Shelter and the Self

Why affordability is not about money

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over someone who cannot picture their own future. Not the peaceful quiet of contentment, but something thinner. Hollow. It is the silence of a person standing in a rental kitchen at midnight, calculating whether this month’s pay cheque will stretch far enough to cover next month’s uncertainty. The walls around them might be solid, but the ground beneath their feet feels like sand.

We talk endlessly about housing affordability in numbers. Median prices, mortgage rates, percentage of income spent on rent. We draw graphs and debate policy. And yet something essential keeps slipping through our fingers, the way water escapes a cupped hand. Because affordability was never truly about dollars.

It is about permission.

Consider what happens inside a person when they sign a long-term lease or receive keys to their own home.

Something shifts in the core of their thinking.

Suddenly, tomorrow becomes real. Next year becomes imaginable. A decade from now transforms from abstract fog into something with texture, with possibility. This is not merely optimism. It is the psychological foundation upon which we build everything else—our relationships, our ambitions, our willingness to invest ourselves in a community. When we know where we will wake up in five years, we plant differently. We root.

But when housing remains perpetually out of reach, something else happens. The future contracts. Dreams begin to feel like luxuries reserved for other people. The young couple delays marriage. The young couple then delays having kids because they cannot imagine where they would live as a family. The would-be entrepreneur never starts the business because there is no stable ground from which to take the leap. The artist abandons the studio for a second job, then a third, just to stay afloat.

Life becomes a series of deferrals, a constant postponement of the self one hoped to become.

Seventy-one percent of aspiring homeowners are currently holding off on at least one major life decision—marriage, children, career changes, even pet adoption—because they cannot afford a place to call their own. This is not a statistic. It is a generation learning to shrink their dreams to fit their circumstances. And when dreams shrink for long enough, we forget they were ever larger.

Here is a truth we rarely speak aloud: housing affordability does something peculiar to self-worth. When the market tells you, month after month, year after year, that you cannot afford to belong somewhere, a darker narrative begins to form. Perhaps the problem is not the prices.

Perhaps the problem is you.

This is irrational, of course.

The forces that shape housing markets are vast and impersonal—decades of policy decisions, global capital flows, the physics of supply and demand. But the human psyche does not process structural economics. It processes feeling. And the feeling of being unable to secure shelter, that most fundamental of needs, carries an ancient weight. It whispers of inadequacy. Of failure.

I have watched this happen. Capable, intelligent, hardworking people begin to question themselves, not their circumstances. They stop applying for better positions because what is the point if they cannot afford to live near the office anyway. They withdraw from friendships because shame is a solitary emotion. They date less, commit less, hope less. The unaffordability of bricks and mortar becomes the unaffordability of imagining themselves as deserving. Worthy. Enough.

This is not weakness. This is what happens when a basic human need remains chronically unmet. We adjust. We adapt. And sometimes, tragically, we accept limitations that were never truly ours to accept.

There is a particular cruelty to dreaming when you cannot afford to dream safely. The young person scrolling through property listings at two in the morning knows this intimacy well. Each photograph of a sunlit kitchen or a garden with space for children becomes both invitation and accusation. This could be yours whispers the image. But it will not be answers the bank balance.

So we learn to dream with one eye on the emergency fund, one foot out the door. We learn to love places without becoming attached, because attachment makes the leaving harder. We learn to call somewhere home while knowing it is only ever temporary. And this guarded relationship with space extends outward into every other relationship we build. How do you trust a neighbourhood when you might be priced out next year? How do you invest in community when community keeps being gentrified out from under your feet?

The anxiety is not hypothetical. Research confirms what the body already knows: housing affordability stress—that chronic, gnawing uncertainty about whether you can continue to pay for where you live—damages mental health with the same persistence as physical illness. Depression. Social isolation. A sense of powerlessness that seeps into every corner of life. And unlike a broken bone, this damage often goes unseen, accumulating quietly over years.

Now widen the lens.

What happens to a neighbourhood when half its residents are temporary? When the schoolteacher who shaped a generation of children can no longer afford to live near the school? When the artist who gave the district its character is displaced by the very desirability they helped create?

Communities are not buildings. They are the invisible threads between people who have stayed long enough to know each other’s names, each other’s stories, each other’s sorrows. These threads take time to weave. They require the slow accumulation of shared meals, borrowed sugar, children growing up together, hands offered during difficulty. When frequent moves become the norm, when housing instability scatters residents like leaves before wind, these threads never form. Or they form briefly, beautifully, and then snap.

What remains is something that looks like a neighbourhood from the outside but feels like a collection of strangers from within.

Beautiful facades. Pristine streets. And behind every door, people who do not know the face of the person next door. We wonder why anomie has become epidemic, why isolation gnaws at us even in the most densely populated cities. Perhaps part of the answer lives here. Here in the spaces where belonging should be but is not.

Children feel this most keenly, though they lack the words to name it. The constant moves. The new schools. The friends left behind again and again until forming friendships begins to seem pointless. They absorb their parents’ stress like sponges, reading anxiety in the tension around dinner tables, in the hushed arguments about money that drift through bedroom walls after lights out.

And they learn. Not consciously, not deliberately, but in the deep way that shapes a life from the inside. They learn that home is precarious. That stability is a privilege. That wanting things is dangerous because wanting leads to disappointment. These lessons calcify into beliefs, and beliefs become the scaffolding upon which an entire adulthood is constructed. Anxious children become anxious adults become anxious parents, passing the inheritance forward.

The cycle turns.

But let us return to something simpler. Older. What is home, really?

Not the building. Not the mortgage document or the lease agreement. Something deeper. Home is the place where we are permitted to be fully ourselves. Where we can close the door on the performing self we present to the world and simply... exhale. It is the kitchen where we learn to cook our grandma’s recipes, the room where we rock our children to sleep, the garden where we measure the years by the height of the trees we planted.

Home is where we become who we are.

Strip this away—render it temporary, conditional, forever under threat—and something fundamental shifts in human identity itself. We become visitors in our own lives, guests in spaces that should be sanctuaries, tenants not just of apartments but of our own sense of self. The psychological weight of this cannot be overstated. Without stable ground, the whole edifice of identity wobbles.

So perhaps we need to reframe the conversation entirely. Affordability is not an economic metric to be optimised. It is a human experience to be honoured. When we ask whether housing is affordable, we should not be asking merely whether people can pay the bills. We should be asking:

1. Can they imagine a future?

2. Can they feel worthy of stability?

3. Can they dream without fear?

These are not soft questions. They are structural ones, as concrete as any foundation. Because a society that cannot provide its members with these basic psychological certainties is a society building on sand, no matter how impressive its skyline.

And yet. There is hope here, folded into the difficulty like light hidden in dark cloth.

Because naming something is the first step toward changing it. When we recognise that housing affordability is fundamentally about belonging—about the deep human need to have a place in the world—we begin to see solutions we might otherwise have missed. Not just more buildings, though we need those. Not just subsidies and policy tweaks, though those help too. But something more radical: a reimagining of what we owe each other.

We are social creatures, you and I. We evolved in tribes, in villages, in communities where belonging was a birthright rather than a purchase. The privatisation of shelter into a purely market commodity is, in evolutionary terms, a very recent experiment. And the results are coming in. They do not look good.

But experiments can be revised.

Directions can be changed. The story we have been telling ourselves—that home is a commodity, that security must be earned, that belonging can be priced out of reach—is just that: a story. And stories can be rewritten.

Imagine, for a moment, a different architecture. Not of buildings, though that matters too, but of assumptions. An architecture in which every person’s need for stable shelter is treated as legitimate—not as a reward for financial success, but as a foundation upon which success becomes possible. An architecture in which communities are designed for continuity rather than churn, where neighbours have time to become friends, where children can count their growth in familiar doorframes.

This is not utopia. It is simply the recognition that certain things are too important to be left entirely to markets. That belonging matters. That the feeling of having a place in the world is not a luxury but a necessity. And that when we deny this necessity to too many people for too long, something precious begins to fray in the social fabric itself.

The young person at the kitchen window, calculating their future against their bank balance, deserves more than anxiety. They deserve to dream. Fully. Without apology. Without the constant undertow of fear pulling them back from the shore of their own potential.

This is not a small thing to ask. It is, in fact, everything.

Because in the end, affordability is not about what we can pay. It is about who we are allowed to become. And that—that—is a question worth everything we have to give it.

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