Not enough people in the United States have access to safe, affordable housing. Today, more than 30% of households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, and it's a problem. It reduces available resources for other expenses including groceries, doctors visits, and more, adding pressure across other aspects of our lives. Changing this is a key policy objective of Healthy People 2030, as well as a goal for millions of housing advocates and organizers across this nation. Addressing housing policy means understanding the core—and deeply personal—narratives underlying our daily lives: our homes.

PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, knows that how stories are told, and the narratives they create, is critical to building better housing futures—housing futures that ensure everyone has access to safe, affordable housing. In January of 2023, PolicyLink partnered with housing organizers and advocates across the nation to release the Housing Justice Narrative Toolkit and worked with partners in Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Louis to bring the toolkit to life. Through journalist engagement and other digital engagement efforts, they realized expanding a housing justice narrative through pop culture was critical to this work's success, but to do so meant figuring out how they might navigate the immense media landscape and surface the right content across all audiences.

Dynamic Access to Data

Enter the Narrative Observatory at Harmony Labs, a unique data resource that connects knowledge of who is consuming content on platforms, including TV, news, YouTube, and streaming, to precisely what they are consuming in those places. Already deep in the work of leveraging media culture, PolicyLink engaged Erin Potts, a cultural analyst, and partnered with Harmony Labs to benefit from this data resource.

Erin provided highly skilled and experienced cultural analysis, and Harmony Labs provided the data science capabilities. Together, we designed and executed the most efficient research we could conduct that captured the full spectrum of how audiences tell stories with houses and homes in them. Harmony Labs’ goal here wasn’t to measure narrative prevalence—that kind of work (like this Harmony Labs research on gun violence) is a much longer, more involved process—it was, instead, to ensure that the biggest trends and themes came to the surface to anchor Erin’s cultural audit and equip PolicyLink with actionable recommendations.

This project focused on YouTube—a platform that Pew Research reports nearly 83% of U.S. adults have visited, which has a little of everything, from real estate and neighborhood news to fictional horror stories (which almost always, as it turns out, take place in houses). The goal was to sample channels, videos, and transcript snippets which mentioned homes, housing, and other housing related keywords (for example: apartment, tenant, rent) across several audiences to spotlight the diverse range of stories for the analysis, so that Erin could consume and synthesize the media content, identifying patterns, illuminating questions, and inspiring ideas—all with the goal of helping PolicyLink sample the storytelling opportunities afforded with a specific emphasis on PolicyLink’s understanding of their anti-racist base and persuadable audiences.

Not So Easy

Effectively capturing all the “relevant” media without retrieving all of YouTube for a concept as broad as “home” is difficult! Tackling this challenge involved an iterative, collaborative process to surface relevant housing-related content based on keyword inputs from housing experts, organizers, and advocates. The media included the intersection of video games and housing, journalists covering crime in different cities, financial advice on renting versus owning, hot takes on Trump’s financial crimes, Halloween and haunted houses, and more. This iterative approach addressed the specific questions Erin, PolicyLink, and their partners had about audiences, content, and narrative patterns, and helped them dig even deeper.

A Key Input to Strategy

As is the case in most narrative landscaping, which covers narrative elements that are part of our lives as well as public policy, the major places where “housing” came up in cultural content weren’t necessarily related to policy or news. In fact, we found that house related content on YouTube is massive, but there is not much about housing justice and that housing is mostly showing up alongside other issues.

Furthermore, we found that content across all audiences was packed with crime and horror storytelling. Stories about houses and homes are intimately connected with stories about safety and danger, including local news crimes. These stories regretfully did not always present our neighbors as our friends. Other things we found included content about how to build wealth and lots of Halloween. Erin synthesized these quickfire analysis results into meaningful recommendations for PolicyLink, including:

• Identifying and promoting our own personalities—those who are closest to the challenges and solutions—to tell stories that center those who have experienced housing insecurity and injustice;
• Shifting to more emotional and less intellectual storytelling;
• Leveraging neighbor-oriented holidays like Halloween (especially as it happens around the narrative inflection points that are national and local elections);
• Gaming!;
• Neighbors/neighboring as a rich area for storytelling, as we learned in the Housing Justice Narrative Toolkit, and one that can naturally highlight collective action.

This research illuminates a critical storytelling space that is, quite literally, at our fingertips. Telling stories of safe, affordable housing on YouTube is another tool in our belts that can serve as a tipping point towards justice. We are excited to continue to partner with housing advocates and organizers across this nation as they bring housing justice on YouTube to life.

—Laura A. Hughes, Director of Narrative Strategies, PolicyLink