5 Houses and Homes
Story – Residences
Residence: Houses vs. Homes
Our first task is to distinguish between the notions of a house vs a home. Houses are dwellings which can be suitable for shelter. They come in many shapes, sizes, purposes, and cost levels. But the term house refers to a physical space. In contrast, a home is a psychological concept. It refers to many inter-related psychological ideas including a sense of safety, security, and the warmth of positive social connections. These two do not have to be the same place. It is an ideal situation for all houses to be homes and all homes to be houses. However, for many people they are absolutely not the same place. In many instances, someone’s house environment is not a safe or secure place for them. Anyone experiencing domestic violence would be experiencing this situation. The reverse is also possible. Someone could experience a home that is not necessarily a house. Perhaps one feels safety, security, and positive emotional connections in a neighborhood gym, comic book store, or library. It might even be possible for someone to experience a feeling of home in the presence of online environments, though this idea is sometimes disputed.
House. Shelter is one of the most basic survival motives of any animal. Without shelter, survival is much less likely to occur on any given day. This is partly why so many animals take such extreme measures to establish territory. For humans, the concept of shelter is bound up in the economic system of the region one is in. For many industrialized countries, this means needing to purchase at house on some sort of market. And in recent years, around the globe, the cost of housing has increased dramatically. In the United States, China, and many countries in Europe, the cost of housing is as high as it has ever been relative to inflation and incomes. The branch of the Federal Reserve based in St. Louis lists the median home price in the United States at the end of September, 2024 to be $420,400.
The reasons for the large increase in housing are multifaceted and varied depending on the area we are focused on. In the United States, there are a number of factors combining to increase the costs of homes to larger than ever levels. The first is the simple economics of supply and demand. There are simply more buyers in the market than there is supply of houses to satisfy those buyers. The natural question to ask then is why? First, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic opportunities in the form of good paying jobs were coalescing into urban areas. Rural areas were seeing people leaving because people could earn more money in urban areas. This led to an increased demand for housing in urban areas. Not enough time has passed to determine if work-from-home opportunities will reverse this trend, but it is possible that this is a change that will happen as a result of the pandemic. Second, home building has been constrained where fewer homes than the market demands are being built. Again, the reasons for this are multifaceted and varied, but generally stems from neighborhoods being uncomfortable with higher-density housing being built. In architecture, this is sometimes called the “Missing Middle” problem.
In some cases, this means that there are only two types of housing that can be built within an urban space – single-family detached homes and large high-rise apartments/condominiums. The general term for this type of advocating for such policies is NIMBY, an acronym which stands for Not In My Back Yard. NIMBY is a way of thinking which recognizes the need for different city infrastructures, like low-rise apartment buildings, homeless shelters, and foster care settings, but does not want those structures within places that will impact the personal value associated with someone’s dwelling.
Because of the increasing unaffordability of houses, a growing problem of housing insecurity is occurring throughout the world. Housing insecurity refers to a situation where someone currently has a dwelling, but they are in a precarious financial position to the point that any small financial problem that the person or family experiences can have devastating consequences for their ability to pay rent or mortgage payments. Individuals experiencing housing insecurity are most at risk of entering the homeless population and, as a result, many advocates for the homeless often seek to begin their advocacy by targeting people that already have a home with programs that will help ensure they do not enter the homeless population in the first place.
Homes: Homes, as stated above, are a psychological state as opposed to a physical place. There are many qualities that will turn a place into a home. And, in fact, some researchers disagree with some entries on this list or on others. However, the general list does provide guidance about what will make a place a home.
The first critical element of a home is a place for positive emotions. For a feeling of home to establish, one needs positivity and the presence of positive emotions. This element of home is often placed as a distinction for people that are experiencing domestic violence in which they have a dwelling, but do not have the positivity and safety within that dwelling to qualify as having a home. The research literature particularly focuses on women as part of this population as women are disproportionately impacted by domestic violence. There is also a small, but growing amount of research examining how LGBTQ+ populations are impacted by a lack of positivity or safety in a house environment.
The second critical element of something feeling like a home is the presence of positive social relationships. There is a critical need for social relationships within a space for it to be considered a home. These social relationships might be immediate family relationships, extended family relationships, friendships, or romantic relationships. Regardless, the critical factor is the presence of positive relationships that are generally beneficial to everyone living in the dwelling.
The third critical element of a home is a space of privacy. The basic elements of privacy and why it is important for people are detailed in Chapter 6. What is critical here is that for a dwelling to feel like a home, one needs to have a sense that certain elements of interactions within that dwelling will be held in confidence and not shown or discussed with people outside the dwelling.
Finally, the last critical element of a home is the opportunity for personalization and self-expression within the home. A home is a place that feels like one can be themselves, in whatever way that matters. Homes are spaces that someone has a sense of control and feeling of agency over. And then those spaces, through control and agency, to express themselves in ways that they may not feel comfortable doing in other spaces.
Summary
The words house and home are often used synonymously. However, in Environmental Psychology they mean very different things with a house referring to the physical building and home referring to a positive emotional connection with the place and the people that reside there. Housing has increased dramatically in price due to a concentrating of economic opportunities into urban areas. Dramatic increases in price increase housing insecurity and can lead to increased homelessness.