of choice. Kieran Yates knows this like no other. By the age of 25, the London journalist lived in 25 different houses, from estates on the edge of London’s western suburbs to cottages in the “deep countryside of Mid Wales”.

her debut, All the houses I’ve ever lived in stands out from several excellent polemics on the UK housing crisis that have been published in recent years. Apartment Correspondent Vicki Spratt Tenantto that of Hasha Mohamed your own home.

It’s not just a matter of form that distinguishes Yeats’ book from the rest, with its balanced mix of memoir, polemic and reportage. Instead, it’s her tone: a carefree warmth and intimacy that breathes new life into horror show statistics. She shifts effortlessly between portraying life in the chaos of the housing system and tackling the systemic problems at the heart of the crisis.

At its core, this is a book about home and the “stories,” she writes, “that make us who we are.” Yeats comes from a “family of dreamers”. Her grandparents were from a small Punjabi village located in Southall, West London in the 1960s. Their deceptively anonymous terraced home was the family’s guiding light: a self-contained and superbly appointed private universe of security and roots.

But home can be a tricky place. When Yeats’ mother was effectively expelled by her family at the age of 19 after filing for divorce, she and Yeats began their itinerant journey to build a future that did not yet exist, away from Southall and in limbo.

Yeats deftly alternates between unsentimental affection for her rapidly expanding forms of temporary housing (her first home on the Green Man Lane estate in West Ealing is referred to with unusual sophistication and boldness) and shrewd anger at the degradation of “the social security system of housing.” [that] turned into nothing.”

She asks what impact home insecurity has on a person’s personality and economic prospects. She also writes touchingly about her experiences of negotiating with her mother as a child (“when I …can we stay”), trying to influence the outcome of public policy beyond their control.

A hard-nosed reporter, Yates covers many areas, from interior design politics and scathing “roommate interviews” to the discriminatory practices of homeowners across the country. One of the strongest parts revolves around the still ongoing tragedy of Grenfell.

Yates tells the story of Amanda Fernandez, who spent a year with her elderly mother in a double room at the Holiday Inn Express in west London after her home was destroyed on June 14, 2017. seemingly endless. Shown in limbo, with no washing machine or working window.

Long after the initial shock, we are reminded that there are still “hundreds of Amandas whose untold stories make up the Grenfell we may never fully hear.”

Here, too, there is a gentle good mood. Yates does the unthinkable: she makes the housing crisis funny, or at least as funny as it gets. There is an interlude with a bad time spent with a cousin with unambiguously terrible taste in surreal posters. And it’s hard not to feel the thrill of second-hand humiliation when Yates tells the story of applying for a place in an addict’s home, with the mandatory time of quality roommates built into an informal social contract.

But make no mistake, it also brings with it deep anger at a housing crisis that was not inevitable, but rather a bitter cocktail of state-sanctioned greed, official inertia, and what increasingly looks like willful negligence.