Getting over messages to improve housing | Nat Kendall-Taylor

Poverty is an important part of the story of housing. If the public doesn’t think about the relationship between poverty and housing, they are less likely to support policies and programmes that can address either issue - or both. Getting the message right is important, for housing professionals and all advocates of social change.

Last year, we conducted research looking into UK public perceptions of poverty [pdf], alongside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the National Children’s Bureau. We found that when you ask people about poverty, you’re likely to hear a morality tale about the kind of people who are poor, the choices they make, and the values they hold. At its core, people think this is a story about individuals – not society – and this is echoed and amplified through media portrayals of “benefit scroungers” or ”shirkers”.

People do recognise the ways housing policies affect poverty. They understand, for example, that the high cost of living in the UK, and particularly in London, creates financial pressures that can push people into poverty and that increasing access to affordable housing would help address this. But thinking about the bigger picture is often obscured by this focus on individuals.

So how can people who want to tell a compelling story about housing escape this trap?

The first tip is to draw people away from specific examples, and on to context. Advocates routinely tell stories about individuals in extreme circumstances to engage audiences on an emotional level. These individual stories can be effective if embedded in larger narratives that put the individual in a social context, but they can also cause people to think about answers at an individual level such as the need for beds in shelters and hot meals rather than increased funding for council housing.

When profiling a rough sleeper, advocates could explain how housing policies or other systemic factors contribute to poverty – and how poverty contributes to homelessness. Better yet, they should skip the profile and tell a story like this one about a council group that is partnering with contractors to build low-cost homes.

Our research on housing messages in the US also yields insights that may apply in the UK. This research shows problematic associations with the terms housing and affordable housing that limit how people think about the importance of affordable, quality, and healthy housing; the ways in which housing is connected to other social issues; and, most importantly, the options for change. While it isn’t possible to completely avoid these terms, we have advised US advocates to use language that broadens the idea of housing – to talk about how much a home means to individuals, families and communities, for example.

We have also urged US housing advocates [pdf] to:

Use an even tone. Housing is often framed as a crisis in both the UK and the US. But messages that focus on the urgency and severity of housing problems often backfire because people feel powerless against the weight of what they see as an intractable problem.

Connect housing to other social issues. In the US, those working in housing do frame the discussion in terms of its broader impacts but not often enough to significantly broaden the audience.

Emphasise solutions. Explaining how solutions can improve outcomes can combat pessimism and build hope for policy change. The challenge is not to convince people that the system is broken, but to show them that it can and must be fixed and to explain how to do so.

If we learn to tell stories effectively, we can put pressure on politicians and policy-makers to advance reform – and we’ll have more power to change our social policies and the homes and communities we live in.

Nat Kendall-Taylor is an anthropologist and chief executive officer of the US-based thinktank FrameWorks Institute.

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