My article “What Kind of Home Is the Shared Home? The Social-Transactional Spectrum in Platform-Mediated Homemaking Among Strangers,” co-authored with Julia Harten and Madison Lore, has just been published in the International Journal of Housing Policy. You can download it from IJHP.

This paper builds on our recent work studying exclusionary language in rental housing listings. Shared housing is usually framed as an affordability strategy: people rent a room in a shared home to split costs and gain access to an otherwise unaffordable neighborhood. Our paper instead explores home-sharing as a home-making process and proposes a social-transactional spectrum of visions of the “home.”

We analyze thousands of shared rental listings in Los Angeles to see how listers describe domestic life. Most listings lean transactional by emphasizing privacy, rules, boundaries, furnishings, utilities, and limited access to shared space. These listings often try to recreate something like private renting inside a shared home. But some listings are explicitly social: they describe current housemates as actual people, talk about shared routines and responsibilities, and imagine homemaking as something co-tenants do together.

Different sharing arrangements land on different parts of the social-transactional spectrum. Transactional sharing may appeal to people who want affordability without much social obligation, while social sharing may offer connection, care, and a stronger sense of household – but they create very different power dynamics and tenant experiences. If shared housing is becoming a normal part of urban life, planners and policymakers need to treat it as more than cheap bedrooms and instead start thinking about access to kitchens and bathrooms, house rules, lease terms, co-tenant protections, and the everyday domestic conditions that make housing a home.

From the abstract:

Housing unaffordability and online platforms have turned shared housing into a mainstream housing strategy, even among strangers and those sharing by necessity not choice. Planning and policy, however, have not kept up with the evolving landscape. Current discourse often ignores the social dimension of shared housing, yet it is one of its defining features. Here, we examine how shared rental listers envision homemaking and domesticity through analysis of thousands of rental listings in Los Angeles, asking whether shared arrangements are primarily transactional or oriented toward building social home environments. Using human-assisted machine learning informed by qualitative coding, we categorize listings as transactional or social, then analyze subsamples through thematic content analysis. We find that less than one-third of listings signal social sharing environments; most emphasize transactional arrangements. We argue that this spectrum spans radically different visions of “home.” While social listings embrace the unavoidable social dimension of shared living and treat homemaking as a collective household project, transactional listings essentially aim to recreate private living, fashioning the shared home through boundary setting and relegating homemaking to individual co-tenants. Uncovering this spectrum of homemaking practices helps policymakers understand shared housing’s unique affordances and constraints and craft more-effective policy.

For more, check out our free open-access article at IJHP.