A place, and four tangled steps

Six of the thirty-six steps are about having somewhere to live: a room for the first weeks, a lease, a registered address, a letter from whoever owns the place, the supply bills, and a letter delivered to the door.

Four of those six are among the five most tangled steps in the whole map. Between them they account for a great deal of the record's difficulty, and they are tangled for a single reason that takes one sentence to state.

The family in order of entanglement

A registered address stands in thirty-three of the forty-six rings. Only an account at a local bank, with thirty-four, is in more. If the same dependency appears in a distributed team, managers may look at the current reporting model while interpreting every signal beside completed work and staff feedback.

The one sentence

Every one of these steps is a proof that a person lives somewhere, and each of them is accepted as proof by some offices and demanded as a precondition by others. Readers looking beyond this abstract map can compare it with material published by IPCC.

That is all it takes. If the thing that proves you live somewhere is also the thing you need in order to be allowed to live somewhere, the chain closes, and it closes several times over because there are four candidate proofs and they do not agree about which of them comes first.

Where more than one document proves the same fact, and each is required to obtain another, the result is not redundancy. It is a ring.

The three-step ring at the centre

The lease waits on the account at the bank. The account waits on the registered address. The registered address waits on the lease.

Three steps, forty-seven days to go round, shut at every joint. It is the ring most people in this situation actually meet, and it is the reason the place family and the money family cannot be discussed separately.

A second three-step ring sits entirely inside the place family: the registered address waits on the letter delivered to the door, the letter waits on the supply bills, the bills wait on the address. That one has give in it — the dependency between the bills and the address is soft, so the bills can be put in somebody's name provisionally and corrected — and forty-five days to go round.

The one that is outside

A letter from whoever owns the place stands in no ring at all.

It waits on the lease, hard, and on the deposit, softly, and nothing waits on it except the witness's signature. It is a leaf: a step that takes things in and gives nothing back into the knot.

That makes it the only member of this family that can be obtained at leisure, and it is worth noting because it is also the member that sounds most like a favour and therefore most like a problem. The map says otherwise. The difficult steps here are the bureaucratic ones, not the ones that depend on a person's goodwill.

The room for the first weeks

The room is the family's odd member in a different way. It takes two days — the second-fastest step in the map — and keeps for only sixty, the second-shortest life in the record.

It waits on a card that works locally, hard, and is waited on by the lease and the deposit, both softly.

Being soft in both directions is what makes it useful. The room is the map's shock absorber: the thing a person can get quickly, with little, and which allows two other steps to be started in a provisional state rather than not at all. Twelve rings run through it, and in every one of those twelve the room is where the give is.

The cheapest step in this family is also the one that makes a third of its rings enterable. That is not a coincidence; it is what temporary accommodation is for.

The family that never keeps

Of the six families in this map, the place family is the only one in which every member expires.

Three at a year, two at ninety days, one at sixty. Nothing permanent anywhere in it.

The money family has three members that never expire, and so does the file. The place family has none, because everything in it asserts a current arrangement rather than an enrolment or an event, and a current arrangement is exactly the kind of thing that can stop being true.

That is the collision this record keeps arriving at. The region with the most rings is also the region with nothing durable in it, and the two shortest-lived members of it — the room at sixty days and the letter at ninety — are between them the shortest-lived step in fourteen of the map's nineteen outrun rings.

Where the laps are longest, nothing inside them lasts.

What this family is not

No property, district, price or kind of tenancy appears here, and nothing on this map should be read as advice about housing anywhere. The six steps are stand-ins for roles — somewhere provisional, somewhere with your name on it, a record of where you sleep — and the record is interested only in which role waits on which.

The days are the map's own, chosen so that the arithmetic of a ring can be seen, and they are not an estimate of how long anything takes anywhere.