CityReads | How Housing System Affects Social Reproduction?

Madden, D. (2025). Social reproduction and the housing question. Antipode, anti.13132.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13132

Picture source:https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/housing-is-a-social-good/

The declining birth rates in most countries worldwide, coupled with the high costs of housing and childcare, have plunged social reproduction into crisis, making it increasingly expensive, uncertain, and difficult.

How does housing influence the crisis of social reproduction?

Housing serves as the fundamental infrastructure of social reproduction. While social reproduction is largely (though not entirely) a process that takes place within the household, its functioning is constrained by the structural forces of the housing market, which in turn shape how residents use and experience housing.

David Madden, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics, is the author of In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (see（CityReads | The Permanent Crisis of Housing; CityReads | Why We Are So Tired? On the Politics of Urban Exhaustion). In his recent paper Social Reproduction and the Housing Question, Madden connects the housing crisis with the crisis of social reproduction. He argues that housing is not merely the site or container of the crisis of social reproduction; rather, it functions as a vehicle and lever that can either intensify or mitigate the crisis.The contemporary housing system exacerbates and shapes the crisis of social reproduction through multiple pathways. The paper specifically identifies four mechanisms through which the housing system influences and intensifies this crisis: depletion, disruption, redomestication, and recommodification. Finally, the paper emphasizes that social reproduction is a central issue in contemporary political economy research and a key area of action for many social movements. Critical urban and housing studies cannot afford to overlook the analysis of social reproduction.

Social reproduction

In the 18th century, physiocrats such as François Quesnay used the concept of social reproduction to describe the overall process of a society reproducing itself. A similar meaning can be found in the works of Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, and sociologists of education and health.

In the field of housing and urban studies, social reproduction theory inherits key elements from critical political economy and is influenced by feminist perspectives. Its fundamental premise is that political and economic life is not only constituted by the sphere and practices of direct production but also involves the reproduction of workers and labor power. This process occurs outside and prior to direct production, yet it is a necessary condition for production to take place and continue operating. The labor of social reproduction sustains all economic activity.

The reproduction of life does not happen automatically—it requires labor. Moreover, depending on different contexts and available resources, this process unfolds in an unequal manner. The concept of social reproduction is used to refer to this labor, which sustains both human life and society.

Under financialized capitalism, the responsibility for social reproduction has been shifted onto families and communities, while their capacity to fulfill this responsibility has been simultaneously undermined. Social reproduction has thus become structurally divided: for those who can afford it, it is commodified; for those who cannot, it is domesticated.

Depletion

One key way in which the housing system influences the crisis of social reproduction is by serving as a vehicle for "depletion through social reproduction". Depletion is defined as a condition in which the outflow of resources in the labor of social reproduction exceeds the inflow of resources and surpasses a sustainable threshold, thereby harming those engaged in this unpaid labor (primarily women). Resource outflows include unpaid domestic labor, subsistence work, care work, and voluntary community labor, while resource replenishment includes access to healthcare, social welfare provisions, and community support networks. Housing can have a depleting effect on social reproduction because the resources required to obtain and maintain housing consume a significant portion of households' finances, time, and energy, making it difficult to invest in other aspects of daily life reproduction.

High housing costs and barriers to housing access exacerbate resource depletion through social reproduction. For example, there is a significant correlation between food insecurity and the proportion of income spent on housing. Expensive housing is often associated with greater material hardship, forcing households to cut back on other essential expenditures such as clothing, children's education, and healthcare. This effect is particularly pronounced among racially marginalized groups facing structural discrimination. For families struggling with high housing costs, the resources needed to avoid material and existential hardship are often forcibly redirected toward housing expenses, a phenomenon known as "rent first".

The most evident example of housing-induced resource depletion in social reproduction is seen in the accumulation of household debt. Amid stagnating real wages, household debt levels have surged among middle- and lower-income families. Mortgages, home equity loans, and credit card debt have become common strategies for filling the financial gap in the cost of social reproduction and maintaining consumption levels.

Depletion also manifests in the emotional, cognitive, and physical dimensions of housing and everyday life. Unaffordable housing makes reproductive labor more exhausting and stressful. Policies such as rental subsidies may help alleviate this burden. If the housing crisis is draining the resources necessary for social reproduction, policy interventions aimed at reducing housing stress can help curb this depletion process.

Disruption

Housing issues not only deplete household resources but can also interrupt social reproduction through the spatial organization of care networks and caregiving practices. Disruption refers to temporal and spatial barriers in the reproduction process. The contemporary housing system is a major source of disruption in social reproduction, with especially significant impacts on working-class, low-income families, and other marginalized groups.

One of the main manifestations of contemporary housing inequality is the differential ability to control residential mobility and immobility. Whether tenants or homeowners, middle-class families generally have the ability to control this process, choosing to relocate or remain in a place when it benefits them. However, this option is not easily accessible for many working-class and low-income families. This inability to control where they live can severely disrupt social reproduction activities, which often rely on complex, location-based care networks. Working-class and low-income families have less control over relocation and move more frequently than middle-class families. Frequent, involuntary moves can severely disrupt care networks, affect access to institutions and places that provide social reproduction resources, and generally weaken social reproduction practices. Housing instability not only brings a heavy economic and social burden but is also linked to increased anxiety and other mental health issues, even raising the risk of suicide.

Even when families are not subjected to involuntary relocation, certain aspects of the contemporary housing system can still disrupt social reproduction. Due to rising rents and home prices, more people—especially low-income workers and minority groups—are being forced to endure longer commuting distances and times, which complicates social reproduction. Low-income workers seeking more affordable housing must move to more distant suburbs, leaving them farther from schools, daycare centers, and other key services for social reproduction.

Changes in housing policy can also have similar effects. For example, many local governments in the UK fulfill their statutory housing obligations by offering housing in other administrative districts or cities, disrupting residents' daily lives and social reproduction networks.

In countries like the UK and the US, housing uncertainty is becoming increasingly pronounced, especially for renters, with rising unaffordability, overcrowding, inadequate maintenance, and housing instability. These issues greatly increase the difficulty of social reproduction and can have profound effects on individuals' and families' livelihoods.

Redomestication

Redomestication refers to practices that were originally carried out in public spaces and institutions, supported by the state, being shifted back into the realm of private family responsibility. Redomestication encompasses privatization, including the withdrawal of the state or a shift in state strategy, with the market becoming the central player. Furthermore, redomestication also involves what is known as "responsibilization", where the state relinquishes care responsibilities, forcing families and individuals to take on their own duties in new ways. The increasing inequality within the housing system and changes in housing welfare policies have further driven the process of redomestication. Redomestication means that families must independently bear the burden of essential social reproduction work. It not only shapes the growing stratification of the housing system but is also affected by this stratification, as families' access to the spatial resources needed for reproduction becomes limited, and their housing choices are constrained.

Redomestication is also a spatial process, one of the typical manifestations of which is the transformation in the design of social housing, where social reproduction activities that were once carried out in shared public spaces are now moved into the home. From the late 19th century until the end of the postwar expansion of social housing, public housing in the UK, Europe, and other regions typically followed a community-based model. The state provided public infrastructure such as health centers, daycare facilities, playgrounds, workshops, and leisure facilities to support social reproduction functions. However, under neoliberal reforms, this type of social infrastructure in social housing has gradually disappeared. Today, even when social housing is still available, it is often limited to housing units without accompanying broad social infrastructure. As a result, the responsibility for maintaining residents' health and well-being has fallen entirely on families, and it must be carried out solely within the private space of the home.

As the state withdraws from social reproduction functions and transfers these responsibilities to the market, wealthy families respond by commodifying and outsourcing caregiving work within the household to private services. There are significant differences in how families from various social classes respond to redomestication. Due to slow wage growth and the lack of effective social policies, families are forced to rely on their own living space and resources to meet the caregiving needs of their members. For wealthy families and some middle-class families, redomestication often takes the form of employing foreign domestic workers, creating a complex global racialized division of caregiving labor.

Recommodification

Housing has become a channel for the recommodification of social reproduction. The social reproduction crises that families experience are seen as business opportunities in the market. What makes the family reproduction industry unique is the widespread application of digital platforms, data enrichment, and other technological capital features in the context of the escalating housing problem.

Many technologies promoted under the label of "smart homes" are packaged as digital tools to optimize social reproduction. Although these technologies are marketed as solutions to social reproduction problems, their effects are highly complex. While they simplify certain tasks, they also introduce new forms of labor. Many applications further reinforce the gendered division of domestic labor.

Digital monopolistic capitalism has also created new ways to organize and profit from the recommodified social reproduction labor. Since the 2000s, a large number of digital platforms have emerged, offering various services through market-oriented methods, transforming previously unpaid domestic labor into paid work. These include services such as food delivery, cleaning, personal care, childcare, errands, gardening, dog walking, repairs, building maintenance, document filing and organizing, furniture assembly, and more. These commercial platforms reflect the inequalities of contemporary social reproduction, where low-income and marginalized groups perform a large amount of unstable labor that supports the daily lives of middle-class families. This creates a model where the needs of time-poor families are met through the labor of money-poor workers. The strategies employed by households with stable housing to manage social reproduction pressures, in turn, exacerbate the predicaments of those with housing instability.

Conclusion

The housing system exacerbates, extends, and shapes the social reproduction crisis through depletion, disruption, redomestication, and recommodification, leading to specific inequalities and harms. Housing shifts economic issues that might affect capital accumulation onto workers. The social reproduction of labor is pushed onto families, making them bear this burden.

Housing is a key site for shaping and limiting social reproduction, but it can also become a site for the repoliticization and renegotiation of social reproduction. By refusing to domesticate the social reproduction crisis, housing can be transformed into a public issue, one that capital and the state must confront.

When families and social movements repoliticize social reproduction in the context of housing issues, they seek to reject and reverse the four processes mentioned above. Just as workers' economic and political struggles in the workplace (for higher wages, shorter working hours, more social benefits) aim to resist capitalism's attempt to increase surplus value through exploitation, workers' struggles at home are also aimed at protecting their reproductive and living spaces, resisting landlords' attempts to extract profits through rent.

If one of the core goals of neoliberal urbanization is to maintain the profitability of urban capital through the privatization and commodification of social reproduction, then one of the goals of post-neoliberal cities should be the decommodification and socialization of family reproduction, so that it no longer submits to the demands of capital accumulation.

CityQuotes

1."Even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens."- Maria Popova, Figuring

2."Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Our physical and social environments change. Almost all of our cells are replaced. Yet we remain, to ourselves, who we are."― Maria Popova, Figuring

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"