How to talk about homes, homelessness, and poverty

In this exclusive blog, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Natalie Tate explores how the charity’s Talking about Housing campaign, alongside its new briefing, can help housing professionals to communicate with maximum impact.

People in the UK recognise the housing crisis, yet persuading them that everyone can and should have a decent, affordable home is the challenge we’re up against. 

This is where the need for effective framing comes in. The Nationwide Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) have worked in partnership with FrameWorks on Talking about Housing - a project revealing how we should frame our communications about homes. By telling our stories in the right way, we can diminish fatalism and enable people to believe that change is worth calling for. 

Together, we launched a toolkit that offers guidance to anyone who writes and talks about homes. Contained within the toolkit are five recommendations on how to effectively communicate housing issues. 

Recommendations

Talk about homes as a source of health and wellbeing to build understanding of why access to decent and affordable homes matters. By leading with health and wellbeing, we remind people what’s at stake. 

Use the ‘foundation’ metaphor to show how decent, affordable homes should be an essential priority. FrameWorks’ research identified that describing decent, affordable homes as the ‘foundation’ for people’s lives is an effective way to build understanding. 

Invoke people’s sense of moral responsibility to build the case for making decent and affordable housing available to everyone. This creates a sense of collective obligation - and when paired with a systemic solution, we can steer thinking away from individualism. 

Combine a critical tone with explanations of systemic solutions to build a sense of urgency and efficacy. Yes, we should talk about the housing crisis, but we must also focus in on a specific problem and be clear about how and why changing things will help. 

Put individual stories in context to bring systemic changes to the housing system to life. When people with lived experience tell their stories, we should place these in context by clearly pointing to how poor policies or a lack of action have caused harm, or how positive policies have – or could have – a beneficial impact.

New briefing 

Using our framing recommendations helps people understand why our homes are so important and have confidence in meaningful solutions. Whilst the focus of Talking about Housing is on how we can change the narrative on homes, the housing crisis doesn’t exist in isolation. That’s why we've also launched a new briefing about framing homes, homelessness, and poverty.

The briefing includes three specific recommendations, including how to show what the issue is really about. This can be done by connecting our homes to our health and wellbeing and by showing how social homes can loosen poverty’s grip.

• To hear more about how to do this, see examples and gain deeper understanding, join Talking about Housing’s free online webinar taking place on 19 September at 12pm 

Main image: Natalie Tate, Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Credit: Joseph Rowntree Foundation