What does it look like to imagine a new vision of home?

03/31/2026

By Claire Haas

Imagine your idea of a good neighborhood. Then, imagine a bad neighborhood. You can picture both easily, right? We all know this code, deeply based in unspoken racial lines about where we desire to live. This is the deeply ingrained cultural myth that underpins how we think about housing.

Good neighborhoods are the ones where you and your neighbors are (white) homeowners, while bad neighborhoods are where (people of color) tenants manage the impacts of disinvestment, like dilapidated apartment buildings with mold and cockroaches. Our expectations about crime, quality of schools, access to grocery stores, and other key community concerns map onto this binary that stems from this history of Redlining and Redevelopment in post WWII US housing policies that deliberately segregated cities and neighborhoods. 

Last year, I analyzed 325 articles about housing from California news stories for the housing narratives they contained and which identities were represented (such as by race, class, gender, etc.). 

Here are some of the key narratives present in this sample: 

• Housing as Good and Bad Neighborhoods: Many articles contained meanings about good and bad neighborhoods. Between 1/3 and ½ of articles that represented any particular racial group had neighborhood-based narratives. Neighborhood narratives also told stories of housing as a cost, a need, and as an investment, aligning with historical practices of neighborhood segregation.
  
• Housing as a Need and Cost: Almost two thirds of these articles framed housing in terms of expense or as a need, reinforcing that we all know that housing is too expensive and all people need to be housed. Some articles talked about housing as related to health, but that narrative layered on to housing as a cost or need.
  
• Housing as a Right: While in our movement spaces, organizers often use a narrative of housing as a human right, less that 10% of the articles analyzed represented housing as a right. These articles were most likely to feature a politician campaigning on this idea, suggesting that housing as a right might be a really effective narrative with our core base of housing activists but might be polarizing for other audiences. Those audiences might respond better to narratives about housing as a need.
  
• The Housing Crisis: Often, we refer to this moment as a housing crisis, but a crisis is meant to refer to a moment of pressure that demands a decision. Housing affordability is, unfortunately, a long-term problem, and referring to it as a crisis may create a sense of urgency without leading to solutions. While 20% of articles surveyed used this narrative, nearly all of them also contained narratives about cost and need.
  
• Housing as Investment, Luxury, and Profit: I analyzed articles for narratives about housing being an investment, a luxury, and a site of profit. These articles overall took a split, with some articles about how to benefit from home ownership, often using specific racial and gender identities, sometimes specifically in Black or Latine news outlets. But most articles about profit or financialization and luxury-related investment had the investors as the protagonists, sometimes in the form of pop-culture stars. There was a lack of stories about how profit motives and luxury housing were impacting housing affordability.
  
• Housing as Home: Some articles had narratives of home, either with home as where we’re from, or home connected to family and meanings of love. Half of these articles also contained narratives about cost and need for housing. Narratives of home invoke meanings about stability and provide a possible shift in many of our narrative strategies, such as saying “social homes” rather than “social housing.” While social housing suggests a complicated policy or an impersonal apartment complex, social homes invokes meanings of families gathered around a kitchen table.
  
• Representing Identities: Articles were more likely to represent racial identities when talking about problems with housing than any of the more positive meanings. Many times, identities were represented aligning with stereotypes or common associations, such as women being over-represented in articles with narratives of housing as home or housing as a scene of a crime (domestic abuse), or disability being extremely over-represented in stories about housing as health. 

I created a zine and toolkit to help housing organizers be able to understand this research and have actionable steps to take to address racial equity in housing narratives and to prepare spokespeople to give interviews in the press that can direct towards more helpful narratives in our fights for social housing. You can download the zine and toolkit at www.narrativestrategy.org. 

Throughout all these articles, even when not directly present, the myth of good and bad neighborhoods sat underneath, implying a racial and class division to where we call home. My conclusion is that this is our core narrative question we need to address as housing organizers and narrative strategies. We cannot yet imagine a future where home is defined outside this binary. We need to engage collective processes that help us imagine a new vision for homes that are not in good or bad neighborhoods but a world where all people have a home in neighborhoods that are resourced, diverse, and thriving. 

Claire Haas is a narrative strategist, community organizer, and transformational coach based in Lisbon, Portugal. She organized with ACORN and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) for over a decade, was the founding executive director of the Sibling Transformation Project. She holds a master’s degree in Culture and Communication from the University of Lisbon, where she is currently a member of the Trends and Cultural Management Lab, a global leader in academic trends studies research. More about her work at www.clairehaas.com.