Psychology, neuroscience, and the housing crisis

Place attachment in our most intimate spaces

Home by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

It’s been a long time! I’m not going to give you a boring account of why the Wandering Brain has been dormant for so long. Here’s the short version: 1. my day job became too time-consuming for extra stuff, 2. We had a baby!  I’ll leave it at that for now, along with the expressed hope that going forward as I contemplate some major decisions about my future, you’ll see more of me here. Stay tuned for that news.

For the last little while, I’ve been thinking about housing. Who hasn’t? Seemingly out of nowhere, at least for many of us, finding somewhere to call home has become one of our most vexing existential problems, even in the so-called super-developed West. In my own little corner of the universe, I’ve seldom thought that I have much to contribute to this discussion, but I’ve had a few small conversations lately with Canadian government people who are trying to help, and I’ve been trying to cobble together some thoughts for a talk I’m giving in a few days.

As always, I begin by pondering what unique perspective my own background might have to offer to the way that we think about housing and home. And oddly enough, once I think this way, I make unexpected clang associations with bits and pieces of my own past both personal and professional.

I’ve written here before about my grand ambition to undertake a pilgrimage to every home I’ve occupied in my life (I think the number is 21 and now holding steady, possibly for the rest of my life—I’m one of the lucky ones). I won’t belabour that story again. If you want to read about it, go look at this old article in Nautilus or wait for an upcoming chapter I’ve written for a book called Dwelling, release date TBA. Briefly, my pilgrimage, which is still far from complete, taught me that there are certain enduring resonances that seem to build over the years as one moves from place to place. In my own case, this manifested as the shocking discovery that the house I live in now, and which I’ve been more strongly drawn to than any other home I’ve ever had, has a remarkable resemblance to one of my first childhood homes in England. I didn’t know about this resemblance at the time I made the offer to buy the house (though I will say that it was probably responsible for me careening wildly into more debt than was, ahem, wise) but I’ve thought about it many times since then. But that honestly isn’t much of an epiphany, is it? That we are attracted to places that resemble parts of our history seems obvious. It’s a little bit less obvious perhaps for someone like me, who cut his scientific teeth thinking about behaviour biologically and so has been biased towards the essentialist assumptions that animal researchers often have, even if only subconsciously. We all might believe that every animal has a personality (ever owned a dog?) but when habitat selection researchers try to understand why animals choose the locations that they do for their homes, we seldom think about the role of history, experience, or culture as much as we think about form, geometry, and ecology.

Other than reflecting on the memories that our former selves might whisper into our ears as we wander through real estate open houses, I’ve had some other visits from my past selves, these ones scientific selves.

Early in my career, I was interested in how animals understand and use space, how they find food, mates, and stay safe doing so. A lot of this work required me to develop methods by which I could keep painstaking track of how animals moved, how often they raised their heads to look around, how often they paused, and even where they pooped (yes….counting fecal “boluses” is a thing because it can be a proxy for anxiety…no way I could make that up-- but if you think back to a time you’ve been really anxious about something, you might see the sense in this). Now, to do this very careful monitoring with nothing more than a pair of eyes and a clipboard is excruciatingly boring and difficult, so with the patience of a young researcher I developed some methods using cameras, imaging software and a lot of code that I wrote myself (as I’ve often said, any student present or past who reads these words will have to swallow their skepticism that there was ever a time that I did my own coding. And enjoyed doing it.).

In my earliest studies using these fancy methods, I did the simplest thing that I could imagine. I took an animal (ok, I’ll say it out loud…a GERBIL. I took a GERBIL. This was the species of choice) and placed it into a big round chamber. There were no features in the chamber itself but of course the chamber was in a big room and the room had walls and a ceiling and things stuck on the walls (probably posters of Jethro Tull and Bob Dylan if I’d had my way). But as far as the gerbil was concerned, unless it had refined taste in music the whole place was very homogeneous.

You might expect that an animal heaved into a miniature coliseum like this would just run willy-nilly, perhaps spinning a few boluses along the way, but my careful tracking setup showed that this was not the case. Before very long at all, in fact within the first few seconds of her bizarre experience in the chamber, the gerbil would begin to make structured use of the space. She would self-define a location somewhere in the field and all her movements would be structured around that location. She would make little forays out into the greater world, usually creeping a bit with belly close to the ground, and then she would pause and dart back to her favoured location. I soon found that I was not the first one to have noticed this behaviour (especially when it comes to measuring the behaviour of rodent critters in contrived laboratory environments, it’s hard to be the first person to see anything at all). Others had come to call what I was seeing “home base behaviour.”  Very apt. And also, very interesting that the default state of an animal is to self-define some location in space as “home” even when it doesn’t really have anything at all homey about it. It’s just a set of coordinates on a Cartesian grid, really.

We don’t really know all the reasons why animals do this, but it makes sense to suppose that they are using home base behaviour to make a map of space. Exploratory forays from home and then quick returns might be a good way to figure out what’s around you and where you are. Indeed, when I was studying this stuff and writing academic papers for my audience of 4.5 people, I mused that people probably do something like this as well. Think about what happens to you on a vacation to a new city, for example (though actually these days, and to our detriment, we seldom set out in a new place without a phone in our hands and a blue dot that can tell us exactly what’s around us). Let’s say that you’re staying in a nice hotel (I hope this for your sake) and your first mission on the first morning of your holiday is to find the good coffee. You make a foray, perhaps armed with some advice from the concierge or the doorman, and then you return to the hotel at some later time. Over successive forays, you gradually build yourself a workable map of your surroundings that can give you access to the stuff of life. Over a remarkably short period of time, you’ve fashioned a kind of survival map of your immediate surroundings. The longer your stay, the more elaborate becomes the map.

This peregrination into the ways of rats and gerbils might seem a far cry from the concerns of the housing crisis, but if the same things are true of our lives in space as are true of these simple little beings, and I would guess that they are, then there’s some insight here into the meaning of home. It may be that it’s almost impossible to not have a home in some sense. It makes me think of the increasing trend to ban the word “homeless” from the lexicon and replace it with the word “unhoused.” I think that the origin of this trend was not some kind of fashionable woke-ism so much as the sticky pejoration that attaches to the word homeless. The word “unhoused” points away from the individual and towards the failure of a system that should provide the basic supports of life for all of us. But the change in language may also be in keeping with home base behaviour and biology. Though we might not all have a nice, tidy shingled roof over our heads, we all have a home. People who live in informal settlements like the remarkable Dharavi in Mumbai or even the humble encampments found increasingly dotted through the landscape of most cities do have homes. And indeed there are loads of signs that they cherish and attach to these homes. Though its more complicated than this, anyone who has witnessed the tenacity with which dwellers in encampments cling to their home base even when offered housing that is seemingly more comfortable and safer is witnessing the power of place attachment.

When I studied psychological responses to an affordable housing complex in Manhattan some years ago, I found that whereas “outsiders” such as tourists found the appearance of the plain design of the building somewhat repugnant, those who lived in the immediate area had much gentler opinions. Based on their own reports and my somewhat unscientific judgements, I think that the reason for this is that the people who lived in the neighborhood knew the residents, the families, the activities, and the history. They saw through the bricks and mortar to the nexus of connections that really defines a place.

Two locations that showed differences in psychological response during experimental walks in New York. Outsiders showed marked negative responses to the affordable housing complex but locals responded differently.

But does this mean that we needn’t worry about what types of accommodations we cobble together for the unhoused? Doesn’t our inbuilt impulse to make a home out of any featureless piece of geography provide reassurance that we can ease up a bit on making housing nice, provided that it gives everyone protection from the weather? You’ll react to this statement with a grimace, I hope. Without the pointy-headed scientists telling you this, you already know about the impact that your most intimate surroundings have on your wellbeing. If you’re lucky you’ll know that the impact is positive. But for many, it isn’t. It’s more a matter of making the best of what we have, even if that turns out to be a few bits of cardboard and a tarp.

So what does matter? What makes us have those nice warm feelings about our homes? Luckily, there’s some good science in this area. We know quite a bit about place attachment, much of it having to do with our connections with others, our networks and our communities. We also know some things about the impact of basic sensory features on our attraction to place. Some of my colleagues have shown that there is a set of features that make it likely that we will approach a place. Features like curvature, symmetry, naturalness, interesting levels of complexity all tickle parts of our brains that make us feel good and draw us in. Scientifically, we are beginning to understand the underpinnings of the things that we like, and what I predict we will find as we continue to study these affinities is that there is an enduring effect of the basic sensory features of our homes on our psychological wellbeing and physical health. Just as it has been shown that exposure to nature, things like boulevard trees in cities, has a measurable effect on health, the same kinds of things will be true of homes.

Given this, it will be a double tragedy if, in our understandable clamour to find ways to provide affordable housing for the unhoused or precariously housed, we lean too far towards the assumption that aesthetics and attractiveness of that housing is only secondary. The cost of designing housing that is psychologically sustainable may be small  compared to the human cost of neglecting such factors. Previous generations, including mine, have already done plenty to postpone payment of debts to future generations. Using what we have learned about place attachment and wellbeing will help prevent some of those debts from multiplying further.

What I’m Eating

I’ve been mostly sticking close to home lately — there’s a new baby at our house and she prefers the home cooking. But at a recent conference I had a chance to explore some Ottawa food. Here’s a delicious sample: a dip called muhammara I found at a fabulous little out of the way Turkish place. The wily server convinced me that I would also need to order a pide (think pastry roughly in the shape of a fish stuffed with something fantastic—in my case duck confit) in order to be full. She was wrong. But I ate the pide anyway (not pictured because I’ll just make you too hungry).

What I’m reading

The avoid the risk of becoming boring, I’m taking a break from the boring academic tomes I sometimes have to plod through and I’m reading the latest Amor Towles book of stories called Table for Two. He’s such an engaging writer that even when held in one hand at 3 am while a newborn is blubbing formula all over my lap I remain immersed. I don’t think she minds.