Amazing writing as always but I am sorry you’re getting uprooted. I have done it many times and it is very unsettling always, for us domesticated types.
We are going the other way, after four and a half decades of life we are finally buying, we have scrounged up enough. It also feels weird and precarious and scary. Basically the way our societies are set up today makes everyone’s position precarious so everyone has to keep frantically paddling.
I’m excited about the possibility of decorating my own space for once, I have always been modest with my attempts in other people’s apartments. I had hoped for a small garden but we could only get a condo, I do get a balcony with a lot of sun though so maybe something will grow.
Everything is very badly set up for artists. We need to rewind to the days where you could go to a clear plot of land and get help from a few people and build yourself a little house. This whole business of owing your rent and owing your mortgage and owing your property taxes and your maintenance fees is just weird and uncomfortable. And landlords should not be allowed, I was just talking about that to someone today. Maybe you can have one secondary residence on top of where you live. Not hoard ten twenty homes and rent them out at ever more and more exorbitant prices.
My kid’s teacher was absent the other day because his landlord had doubled his rent (that’s illegal, but apparently not illegal enough) and he had to go to small claims court to fight to get it reduced. It made me so sad for him and so grateful that didn’t happen to us. Even if he gets the landlord to back off he has to live with that feeling now, of being forever menaced by that rising cost.
When I was a kid we had social housing in Yugoslavia and it actually worked really well, while it worked. When you started a family the government would give you a place. They were apartments in large concrete blocks, not houses, there are barely any houses in Belgrade. Only for the extremely rich or the extremely poor. But it was a good system I thought.
Congratulations on your imminent fence-jumping! The book I mentioned in the piece, Having and Being Had by Eula Biss, investigates exactly that transition. It's worth reading.
Big Government investment in social housing development would be a good solution for the housing crisis in NZ, but instead our pitiful excuse for a Government is busy dismantling tenancy law and giving tax breaks to landlords. There is some social housing here but not enough, and it isn't much cheaper than market rent- so the only advantage of it is that it's more secure. It's so frustrating because I know that I can do a lot with a little, but I can't even get that little that I need. My friend Neil had an apartment in Baltimore that was part of some kind of 'artist's housing' scheme- imagine!
Thank you!! I’ll check out the book! I need something to calm my nerves 😬
Here in Montreal specifically there is something called co-ops. It’s buildings that control rent to very reasonable amounts and their main idea is if you can’t contribute financially you can do repair work, paint walls, work in the community garden…. I love that idea of living like that but of course they’re desperately hard to get into and getting harder by the year as other rents and real estate prices soar and soar.
Fact is all our issues could be sorted if our governments wanted to sort them but no….
Damn, I'm so angry that you'll have to leave your nest. I agree with everything you write here and completely empathise. Landlordism should go the way of powdered wigs, but it won't, I fear. I think of Shevek so much too. You are my 6th friend I hear of in housing peril this month. And it's only 12th Sept.
So sorry to hear that you are being forced into moving. One of the many reasons that I love your writing is its fierce sense of place, your engagement with the whole process of rooting yourself in a specific environment, of finding Home. Homing is an active process. It is something that you have to "do". You can't "buy" it or "consume" it. At least, that's my experience. And I agree that people should not be allowed to own multiple properties in order to rent them out. It drives the price of houses up and dislocates them from the people who are living (or trying to live) there. Houses are not "property" , they are living beings with whom we must forge relationship - only then, might we stand a chance of making them "homes". And I totally agree that I have to feel safe in order to be creative. It's really difficult to be creative in an insecure environment. When I have to spend precious energy on making sure that I will have shelter this coming night, there's precious little left for creative endeavours. I hope that you find a new home soon.
I think you're right Andy, about Homing being an active process. I've been lucky to live in the neighbourhood I'm in for 13 years now. Wanting to stay in the same place I've developed a long relationship with- as you point out it's the baseline of my work- is a big spanner in the works of looking for other places. Luckily I have found a room to move into within my community. Blessings upon good neighbours!
Rosie, this is incredible. So much of this parallels my own thoughts, and you've said a lot that's been on the tip of my tongue here. To commodify the home is to commodify dreaming. I knew exactly what you meant about the privilege of flow states. The privilege it is in this time to have an inner world, which can't be had with a home. I hope you find something comparable soon.
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.
...i'll have to move out of here sometime in the next couple of years and dreading the moment...i've never felt rooted so completely somewhere...but far in the outer reaches of my bird brain i see the delight in flight of having no ties and no home...of maybe never rooting...it's not easy and sorry that you have to endure this without your own beckoning being the reason...
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?"
Oh Rosie, I’m so sorry that you’re being uprooted from your lovely home! I can feel your grief and fear through your eloquent words, but it must be so much more raw having to pack up and leave when you’d much rather stay…
I moved 12 times in 8 years at University in Australia. It sucked every time. When I finally found my (completely run down and unhealthy, like most Kiwi homes) little bach on the South Coast I thought I’d achieved everything I could have ever dreamed of, growing up poor in a tiny flat in Austria where I had to share a bedroom with my Mama until I fled at 17. Then, one way too early Monday morning, just after I spent my whole weekend planting my first vege garden, the knock on the door that changed my life: the landlord told me he was selling my home. I just reacted and said “For how much? I’ll buy it.” That stumped him so much, he mumbled “Uhm, what I paid for it I guess?” We shook hands.
I had no idea how I was going to find half a million dollars in 2005. I had just gotten my first-ever proper job following 10 years of study living on less than 20K a year. It was $43K a year and my boyfriend was a Weta artist on a $25 hourly rate. His mental health issues meant he rarely worked 40h weeks. He’d been debt collected and sued by the IRD and had bad credit rating. My Mama had scraped and saved all her life to give me the stability she never felt. She had sent me 25K the night before the landlord knocked to put down a deposit on something.
Long story short, back then, banks were still basically giving out a version of Ninja (no job no asset no income) loans which led to the GFC a few years later. By sheer luck, and with some help from my Mama and best friend to scrape the 5% (a distant dream for today’s home buyers) down payment together, I managed to get a bank to give us a home loan. The day after we settled, a real estate agent came and offered us 100K more than what we paid! This was my first taste of capitalism and how home ownership could instantly make you richer.
It was bloody hard to pay the mortgage, especially after we broke up, but it made me triple my income in 2 years, because I had to. I wouldn’t have had the career I had had I not been forced into it by the shackles of the mortgage and fear of losing my home. I fought the airport for almost ten years to stop their expansion and destruction of our neighbourhood and marine environment. It was exhausting but I always knew it was worth it for that magical place that I felt so attached to.
After 20 years living in what can only be described as unhealthy but happy conditions (inhaling jet fuel, the noise pollution, the 100 year old leaks and creaks of an uninsulated shack), I let it all go. But because I had the insane luck of jumping at the chance of buying it when I was about to lose it, I could more than double my investment and buy a ton of beautiful land that I can now develop into a safe haven for beautiful souls (you can always have a place here, my friend!). It feels deeply unfair that our paths diverge at the ability or luck of “getting on the ladder.” I never thought I wanted to get on the ladder, but the fear of losing the first home I truly deeply felt at home in - my tūrangawaewae - forced my hand and the luck of circumstances and help from loved ones made it happen. But now that I’m on that ladder it seems I have infinite opportunities anyone who’s not on there with me will never have.
That’s why I research energy injustice, which is so tightly linked to housing. No one should feel housing precarity in a resource-rich country such as ours. It’s a choice made by politicians from both sides of the aisle for their voters and financial backers. It is a feudal system, where renters are kept in fear, and in thrall to their lords (who don’t provide them any bread either!). Do you mind me linking to this article on Bernard Hickey’s The Kākā? It needs to be widely read as too many Kiwis are in the same, inequitable unjust and leaky boat. Kia kaha e hoa ❤️🔥
Rosie your writing is incredible. Gripping, visceral, beautiful. I'm sorry something so unfair is happening to you, and that we exist within such unfair, rigged systems. I hope you find something more permanent soon, a new chrysalis in which to metamorphose. I can't wait to read more of your words - beautiful, intricate winged things.
Thanks, rebecca for sharing. That's how I landed here. I'm off to start a paid subscription. That feels like the only right thing to do after the amazing Rosie expressed my housing feelings in a way that goes beyond epic artistry.
Thank you both! The beauty of Substack is the solidarity. This is the silver lining of the Internet- connecting across the world with other artists who understand exactly what I'm talking about.
I’m sorry you’re losing your home. You write so beautifully. I pray that you will find another home in which you can be at peace and continue to create.
Amazing writing as always but I am sorry you’re getting uprooted. I have done it many times and it is very unsettling always, for us domesticated types.
We are going the other way, after four and a half decades of life we are finally buying, we have scrounged up enough. It also feels weird and precarious and scary. Basically the way our societies are set up today makes everyone’s position precarious so everyone has to keep frantically paddling.
I’m excited about the possibility of decorating my own space for once, I have always been modest with my attempts in other people’s apartments. I had hoped for a small garden but we could only get a condo, I do get a balcony with a lot of sun though so maybe something will grow.
Everything is very badly set up for artists. We need to rewind to the days where you could go to a clear plot of land and get help from a few people and build yourself a little house. This whole business of owing your rent and owing your mortgage and owing your property taxes and your maintenance fees is just weird and uncomfortable. And landlords should not be allowed, I was just talking about that to someone today. Maybe you can have one secondary residence on top of where you live. Not hoard ten twenty homes and rent them out at ever more and more exorbitant prices.
My kid’s teacher was absent the other day because his landlord had doubled his rent (that’s illegal, but apparently not illegal enough) and he had to go to small claims court to fight to get it reduced. It made me so sad for him and so grateful that didn’t happen to us. Even if he gets the landlord to back off he has to live with that feeling now, of being forever menaced by that rising cost.
When I was a kid we had social housing in Yugoslavia and it actually worked really well, while it worked. When you started a family the government would give you a place. They were apartments in large concrete blocks, not houses, there are barely any houses in Belgrade. Only for the extremely rich or the extremely poor. But it was a good system I thought.
Congratulations on your imminent fence-jumping! The book I mentioned in the piece, Having and Being Had by Eula Biss, investigates exactly that transition. It's worth reading.
Big Government investment in social housing development would be a good solution for the housing crisis in NZ, but instead our pitiful excuse for a Government is busy dismantling tenancy law and giving tax breaks to landlords. There is some social housing here but not enough, and it isn't much cheaper than market rent- so the only advantage of it is that it's more secure. It's so frustrating because I know that I can do a lot with a little, but I can't even get that little that I need. My friend Neil had an apartment in Baltimore that was part of some kind of 'artist's housing' scheme- imagine!
Thank you!! I’ll check out the book! I need something to calm my nerves 😬
Here in Montreal specifically there is something called co-ops. It’s buildings that control rent to very reasonable amounts and their main idea is if you can’t contribute financially you can do repair work, paint walls, work in the community garden…. I love that idea of living like that but of course they’re desperately hard to get into and getting harder by the year as other rents and real estate prices soar and soar.
Fact is all our issues could be sorted if our governments wanted to sort them but no….
Damn, I'm so angry that you'll have to leave your nest. I agree with everything you write here and completely empathise. Landlordism should go the way of powdered wigs, but it won't, I fear. I think of Shevek so much too. You are my 6th friend I hear of in housing peril this month. And it's only 12th Sept.
Good luck Rosie and thanks for this piece.
Thank you Caro, and thanks for the share. I know you know the struggle.
So sorry to hear that you are being forced into moving. One of the many reasons that I love your writing is its fierce sense of place, your engagement with the whole process of rooting yourself in a specific environment, of finding Home. Homing is an active process. It is something that you have to "do". You can't "buy" it or "consume" it. At least, that's my experience. And I agree that people should not be allowed to own multiple properties in order to rent them out. It drives the price of houses up and dislocates them from the people who are living (or trying to live) there. Houses are not "property" , they are living beings with whom we must forge relationship - only then, might we stand a chance of making them "homes". And I totally agree that I have to feel safe in order to be creative. It's really difficult to be creative in an insecure environment. When I have to spend precious energy on making sure that I will have shelter this coming night, there's precious little left for creative endeavours. I hope that you find a new home soon.
I think you're right Andy, about Homing being an active process. I've been lucky to live in the neighbourhood I'm in for 13 years now. Wanting to stay in the same place I've developed a long relationship with- as you point out it's the baseline of my work- is a big spanner in the works of looking for other places. Luckily I have found a room to move into within my community. Blessings upon good neighbours!
Good to hear. I hope it works for you. Good neighbours are a blessing, indeed.
Rosie, this is incredible. So much of this parallels my own thoughts, and you've said a lot that's been on the tip of my tongue here. To commodify the home is to commodify dreaming. I knew exactly what you meant about the privilege of flow states. The privilege it is in this time to have an inner world, which can't be had with a home. I hope you find something comparable soon.
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.
...i'll have to move out of here sometime in the next couple of years and dreading the moment...i've never felt rooted so completely somewhere...but far in the outer reaches of my bird brain i see the delight in flight of having no ties and no home...of maybe never rooting...it's not easy and sorry that you have to endure this without your own beckoning being the reason...
Waiting for the axe to fall is a special flavour of insecurity. I know that one from my last house.
…a lot of truth and insight there…a bold honest existence holds the reigns of truth and direction…
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?"
Oh Rosie, I’m so sorry that you’re being uprooted from your lovely home! I can feel your grief and fear through your eloquent words, but it must be so much more raw having to pack up and leave when you’d much rather stay…
I moved 12 times in 8 years at University in Australia. It sucked every time. When I finally found my (completely run down and unhealthy, like most Kiwi homes) little bach on the South Coast I thought I’d achieved everything I could have ever dreamed of, growing up poor in a tiny flat in Austria where I had to share a bedroom with my Mama until I fled at 17. Then, one way too early Monday morning, just after I spent my whole weekend planting my first vege garden, the knock on the door that changed my life: the landlord told me he was selling my home. I just reacted and said “For how much? I’ll buy it.” That stumped him so much, he mumbled “Uhm, what I paid for it I guess?” We shook hands.
I had no idea how I was going to find half a million dollars in 2005. I had just gotten my first-ever proper job following 10 years of study living on less than 20K a year. It was $43K a year and my boyfriend was a Weta artist on a $25 hourly rate. His mental health issues meant he rarely worked 40h weeks. He’d been debt collected and sued by the IRD and had bad credit rating. My Mama had scraped and saved all her life to give me the stability she never felt. She had sent me 25K the night before the landlord knocked to put down a deposit on something.
Long story short, back then, banks were still basically giving out a version of Ninja (no job no asset no income) loans which led to the GFC a few years later. By sheer luck, and with some help from my Mama and best friend to scrape the 5% (a distant dream for today’s home buyers) down payment together, I managed to get a bank to give us a home loan. The day after we settled, a real estate agent came and offered us 100K more than what we paid! This was my first taste of capitalism and how home ownership could instantly make you richer.
It was bloody hard to pay the mortgage, especially after we broke up, but it made me triple my income in 2 years, because I had to. I wouldn’t have had the career I had had I not been forced into it by the shackles of the mortgage and fear of losing my home. I fought the airport for almost ten years to stop their expansion and destruction of our neighbourhood and marine environment. It was exhausting but I always knew it was worth it for that magical place that I felt so attached to.
After 20 years living in what can only be described as unhealthy but happy conditions (inhaling jet fuel, the noise pollution, the 100 year old leaks and creaks of an uninsulated shack), I let it all go. But because I had the insane luck of jumping at the chance of buying it when I was about to lose it, I could more than double my investment and buy a ton of beautiful land that I can now develop into a safe haven for beautiful souls (you can always have a place here, my friend!). It feels deeply unfair that our paths diverge at the ability or luck of “getting on the ladder.” I never thought I wanted to get on the ladder, but the fear of losing the first home I truly deeply felt at home in - my tūrangawaewae - forced my hand and the luck of circumstances and help from loved ones made it happen. But now that I’m on that ladder it seems I have infinite opportunities anyone who’s not on there with me will never have.
That’s why I research energy injustice, which is so tightly linked to housing. No one should feel housing precarity in a resource-rich country such as ours. It’s a choice made by politicians from both sides of the aisle for their voters and financial backers. It is a feudal system, where renters are kept in fear, and in thrall to their lords (who don’t provide them any bread either!). Do you mind me linking to this article on Bernard Hickey’s The Kākā? It needs to be widely read as too many Kiwis are in the same, inequitable unjust and leaky boat. Kia kaha e hoa ❤️🔥
Āmene to all of that! Are you guesting on The Kākā again? It's in the public domain, so share away
Rosie your writing is incredible. Gripping, visceral, beautiful. I'm sorry something so unfair is happening to you, and that we exist within such unfair, rigged systems. I hope you find something more permanent soon, a new chrysalis in which to metamorphose. I can't wait to read more of your words - beautiful, intricate winged things.
Thanks, rebecca for sharing. That's how I landed here. I'm off to start a paid subscription. That feels like the only right thing to do after the amazing Rosie expressed my housing feelings in a way that goes beyond epic artistry.
Rosie, we are with you.🌱🌿
Thank you both! The beauty of Substack is the solidarity. This is the silver lining of the Internet- connecting across the world with other artists who understand exactly what I'm talking about.
We do understand exactly what you are talking about!🌱
I’m sorry you’re losing your home. You write so beautifully. I pray that you will find another home in which you can be at peace and continue to create.