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Rosie Whinray's avatar

One of the reasons it's difficult to talk about housing is that it's so charged- whatever you say is likely to hurt someone's feelings. I wanted to add that of course there are many people in my generation who own homes. However, in most of those cases one or more of the following statements is true:

Their multiple-home-owning parents helped them into home-ownership. (i.e. 'class'.)

They have inherited wealth or assets. (also 'class'.)

They are one half of a securely attached double-(moderate-to-high)-income-earning couple. (arguably secure attachment is also a class matter.)

They cannot choose where to live- they have to buy wherever they can afford.

They are mortgaged up to the eyeballs and thus will ultimately pay far more than their house's nominal price at purchase.

Maybe the people who inherit or have help can have something like an old-fashioned property ownership experience, but those who manage to scrape their way in by their own efforts enter into a different kind of precarity: shackled for the next few decades to a volatile housing market, inflation, rates, vagaries of employment, etc. etc. I admire those people's determination and cleverness- it really is a massive achievement to buy a house!- but they have been backed into a corner too, a corner of indebtedness. So I don't think we're so different from each other despite the fact that (with luck) they will ultimately own the thing they're paying for week by week.

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Rosie Whinray's avatar

My friend James responded, via email: "I agree that there is this narrative that creative genius comes from trauma / desperation / tortured existence, and that this is the silver lining / price you have to pay for being a creative soul. I think that this is just what society tells itself in order to justify failing to support its culture producers. While it's true that often people convert their torment into creative productivity as a way to survive their experiences, I think that brings a very different 'product' or cultural outcome. It's ingenuity out of necessity, rather than the unfurling of creative becoming. Who knows what the child may have become without the constraints and struggle that bent them to the form they now have?"

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