What is a house?
The question is not philosophical. It is zoological, and it has two answers that cannot coexist in the same sentence. A house is, first, shelter -- the most elementary environmental requirement for a terrestrial mammal in a temperate or variable climate. Every zoo on earth provides it. The second of the Five Freedoms, established by the Brambell Committee in 1965 and codified into welfare legislation across the developed world, is freedom from discomfort, defined as the provision of an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area. No accredited facility anywhere -- not the smallest rescue centre, not the most underfunded municipal zoo -- would house an animal without it. Shelter is not a privilege to be earned. It is the minimum specification of a functional enclosure. It is the floor beneath which no keeper may go.
A house is also a financial instrument. It is an asset class traded on global markets, bundled into mortgage-backed securities, leveraged by institutional investors, speculated upon by individuals and sovereign wealth funds, and priced not by the cost of its materials or the labour required to build it but by what the next buyer can be persuaded to pay. In England in 2024, the average home cost 7.7 times the median annual household income, according to the Office for National Statistics. In 1997, when the ONS data series begins, 88 percent of local authorities had house prices below five times average earnings -- the conventional threshold for affordability. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 9 percent. Twenty-seven local authorities out of 318. The shelter became, in the space of a single generation, something the median organism cannot afford.
These two definitions -- shelter and asset -- are in direct conflict. They cannot both be optimised simultaneously. An asset appreciates in value. Shelter depreciates in cost. An asset rewards scarcity. Shelter rewards abundance. An asset benefits the holder by excluding others from it. Shelter benefits the occupant by including them within it. The species built a system in which the fundamental environmental need of every organism is simultaneously the primary vehicle for private wealth accumulation, and then expressed surprise that some organisms have shelter and others do not. Can both definitions survive? Can a society optimise for the value of its housing stock and the welfare of its housed population at the same time? The answer, as the numbers are about to show, is no.
The numbers are not subtle. In England, as of October 2022, there were 676,304 recorded empty homes, according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's council tax base data. Of these, 248,149 were classified as long-term vacant -- unoccupied for six months or more. Action on Empty Homes, a national campaigning charity, estimates the true figure at closer to one million when broader categories of vacancy and second homes are included. In the same country, in the same year, Shelter -- the housing and homelessness charity -- estimated that at least 309,000 people were homeless in England on any given night. That figure, drawn from government data on statutory homelessness, rough sleeping counts, and supported accommodation records, represents one in every 182 people. Ninety percent of them were not sleeping on the street. They were in temporary accommodation -- bed and breakfasts, hostels, overcrowded shared houses, emergency placements -- the institutional holding pattern for organisms whose enclosure has failed. The number had risen 14 percent from the previous year's figure of 271,000.
Six hundred and seventy-six thousand empty homes. Three hundred and nine thousand homeless people. The numbers do not require interpretation. They require a zoologist.
Imagine a zoo. It is a well-funded facility with extensive grounds, modern veterinary infrastructure, and a stated commitment to animal welfare that appears in every annual report, every press release, every guided tour for schoolchildren. The zoo has exhibits -- enclosures designed and built for specific species, equipped with shelter, feeding stations, enrichment structures, climate control. It has more exhibits than it has animals. The surplus is substantial. For every three shelters in the facility, roughly one stands empty.
Now imagine that these empty exhibits are not empty because of a shortage of animals. They are empty because they are owned by investors. Private individuals and institutional funds purchased the exhibits during a period of deregulation, and they hold them vacant because the exhibits are appreciating in value. An exhibit purchased for fifty thousand pounds in 1985 is now worth four hundred thousand pounds, and the investor has no interest in placing an animal inside it, because an animal would cause wear, require maintenance, and reduce the resale value. The exhibit is worth more empty than occupied. Meanwhile, outside the enclosure perimeter, the animals for whom the exhibits were built sleep in the rain. Some cluster near the perimeter fence. Some find temporary cover under structures not designed for habitation. Some die. The zoo's annual report notes with concern that animal welfare outcomes are declining, and recommends a review.
The analogy is precise in every particular except one: no zoo on earth operates this way. The scenario is absurd. A facility that built shelters for animals and then kept them empty as appreciating assets while the animals suffered outdoors would lose its accreditation, its funding, its licence, and the professional reputation of every keeper associated with it. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria requires that enclosures provide sufficient shelter for every animal in the collection. The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums mandates welfare assessment processes that must be proactive, not merely reactive. The Five Domains model, which superseded the Five Freedoms as the leading welfare framework, integrates nutrition, environment, health, behavioural interactions, and mental state into a single evaluative structure. No dimension of that structure permits the indefinite withholding of shelter from an animal for the financial benefit of a third party.
The analogy is absurd only in the context of a zoo. In the context of a human civilisation, it is the housing market. And the fact that the analogy strikes us as absurd for animals but normal for humans -- does that not tell us something about what we have agreed to accept?
The history of human shelter is, for most of the species' existence, the history of pragmatic construction from available materials. The Natufians, the sedentary hunter-gatherers who established the first known year-round settlements in the Levant around fourteen thousand years ago, built semi-subterranean dwellings from stone and brush -- structures designed to insulate against temperature extremes and provide security during sleep. The shift to agriculture, beginning roughly twelve thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, produced permanent villages, and permanent villages produced the first recognisable houses -- mudbrick structures with defined rooms, storage facilities, and communal spaces. The archaeological record from Catalhoyuk in modern Turkey, dating to approximately 7500 BCE, reveals a settlement of several thousand people living in densely packed mudbrick houses, entered through the roof, with interior walls plastered and decorated. The houses were built, occupied, and rebuilt on the same foundations over centuries. They were not investments. They were not assets. They were where the animals lived.
For fourteen thousand years, that is what shelter was. A place to be. Not a portfolio item.
The critical transition -- the moment at which shelter began its transformation from environmental provision to financial instrument -- is not ancient. It is strikingly recent. For most of recorded history, land and property were held through systems of tenure that limited market exchange. Feudal arrangements tied land to obligation. Common land was shared. Ecclesiastical holdings were permanent. Even after the enclosures of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in England -- which converted roughly 6.8 million acres of common land into private property, according to the economic historian Robert Allen -- the resulting property market operated on a fundamentally different logic from the one that governs it today. Land was wealth, certainly. But it was wealth of a particular kind: productive wealth, generating value through agriculture, tenancy, and resource extraction. The house was secondary to the land. The building was an accessory to the productivity of the soil beneath it.
The modern housing market -- in which the building itself is the primary asset, and the land is valued not for its agricultural productivity but for its proximity to employment, transport, and other buildings -- is a product of the twentieth century, and its current form dates to a specific period: the 1980s.
On 3 October 1980, the Housing Act received Royal Assent in the United Kingdom. Its centrepiece was the Right to Buy -- a policy that gave five million council house tenants in England and Wales the legal right to purchase their homes from their local authority at discounts of 33 to 50 percent of market value, rising to 70 percent for flats. The policy was the defining domestic initiative of Margaret Thatcher's government, championed by Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine, and it was enormously popular. Home ownership in the United Kingdom rose from 55 percent of the population in 1980 to 67 percent by the time Thatcher left office in 1990.
The good impulse is real. And this is the chapter where I must be most careful to see it, because the consequences of what followed are so severe that the impulse risks being lost entirely.
The impulse was ownership. The idea that the organism should have a stake in its own shelter -- not merely inhabit it at the discretion of an institution, but possess it, control it, modify it, pass it to its offspring. This is not a trivial desire. It has deep biological roots. Territorial behaviour in mammals -- the defence and modification of a home range -- is one of the most conserved behavioural patterns across species. The nesting instinct is not a cultural artefact. It is neurological. The urge to possess, control, and improve one's shelter is observable in birds, rodents, great apes, and every human culture ever studied. A council tenant in Salford who wanted to own the house she had lived in for twenty years was not being manipulated by ideology. She was expressing a species-typical drive to secure her environment. Who among us would not want to own the walls around us? To know that the shelter we sleep in tonight will still be ours tomorrow?
The error was not the impulse. The error was the mechanism. The council houses that were sold were not replaced. The revenue from Right to Buy sales -- twenty-eight billion pounds by 1995 -- was not reinvested in new social housing construction. Local authorities were prohibited by central government from spending their capital receipts on building new homes. The social housing stock, which had grown steadily since the Housing Act of 1919 -- Lloyd George's "Homes Fit for Heroes" programme, which for the first time made housing a national responsibility -- began its long contraction. By 2024, over two million council homes had been sold through Right to Buy in England alone. The New Economics Foundation reported in 2024 that more than four in ten of those homes were now owned by private landlords, renting them back to tenants at market rates -- often to tenants who would, a generation earlier, have been council tenants paying social rents in the same properties. The organism's shelter was sold, not replaced, and then rented back to the next organism at a higher price. Does that sequence make sense to anyone who is not profiting from it?
Brett Christophers, the economic geographer at Uppsala University, documented the broader pattern in The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain, published in 2018. Since 1979, Christophers calculated, approximately two million hectares of land -- ten percent of Britain's total land area -- had been transferred from public to private ownership. The book's title is precise. The original enclosures, spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, converted common land into private property and dispossessed the rural poor. The new enclosure, spanning the 1980s to the present, converted public housing, public land, and public infrastructure into private assets and dispossessed the urban poor. The mechanism differed. The direction was identical.
Across the Atlantic, the process took a different form but produced the same result. In the United States, the financialisation of housing accelerated in the late 1970s and 1980s through the securitisation of mortgages -- the bundling of individual home loans into tradeable financial instruments. Lewis Ranieri at Salomon Brothers and Larry Fink at First Boston invented the mortgage-backed security, which allowed banks to sell their mortgage portfolios to investors, freeing up capital for further lending. The innovation was, in its own terms, brilliant. It expanded access to home ownership by increasing the supply of available mortgage finance. It distributed risk across a broader base. It connected local housing markets to global capital flows. It also, as the world discovered in 2008, created instruments of such complexity that the regulators charged with overseeing them could not understand what they contained, and when the underlying mortgages defaulted, the losses cascaded through every institution that had purchased the securities, collapsing banks, evaporating savings, and producing the worst financial crisis since 1929 -- all built on the transformation of shelter into a speculative financial product.
The organism's most fundamental environmental need had been securitised. Our need to sleep indoors had been turned into a casino chip.
The word "mortgage" enters English from Old French in the late thirteenth century. It is a compound: mort, meaning dead, and gage, meaning pledge. A death pledge. The etymological dictionary records it from approximately 1390, defined as a conveyance of property as security for a debt, with the condition that if the debt is paid, the conveyance becomes void. The pledge is "dead" because it dies when the debt is paid or when the property is forfeited through failure to pay. There was an alternative arrangement in medieval law -- the vif gage, the living pledge -- in which the income from the property was used to pay down the debt itself. The living pledge was kinder. The death pledge won. It always seems to be the death pledge that wins.
I labour the etymology because words, occasionally, contain a diagnosis that the culture has been trained to ignore. Every organism that purchases a house through a mortgage enters a death pledge. The organism borrows tokens from a bank. The bank, as Chapter 6 established through the Bank of England's own 2014 paper by McLeay, Radia, and Thomas, does not lend tokens it possesses. It creates them. The bank types the number into the borrower's account. The tokens now exist. They did not exist before. The organism then spends the next twenty-five to thirty-five years of its life repaying the tokens -- plus interest -- through monthly deductions from its labour income.
The terms have shifted. In 2023, according to UK Finance, half of all new first-time buyer mortgages had terms exceeding thirty years, up from a quarter ten years earlier. The average first-time buyer mortgage term rose to thirty-two years. One in eight new mortgage agreements was for a term exceeding thirty-five years. The organism, aged twenty-eight or thirty or thirty-three, signs a contract committing the next three decades of its productive life to the monthly repayment of tokens that were created from nothing at the moment of lending and will cease to exist at the moment of repayment. Between those two moments -- creation and annihilation -- the tokens extract a substantial portion of the organism's total lifetime labour output. At a 4.3 percent interest rate on an average UK house, the borrower repays roughly 1.7 times the original loan amount over twenty-five years. The additional seventy percent -- the interest -- is payment not for the house but for the use of the tokens. Tokens that were created by the act of lending them.
This is not a conspiracy. It is the published operational description of the monetary system, as described by the institution that operates it. And it converts shelter -- the most basic environmental requirement of the animal -- into a mechanism for the extraction of labour across the organism's entire productive life. The house is not expensive because houses are expensive to build. A brick-and-mortar two-bedroom terrace house can be constructed for eighty to one hundred thousand pounds in materials and labour. The house is expensive because the land beneath it is expensive, and the land is expensive because it has been capitalised -- priced not by its utility but by the expected future returns it will generate as an appreciating asset in a market where supply is constrained by planning regulation, land banking, and the fundamental incentive structure of property ownership, which rewards scarcity over abundance.
The organism does not experience this analysis. The organism experiences the mortgage as a monthly payment that must be met, month after month, for decades, and that determines where it can live, whether it can change careers, whether it can take time to be with its children, whether it can tolerate a period of illness, and what happens to it if any of these circumstances disrupts the flow of tokens from its labour to its lender. The death pledge does not feel like a death pledge. It feels like responsibility. It feels like what adults do. It feels like the baseline condition of a functioning life. And that normalisation -- the seamless absorption of a thirty-two-year debt obligation into the category of ordinary existence -- is the enclosure wall made invisible by familiarity. How many of us are inside a death pledge right now? How many of us signed it without pausing on the word?
My rent in Leiden is fourteen hundred euros per month. The apartment is on the second floor of a building constructed in 1962. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with a view of the Rapenburg canal if I stand on the counter and lean slightly to the left. It is adequate. It is functional. My two boys share a room. The building's construction costs were recovered decades ago -- long before I was born, long before my landlord purchased it, long before the previous owner purchased it from the owner before. The bricks were fired and laid by people who have since retired or died. The plumber and the electrician completed their work more than sixty years ago. The building exists. It is paid for. It is here.
The rent is not paying for the building. The rent is paying for the right to be inside it.
I pay fourteen hundred euros per month -- sixteen thousand eight hundred per year -- for access to a structure whose material costs were amortised before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The landlord, who owns the apartment as an investment, purchased it for a price determined not by its construction cost but by its market value -- which is to say, by the amount of future rent it could be expected to extract from the succession of organisms who will inhabit it. The rent I pay services the landlord's mortgage, which services the bank's creation of tokens, which services the system's requirement for continuous debt repayment to prevent the money supply from contracting. At no point in this chain does anyone provide me with shelter. The shelter was provided, once, by workers in 1962. Everything since has been extraction.
This is not unusual. This is the structure. And once you see it -- once you trace the chain from your monthly payment back through the landlord's mortgage back to the bank's creation of money back to the system's need for continuous debt service -- the water becomes visible. Not all of it. But enough.
Across the Netherlands, the average rent in Leiden in the first quarter of 2025 was twenty-six euros and ten cents per square metre, 4.7 percent above the national average. Across the United Kingdom, private renters spent an average of thirty-three percent of their income on rent in 2023, according to the English Housing Survey. For the lowest-income quintile, the proportion rises to forty percent or more. The organism works. The organism is paid in tokens. A third or more of those tokens are immediately transferred to the owner of the shelter the organism occupies, in exchange not for the shelter itself -- which already exists, which was already built, which is already here -- but for the continued right to remain inside it.
In Vienna, sixty percent of residents live in social housing. The city directly owns 220,000 housing units, housing approximately 500,000 people. Ninety percent of the population qualifies for subsidised housing. Almost all Viennese residents, including those in market-rate housing, pay less than twenty-seven percent of their net income on rent, and only eighteen percent are "rent burdened" -- defined as spending more than forty percent of post-tax income on housing. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index has repeatedly ranked Vienna among the best cities in the world to live in. The model works. It has worked since the 1920s, when the Social Democratic government of "Red Vienna" began its programme of municipal housing construction. The city decided that shelter was infrastructure, not commodity, and built accordingly.
In Singapore, the Housing and Development Board provides public housing to eighty percent of the resident population. Ninety percent of those residents own their flats, purchased through a government scheme that uses mandatory savings contributions to fund mortgage payments. Homeownership among the bottom ten percent of the population by income is eighty-four percent. Mortgage payments can be as low as seven percent of monthly income when grants are applied. The model works. It has worked since 1964, when the government introduced the Home Ownership for the People Scheme, explicitly connecting housing security to national stability. The state decided that shelter was a right, and engineered the financial mechanisms to deliver it.
In Finland, the government adopted a Housing First policy beginning in 2008, based on the principle that stable housing is a precondition for addressing every other dimension of disadvantage -- employment, mental health, addiction, social integration. The number of individuals experiencing long-term homelessness fell by sixty-eight percent between 2008 and 2022. Helsinki reduced its shelter and hostel beds from 2,121 in 1985 to 52 in 2016, replacing them with 2,433 independent rental apartments for formerly homeless people. The policy saved the Finnish state an estimated fifteen thousand euros per person per year through reduced use of emergency healthcare, police, and the justice system. Four out of five recipients of Housing First maintained their tenancy long-term. The model works.
Vienna. Singapore. Finland. Three different political systems, three different economic models, three different cultural contexts. The same conclusion: when the state treats shelter as infrastructure rather than commodity, the organisms are housed. When the state treats shelter as a market to be optimised for returns, some organisms are housed and others are not, and the distribution correlates not with need but with purchasing power. The zoological assessment is straightforward. The question is not whether it is possible to house every organism. It is possible. It has been demonstrated, at scale, on three continents, across decades. The question is whether the enclosure's designers choose to do so, or whether they choose instead to maintain a system in which the organism's most fundamental environmental need is simultaneously the primary vehicle for private wealth accumulation. The question, in other words, is not one of capacity. It is one of priority. And our priorities, at present, are those of a zoo that keeps its exhibits empty because they are worth more without animals in them.
I have been here before -- at the turn in the chapter where the zoological lens requires me to look for the good impulse beneath the broken system. And in this case, the impulse is not difficult to find.
Property rights enabled civilisation. The Neolithic revolution -- the transition from mobile foraging to settled agriculture that began roughly twelve thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent -- required, as a precondition, the concept that a specific piece of land belonged to a specific group. Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi, publishing in the Journal of Political Economy in 2019, argued that private property, in the form of possession-based claims to cultivated plots and domesticated animals, was more readily established and defended than claims to the diffuse wild resources of the foraging economy, and that this defensibility was a precondition for the emergence of farming itself. You do not plant a crop you cannot protect. You do not build a permanent structure on land someone else can claim. The shift from mobility to permanence -- the shift that produced villages, towns, cities, writing, law, medicine, science, art, and every institution examined in this book -- required the organism to know that the shelter it built would remain its own.
The impulse to own shelter is not arbitrary. It is not ideological. It is functional. Ownership confers security. Security permits investment. Investment produces improvement. Improvement accumulates across generations. The mudbrick houses of Catalhoyuk were rebuilt on the same foundations for centuries because the inhabitants knew the foundation was theirs. The medieval peasant improved the cottage because the cottage would shelter his children. The industrial worker saved for decades to purchase a terraced house because the house represented security that no landlord could revoke. The drive to possess, modify, and defend one's shelter is among the oldest and most conserved behavioural patterns in the species. Thatcher's Right to Buy was, whatever its consequences, built on this foundation. The council tenant who purchased her house was not a pawn of neoliberal ideology. She was an organism securing its environment.
The error was not property rights. The error was allowing property rights over shelter to extend from use rights to speculative rights. Use rights say: this is my shelter, I live in it, I maintain it, I may pass it to my offspring. Speculative rights say: this is my asset, I hold it, I restrict access to it, I profit from its appreciation, and whether anyone lives in it is incidental to its function in my portfolio. The first is biological. The second is financial. The first secures the organism. The second commodifies the organism's need and extracts value from it. The species invented property rights to solve a genuine problem -- the security of permanent settlement -- and then extended the mechanism until it produced the opposite of its original function: insecurity, displacement, and the withholding of shelter from organisms in need of it. Do you see the arc? The same arc as every chapter before this one? A good impulse, a correct response, an extension past its working range, and then suffering at scale.
Every broken system in this book follows the same arc. A good impulse. A correct initial response to a real need. An extension past the conditions under which the response worked. And a resulting structure that produces suffering at scale while the participants experience it as normal, inevitable, and impossible to change.
Globally, the numbers resist precise quantification because homelessness is defined differently across jurisdictions and cultures, and the most vulnerable populations are, by definition, the least visible to the systems that count them. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimated in 2025, ahead of the Second World Summit for Social Development, that approximately 300 million people worldwide are homeless, and that nearly 2.8 billion -- more than a third of the global population -- lack access to adequate housing. UN-Habitat has reported that 1.6 billion people, over twenty percent of the world's population, may lack adequate housing. The World Economic Forum placed the figure at 150 million in 2021, using a narrower definition. The numbers vary because the definitions vary, but the direction is consistent: hundreds of millions of organisms, belonging to a species that has been building shelters for fourteen thousand years, do not have one.
These organisms are not homeless because there is insufficient shelter. They are homeless because the shelter that exists is allocated by purchasing power rather than by need. The global housing stock, by any reasonable estimate, exceeds the number of humans who require it. The empty homes in England alone could house the homeless population of England twice over. The problem is not scarcity. It is distribution. And the distribution is determined not by the animal's biology but by the financial system built on top of it -- the system of tokens, interest, debt, securitisation, and speculative ownership that transforms shelter from an environmental provision into a commodity.
A house in London that stands empty while a family sleeps in a bed and breakfast four miles away is performing, in financial terms, exactly as designed. It is appreciating. It is generating returns for its owner through capital growth. It is functioning, as an asset, perfectly. That the family sleeping in the bed and breakfast is experiencing anxiety, disrupted education for its children, deteriorating physical health from overcrowded temporary accommodation, and the chronic stress response that John Cacioppo documented in organisms deprived of stable environmental conditions -- this does not appear in the asset's performance metrics. The asset is doing well. The animal is not.
I notice, as I write this, the temptation to become angry. The zoological lens is supposed to be dispassionate -- observation, not judgement. But the zoological lens is also honest, and the honest observation is this: no competent keeper, in any accredited facility in the world, would maintain an enclosure in which functional shelters were held vacant as appreciating assets while the animals assigned to those shelters went without. The keeper would be fired. The facility would be sanctioned. The professional bodies that govern zoo welfare would intervene, because the withholding of shelter from an animal in your care, when shelter is available and functional, is not a policy disagreement. It is a welfare failure. And if that standard applies to gorillas and snow leopards and Humboldt penguins -- organisms we share this planet with but whose inner lives we can only infer -- how can it not apply to us?
The species has decided that this standard applies to its captive animals but not to its own members. The gorilla in the zoo has a guaranteed enclosure. The child in the bed and breakfast does not.
Every human gets shelter. Obviously.
I want to sit with the word "obviously" for a moment, because in the context of this chapter it is doing important work. The claim is not radical. It is not utopian. It is not politically positioned on any axis that matters. It is the minimum specification for a functional enclosure. It is what Chapter 1 established as the baseline: identify the animal's needs, provide for them. Shelter is need one. Not need one of eight, ranked by priority, subject to budget constraints and political feasibility assessments. Need one in the sense that you cannot assess any other dimension of welfare -- diet, social connection, enrichment, purpose, mental state -- without first establishing that the animal has somewhere to sleep that is safe, warm, dry, and stable.
The question "Should every human have shelter?" is not a question any more than "Should every gorilla in a zoo have an enclosure?" is a question. The answer is so obvious that asking it reveals the dysfunction of the system in which it needs to be asked. A sanctuary that does not provide shelter is not a sanctuary. It is a yard with a gate. The fact that this needs to be stated -- that it is in any sense controversial, that it triggers in many readers an instinctive classification as "left-wing" or "naive" or "where's the money coming from?" -- is itself the diagnostic finding. The culture has so thoroughly normalised the commodification of shelter that the proposition "every animal should have somewhere to live" reads as political rather than zoological. Notice your own reaction. If you felt a flicker of resistance -- a "yes, but" forming somewhere in the back of your mind -- that flicker is the enclosure talking. Not you.
It is not political. It is the specification.
Vienna built it. Singapore built it. Finland built it. Each chose a different mechanism, a different funding model, a different relationship between public and private provision. Each demonstrated that the allocation of shelter on the basis of need rather than purchasing power is achievable within a modern economy. None of them collapsed. None of them suffered economic ruin. None of them sacrificed property rights -- all three maintain private property markets alongside public provision. What they sacrificed was the principle that shelter is exclusively a commodity. They retained the good impulse -- the organism's right to own, modify, and secure its environment -- and removed the distortion: the speculative layer that converts the organism's need into a third party's profit.
This is the first design principle for Part Four. Shelter is infrastructure, not commodity. It is the roads, the water mains, the electrical grid of habitat provision -- built once, maintained perpetually, available to every organism as a condition of membership in the species. Not because the species is generous. Not because it is idealistic. Because a sanctuary that does not provide shelter is not a sanctuary, and whatever else this civilisation has built -- its tokens, its laws, its institutions, its technologies, its extraordinary and terrible prosthetics for trust at scale -- none of it functions if the animal sleeps in the rain. We know this. We have always known this. The question is not knowledge. It is will.
I want to close with a number, because numbers have been this chapter's language and they should have the last word.
The average first-time buyer in the United Kingdom in 2024, purchasing a house at the median price, with a mortgage at current rates, over a term of thirty-two years, will repay approximately 1.7 times the purchase price. The excess -- the seventy percent -- is interest. It is payment for the use of tokens created from nothing by the act of lending them. Over thirty-two years, at current rates on an average home, this amounts to roughly one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in interest alone. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds of the organism's lifetime labour output, transferred to an institution that created the tokens it lent by typing a number into a screen.
Add rent. The organism that does not buy pays rent instead -- a monthly transfer to the owner of the shelter, payment not for the shelter but for continued access to it. Across a working life of forty years, at the current English average for private rent, the organism transfers approximately four hundred and eighty thousand pounds for the right to sleep indoors. Neither the renter nor the buyer is paying for shelter. Both are paying for access to shelter through financial mechanisms that extract the organism's labour and convert it into returns for owners and lenders.
The organism spends its productive life -- its one life, its only allocation of waking hours on this planet -- earning tokens to pay for shelter that already exists, built by workers who have already been paid, using materials that have already been extracted, on land that was here before any of them. The death pledge. The rent. The interest. The appreciation. The securitisation. The empty home four miles from the family in the bed and breakfast. The 676,000 vacant homes. The 309,000 people without one. The entire structure is not a housing market. It is a labour-extraction mechanism with a roof.
And the organism, caught inside it -- the organism that works the thirty-two-year death pledge or the lifetime of rent, that gives a third or more of its income to the owner of the walls that surround it, that experiences this extraction as normality, as the way things are, as the simple cost of being an adult in a civilisation -- this organism is also, simultaneously, living through something else. Something that the financial analysis does not capture and that the empty-homes statistics cannot measure. The organism's body is being treated as an economic unit. Its labour is being valued. Its time is being priced. Its needs are being commodified and sold back to it at a rate that consumes the majority of its waking life. And somewhere in the architecture of this arrangement, something has been severed.
The animal's body has been split from its mind. The system that houses the body -- the GP, the hospital, the physical infrastructure of health -- occupies one building. The system that addresses the mind -- the therapist, the counsellor, the psychiatrist with the six-month waiting list -- occupies another. And the organism, which is one thing, which has always been one thing, which Damasio proved is one thing and Descartes was wrong to split into two, navigates between them, trying to locate the source of its distress in a system that has divided it into departments.
The animal's body is split from its mind. And that split has a history, a date, a single author, and consequences that reach into every hospital, every clinic, every waiting room in the modern world. The next chapter begins there.