Housing the locus to positive progression: young people’s experience of housing inequities and the prospect of hope

This thesis was developed from a tacit theory that housing comprises a locus of positive progression for young people at risk. Yet their lived realities are more tensile. Young people experience housing as an embodied space where interpersonal relationships play out and produce loci of effect, and a place shaped by challenging structural conditions. Lived accounts capture young people’s fractured childhoods in the non-home of presently absent parents, the house‑less event when they are kicked out, traversing dangerous terrains within proximal peer communities, and accessing the scarce resource of independent accommodation. As these conditions converge, effects emerge. A schematic of housing‑loci effects is developed to access the complex macro–meso–micro conditions which operate across lives and impact young people’s experience. Young people describe being trapped in the homelessness vortex and the “longgg” housing system, where gatekeeping, defensive practitioner behaviours, and the absence of early intervention cause harm. Structural conditions compound this: a marketised and privatised housing system that generates high‑cost impacts for renters with limited resources, and a persistent undersupply of affordable homes. Despite these realities, the young interviewees live with a growth mindset as they pursue “prospects of hope”. Alderfer’s Existence–Relatedness–Growth theory is applied in a housing context to illuminate these motivations, as young people follow pathways oriented towards positive life progression. Conditions of secure housing, coupled with “sustaining” relationships, are interpreted as engendering feelings of safety, positivity, and hope. In young people’s lived experience, these conditions constitute a locus for restoration from painful life experiences and a locus for positive progression – towards employment, adult relationships, and the establishment of home. The research contributes ideas that may support equalising housing solutions. Crucially, young people apply their lived experience to offer actionable recommendations for policy and practice aimed at advancing change for young people with less resources.