Housing in progress: Caring for and living in unfinished remittance houses

Empty, unfinished, or ‘ghost’ houses are common sights around the world, where aspirational investment in housing outpaces the potential to physically occupy it. While these structures may be only partially completed, this does not mean they are unoccupied. In fact, their state of incompleteness can prompt owners to find an occupant, in order to prevent incursion, protect the existing investment in construction, and enable incremental progress towards completion. This paper explores one configuration of housing investment – ‘remittance houses’, constructed by migrants – and the dynamics of caretaking and guardianship that arise to protect these housing structures while they are in-process over an unpredictable, multiple-year timeline. Building on two case studies, in Morocco and Ghana, we investigate both the lives of the houses in-progress and the accommodations and adaptations made by live-in caretakers to make them into dwell-able homes. These simultaneous and interwoven timelines involve uncertain futures for both the house and its occupants, as the more ‘complete’ the house becomes, the more uncertain the caretaker’s tenure. We bring into question how the framework of ‘care’ as mutually transformative development can help to understand the affective and embodied investments made by the migrant who is building the home and the caretaker occupying and adapting it, in relation to the material responsiveness of the house itself. We take these mutual transformations as resonant not just for these houses which are markedly ‘unfinished’, but as a way to consider how much housing is somehow ‘in progress’ and complexly constituted through care.