“Housing” nowadays is understood as a social problem. How are we to establish enough residences so as to make populations both affordable and comfortable? It is difficult to do so because there is always a tendency to build luxury housing rather than build low cost housing. All you have to do is put in gold knobs and the price jacks up, while low cost housing has a small profit margin. Moreover, people away from transit lines or commercial areas will not provide the amenities upper income people desire. That is why municipalities offer rent controls and other devices so that the populations of people will remain mixed rather than just enclaves of very high incomes, though that is an always losing battle, Manhattan, for example, replacing lower income housing with luxury housing. The drive to provide affordable and manageable housing is at least as old as the New Tenement Law in New York City in 1901 which required apartments in buildings to include running hot and cold water, indoor toilets, ventilation and other amenities to be certified for inhabiting these structures. The idea was that housing was a home in that it was a place where people felt comfortable and sufficient in that they could deal with their basic needs for food, heat and grooming. It was a place where people could be at peace when they were alone with their families rather than engaged during the day with commerce and work and schooling and all the other activities or purposes whereby people left their homes so as to joust with their incomes and their bureaucracies. That was different from what happened in mass public supported buildings in the mid Twentieth Century when housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was notorious for elevators that didn’t work and young people wandering around the halls intruding into any apartment they care to and so providing neither amenities nor security for the occupants. The entire edifice had to be torn down because it was an urban pest hole that no one wanted to live in.
So we are already in housing dealing with a notion or conception of home that goes beyond the idea of housing, which is just a place to live. It is a way to live comfortably by having privacy and amenities and the pleasure of family companionship. That idea of housing is meaningful in its social context: a separation between work and family, the breadwinner off to the factory or business, the children off to school, the wives at home tending to and managing their families. A hundred years ago it had been different. Work and family life were intertwined in a single abode either because farmers lived where they worked, tending their acreage with wives and children helping out, or else because cottage industries allowed home cloth makers to stay at home while those who paid them brought their materials to them. Instead, the home was not a place for remuneration except when those very marginal families worked together to earn a living at piece work wages. Actually, the goal of a home was to be able to do nothing, to luxuriate at leisure activities and the pleasures of taking care of one another, what a wife doing endless chores was nonetheless unalienated because she was doing with her own people, she an amateur, and so not to be thought of as being paid a salary or wages. From that descends the idea of backyard barbeques. The husband mixing drinks and presiding over an elaborately appointed outdoor grill as a leisure activity and also a kind of spiritual fulfillment, now that the coronavirus is over, the usual kind of cooking done by women in the also elaborately equipped indoor kitchens that are the pride of the house, even more so than the living rooms where people congregated in past centuries to play cards or read or converse after the servants were finishing up the dining room.Your home is not your castle whereby you are protected from outside intruders, even if people do still subscribe to home security devices. Rather, a home is a site of leisure activities, a carnival of games and amusements, as amplified by electronic devices to broadcast and stream so that a person communicates to the outside and, given a secure income, is free to observe and say what he or she does, independent of constraint but the fruit of thought, whether of politics or religion or novels, as just it pleases, and that the substance of freedom in our times, even if having irresponsible opinions are not constrained by class or ethnic interests.
There are other features that turn places to sleep into homes in which to live and these evolved over time. The Seventeenth Century Lowlands was a time that established the modern home because rooms had privacy and each house had its own style of interior decoration. Some had paintings or objects or tables, not the dreary wall hangings that might previously have preserved heat but strike me as particularly dreary. Indeed, it strikes me that the greatest interior decorator ever was Vermeer, who doesn’t use wall hangings as a symbol by which to inform the viewer what the subject matter is about, even though his “The Art of Painting” has a tapestry on the wall that contains a map that is taken by critics as allegorical, and so a clue to meaning rather than an object for itself. But so many walls are decorated that they make a sense of what the place is like rather than just its meaning. Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance” sports a painting while his “The Music Lesson” has a large rug on a table as well as multiple paintings on a wall and elaborated tiles on the floor, and so the motif is room decoration to make a room liven up and not just give clues to meaning.
Actually, interior decoration may be very old. The drawings of animals in caves, whether lived in by the same people or over time by many different temporary residents, were an art that is rightly regarded as a breakthrough in making an imagination of events past into monuments and representations of facts now gone and mentally revived. It is also the case that those cave drawings make the place a familiar one, a human habitat, recognized as humanly marked and so providing peace and solace that the people there might survive and rest from their adventures, and so are in this modern sense also a home.
Another meaning of home that developed over time was the preservation of privacy. That matter could be associated with the social structure of the family in that a particular family is separated from other families because it has certain services in common, such as eating or having common finances or sharing intimacies of thought or action. You don’t speak outside the family about what you earn or some of your cherished opinions. But privacy also depends on the physical structure of the home. Doors and walls allow people in a family to be private from the outside and also from one another so that in bathrooms and bedrooms they can go about each of their private businesses. This goes very deep. When Japanese Americans were put in internment camps such as a race track, each family would add a curtain to separate the paddock assigned to a family from other spaces so that the family had some degree of privacy. A barracks is not a home in part because it has not much privacy. A pin up picture provides a wall decoration and intimates a more “natural’’ home life, but the point of it is to create collegial rather than familial solidarity, as was the case with Spartan youth or boys in a Victorian boarding school. It is amazing how successful walls can be in protecting privacy. One can live on a floor in an apartment building without ever meeting or knowing members of a family who live a wall apart from their own apartment. Apartment buildings were great inventions, homes no longer needing gables and attics and lawns so as to make a family an independent institution.
There is also another meaning of home that is ancient though not nearly as ancient as the cave drawings. When the three visitors come to tell Sarah that she will have a child of her own even though she is quite old, she is behind the flap of the tent and only listens to what has been told to Abraham by the visitors. Abraham had recognized them immediately for what they were and immediately ordered offering food and milk to them. This is a sign of generous hospitality and it occurs where there are no other tents in evidence, Sarah and Abraham alone with their servants. So we may infer that a function of a house is to offer hospitality, to offer so as to be lenient from some one or many who come to an isolated household so as to achieve peace rather than war. That is different from what happens when there are many tents near one another which is what presumably happened when Abraham and Sarah had been very inhospitable to Hagar and Ishmael, who were part of the social order of the tribe and so didn't earn hospitality. Remember that God and his angels are on the way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, hardly a hospitable event, and so these visitors could turn against the two of them if they behaved less civilly than they do, which is exactly what Sarah does when she mocks at the promise of having a child when she and her husband are so old. Maybe God might have been insulted and who knows what might have followed.
Hospitality remains as something offered to someone who crosses your hearth. You offer drinks or dinner. It is more difficult to quarrel with people who have drunk your liquor or where the son or daughter of your friend has passed you the bread. The same happens when people go out to dinner, which is possibly neutral territory but acts as a way for all parties to feel more comfortable with one another because table talk is interrupted by waiters and plates and so people are more careful and also candid about passing remarks with one another. The common humanity of chewing makes people amiable, even more so when the food is prepared in your kitchen to please a guest. Diplomats share meals not for ceremony but because it works. It should therefore have been no surprise that people felt such a sense of loss during the covid pandemic, people deprived of buying one another a beer or flirting with someone. We all need such things to tie ourselves to one another whether there is or is not a treaty at stake.
A more general point. Concepts that arise out of social institutions, such as privacy, are appropriated in the American culture into being legal concepts. That happened when the Supreme Court identified privacy as a right which could be found in what was called “the penumbra” of the Constitution. It provided the basis for Griswold v. Connecticut, in 1962 that allowed people to buy contraceptives because deciding what to do about contraception was a personal and therefore a private decision, although the purchase was done in a pharmacy which is a public accommodation and would seem subject to commercial regulation. Also dubious about the Griswold decision is that mechanisms for privacy can change. Not only are abortion efforts, an extension of privacy, are now done in clinics and so not in private but also may well become over the counter products, mean that such coincidental circumstances may change and so have little bearing on the issue of privacy, which has to do with a characteristic of a home, which evolve only slowly and can be experienced accurately only in terms of an abode. Privacy means separation of people in a family from one another and others so as not to be aware of what people are doing. It is very precious and a complement of having communication with the world across the moot that separates a home from the world. It is a very distinctive idea.
The same is true of other aspects of home. When it is wrenched out of its particular occasion, the distinctiveness of the concept gets lost, altered into being something else and not nearly as rich for having done so. Hospitality, for example, is weakened by extending it to mean all graciousness or solicitude regardless of circumstance. Hospitality is neither being a good samaritan or is the offering of charity. It is specifically the feeling and obligation that takes place when a person has become under a person’s residence and the family offers food, lodging, and other comforts so as not to have to deal with the ordeals of the cold and snow outside or a moment of solidarity in the midst of an unsettling event, as when a friend took me in after the World Trade Tower collapse rather than let me sit in a motel room away from home but had learned my wife was safe. What happens in hospitality is to share some intimacy with the family, become aware of its peculiar ways of being organized such as who washes up or watches television or what books are on the shelves and so is a sacrifice more important than just food and shelter. Disinterested hospitality is an oxymoron and is in some ways preferable to real hospitality as happens when the government provides welfare checks or places where inoculations can take place. That provides efficiency and legitimacy, but it is not hospitality, an example of which occurs in the modern world where hospitality is an industry provided by hotels and restaurants where people are paid so as to have people act with graciousness and to cater to one or another whim or pleasure that might not ordinarily come to pass in other commercial transactions or which are offered mainly through intimate people. Similarly, escort services can be thought of as part of the hospitality industry but maybe not because offering a wife to a guest would seem to be going too far. Hospitality is generous but not obsequious.
It is also a stretch to turn the separation of home from work into the additional added feature of doing a commute, to travel between the two so as to experience that added set of circumstances, people hurry to keep their timetables, or jostled on trains, or kept in traffic jams. There are advantages to that ordeal in that people get alert, put on their game face, during the trip to work, or relax when going home so as to be less abrupt when dealing with a wife or children, softer than they are at work. But, in fact, that transition is easily managed and so commutation is not a very useful function, people who are working at home during the pandemic easy enough to have children quiet around daddy working at the computer in his study during the length of the work day, themselves having their time apportioned out for homeschooling or play. It is probably being cooped up, unavailable with hospitality, which created a psychological strain wherebyu badly organized people did increase their number of shootings during the pandemic year. Be careful not to see convenience or functionality as being also essential.
What also happens to an aspect of home (or any other social structure) can also become essential. Those interior decorations for cavepeople became autonomous as something called art. Pictures were not just ways to make buildings distinctively familiar; they have, ever since, at least, ancient Greece, been thought of as objects for themselves alone, as having a different kind of existence, summed up as beauty, and including a complex of things having to do with resemblance to something that is not there, to balanced in its parts, to aesthetically pleasureful, to the prospect of a window into a different time and space and being a different person. Art does things for its own but can be derived from its associated thing, which was to make a place a home. Be grateful that the imagination of people is so great that they can twist aspects of one thing into being something entirely different.