Abstract
In Doubled Up: Shared Households and the Precarious Lives of Families, author Hope Harvey offers a critical examination of the realities of shared housing among low-income families, also called “doubling up.” Millions of children have spent part of their childhood in doubled-up households, experiencing this component of the private safety net (Harvey 2020; Pilkauskas et al. 2014; Pilkauskas and Cross 2018). This exploration could not be any more necessary as Harvey situates the work within broader structural trends—rising rents, stagnant wages, the erosion of affordable housing, and the broader instability of the public safety net. While doubling up is a well-established buffer against poverty and homelessness, its dynamic nature leaves many questions unanswered: Who doubles up, and why, and for how long? How do these arrangements function? Do they provide a pathway to greater stability? This context frames one of the book’s central claims: doubling up cannot be understood simply as a strategy to avoid poverty or homelessness.
The data come from in-depth interviews conducted with a subset of families from the How Parents House Kids (HPHK) study, which focused on the housing experiences of families living in neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio and Dallas, Texas. The sample of 60 families, most of whom were African American, were followed for three years (2013 to 2015). The book excels in illustrating the lived realities of shared housing in all its complexity. It is organized into three parts that explore (1) how families become doubled up, characterizing experiences of guests and hosts, (2) living doubled up, and (3) and transitions out of a doubled-up household.
By tracing housing histories and transitions over time, Harvey shows that doubling up is not a static condition but an ongoing process of negotiation—one that often involves trade-offs between privacy, authority, and economic survival. Harvey’s interviews reveal the fluidity of shared housing: families move in and out of relatives’ or friends’ homes, hosts take in guests only to later ask them to leave, and some arrangements offer stable support while others create tension or even risk.
Doubled Up fully unpacks the experience of housing support. These interviews, with stunning detail and scope, paint an intimate picture of what is means to live in a home that is not one’s own, or to house someone unexpectedly. Harvey sheds both compassionate and incisive insight into the complex nature of doubling up. Some families move in and out of residences of their relatives or friends multiple times, while others take in families and/or friends and at times push them out or are left. Some arrangements provide mutual support, some drain, and some even pose a safety risk.
Rather than romanticizing family resilience, Harvey offers a nuanced view of the private safety net’s limitations. While co-residence can help families accumulate resources, it frequently entails compromises in autonomy and stability for both guests and hosts. The absence of clear norms governing these arrangements leaves families to “make the rules as they go.” This lack of structure complicates everything from household decision-making to child-rearing and how economic matters are settled. Support is often two-way, with hosts relying on guests to support housing costs. Despite these contributions, guests often do not have authority over household matters (see also Harvey 2022).
Importantly, these negotiations are occurring in a broader cultural context that views doubling up as a non-normative household structure. The ways in which doubling up is at odds with a nuclear family ideal of independent housing loom large—demonstrating the persistent role of ideologies shaping how families view their circumstances and understand their options. Despite the prevalence of shared households among low-income families, norms that privilege nuclear families that live independently still prevail. These norms shape guests’ desire for housing and hosts’ perceptions of who is deserving of being taken in. The gendered nature is particularly poignant, punishing male partners as those who should be able to attain their own homes.
While Doubled Up is a study of class-based disadvantages, this is also a study of the roles of race and gender. As three-quarters of the sample are Black families, this is also a study of Black family life and the ways racialized and gendered dimensions of the labor and housing market shape housing access and housing options (or lack thereof). This work extends key insights of work on grandparent-led families, for example, LaShawnDa Pittman’s (2023) Grandmothering while Black: A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion, and Survival. Additionally, the realities of racial segregation for seeking housing and schools are immediately visible here, as families negotiate what they can afford with what is safe, alongside distances from schools for their young children and work.
Ultimately, Doubled Up paints a picture where there are few clear winners, but Harvey is careful not to offer an overly pessimistic view, noting many cases of guests and hosts enjoying each other’s company and family members being fulfilled by sharing time. These are penetrating stories that will stay with readers, showing how families settle everything from budgeting, to when to come and go, to whether to remain together in the midst of constrained spaces and limited resources. The analysis repeatedly provides cases that defy a single story of how guests or hosts experience this arrangement. While challenges abound, Harvey also highlights cases where various forms of stability occur—economic stability and interpersonal stability, alongside a persistent sense of safety and a life free of crises.
The book closes by urging scholars and policymakers to recognize housing as a central social resource, making the key difference between a tenable and unsustainable existence. Although there are few direct policy recommendations, there is much to learn about why policies fail doubled-up households. Strengthening public assistance systems that currently overlook the realities of doubled-up households can only help. The chapters on economic exchanges should be necessary reading for policymakers on the limits and the failures of poverty policy that views household size as an adequate indicator of resources. Even if policies can be adjusted, this is only one step. Harvey tells a deeply sociological story exposing the role of many social actors—housing vouchers that are not keeping pace with the market value of rent and the fact that public housing is often unsafe or hard to access are key players, but so is the labor market for low-skill workers, a segregated housing market, and family ideals that are not only out of step with the ways people are living but that stigmatize the strategies families use to support each other.
Doubled Up is both rigorous and accessible, weaving a multi-layered sociological analysis with compelling narratives. Harvey shows how housing is not merely a physical source of support—it is inherently social, reflective of one’s networks and relationships. This work would be a welcome addition to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on family, housing, or poverty policy. In addition to critical lessons on family and inequality, the methodological appendix is a dynamic read. Here, Harvey lays out how she gained trust and access to her sampled families and how she navigated her own positionality, as a white woman from an elite university, while studying largely families of color in poverty. Ultimately, this work makes a critical contribution to the study of family life as tied to being able to have a place to live.