Balancing Belonging: Competing Needs and Citizenship Consciousness in Housing Law

This paper draws upon the notion that ‘home, belonging, having a sense of identity, is a prerequisite for . . . occupying a place in the public-political domain’ (du Toit 2007: 211). In other words, perceptions of citizenship depend on the need for a sense of home/place to be fulfilled. Here, specific attention is given to the provision of housing in England in order to argue that belonging within a political community inversely relates to precarity and necessity. Within this jurisdiction, home ownership is often presented as the idealised way of relating to housing; I argue that this is problematic for two key reasons. First, the emphasis on home ownership and the exchange value of residential dwellings presents a number of difficulties for non-owners, namely navigating senses of place and of alienation (Madden and Marcuse 2016). Second, the identification of owner-occupation as a desirable policy objective has manifested itself in a reduction of state involvement in the provision of housing over recent decades. This rhetoric and various policy initiatives contribute to housing precarity for those most in need. This precarity is made manifest in legal decision making, where the material need to be housed can be marginalised in judgment. As such, the courts institute particular limits on place, belonging, and citizenship consciousness. In order to demonstrate this, this paper focuses on an analysis of a recent housing law judgment, R (Z & Anor) v Hackney LBC and Anor [2019] EWCA Civ 1099. This case concerns the housing need of a mother and her children and the competing right of a religious housing association to be able to discriminate when deciding on who can and should be housed. This analysis will demonstrate how housing policy, compounded by reliance on a liberal conceptualisation of human rights, can often cut across people’s senses of place, familiarity, and home. The judgment relies upon various provisions under the Equality Act 2010 and I argue that this exemplifies the need for the duty to consider socio-economic rights to be fully introduced as a vital step in satisfying both geographical and political senses of belonging.