8. Home, Trust, and the Right to the City: Concluding Remarks

The final chapter weaves together the various threads that pervade this book: trust, home, housing insecurity, and activism. Home as a space of trust does not lose its significance in the face of the housing crisis; rather, its potential and significance are underlined. The analysis reveals not only the pitfalls of the current housing system and the hardships of people on the ground, but also the strong sense of belonging people continue to feel and home’s potential for current activism around the housing question. This chapter thus aims to strike a hopeful chord, showing that while the home has become unsettled, it remains a central building block of urban society. Things are thus more complicated than to simply attest a loss of home and trust in times of the US housing crisis. Rather, the final chapter highlights the ambivalence of home and trust. When analyzing people’s housing biographies, home is simultaneously about trust and distrust, about belonging and displacement, about rootedness and venturing into the future. Having extrapolated the significance of home, this chapter then concludes in a call for a universal right to housing as part and parcel of the right to the city.