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Where do you live? Over a decades-long housing crisis in the UK, the answer to that question has become a complicated one Our responsibilities and abilities as individuals to put down roots and participate in communities, to invest in the houses we live in and the areas that surround them, have been compromised by years of an unregulated private rental market, unaffordable home ownership and, above all, underinvestment by central government and local councils in the building of new social housing   Today, one person in every two hundred in England and Wales is homeless In the first four months of 2018, over 100,000 children in England were living in temporary accommodation, a figure that was up nearly 80 per cent since 2011 In his book about social housing in Britain, Municipal Dreams, John Boughton notes that in 1979, one in three of the population lived in council housing Today, there are more people living in private rental accommodation than in social housing A report produced by a cross-party commission in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire called for three million social homes to be built by 2040 And yet in cities up and down the country, but most acutely in London, luxury apartments go up at an alarming speed The optics can be confusing, as can the economics Who are these homes for?
 Who can afford to live there?   This is the context in which our roundtable on housing took place Our conversation focused on social housing, which once provided genuinely affordable accommodation for the many The participants traced a history from the beginning of social housing to the effects
 of Right to Buy to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 They discussed the psychological effects of bad housing, the vilification of estates as well as the joyful aspects of growing up in them, the failure of the private market, and how the negative consequences of gentrification might be lessened As this roundtable shows, a conversation about housing is always a conversation about public space and community, as well as about safety and freedom   (…)   JOHN BOUGHTON: We live in an Alice