owning a home doesn't buy happiness

Owning a home doesn't buy happiness

Buying a property in Australia is increasingly becoming an impossible dream. So why do we remain transfixed by this goal?



Clementine Ford
Clementine Ford
guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 June 2013 13.55 AEST


'There are admirable ways to spend your money that don’t involve strata fees and council rates'. Home ownership: 'there are admirable ways to spend your money that don’t involve strata fees and council rates'. Photograph: Nicholas Eveleigh/Getty

I'm sitting on a wobbly chair at the second hand kitchen table that graces my apartment. From my position, I have a clear view down the hallway into my bedroom, where rain splattered windows overlook the trams whose passing rumbles and whistles drift up the stairs. Behind me, two second hand armchairs are turned towards the old television which sits atop my partner's record collection – surely the most valuable thing in the house.

Below me, the man and woman who run the hairdressers sound like they’re fighting again. On Wednesdays, depending on who gets there first, he or I will bring in all the bins. We’ve never spoken more than a few words to each other, but it’s a courtesy that established itself early on. He nodded his head at me as I passed by this morning to let the plumber in, who had come to issue a biannual servicing to our gas heater (not an innuendo). It sits on the wall, fanning delicious waves of heat out into the long space that makes up our home. I say “our home”, but it isn’t really. I rent, because goodness knows I couldn’t afford to own it myself.

For decades, the great Australian dream has supposedly been to own a house; to purchase a three bedroom property with room for the kids that you’ll eventually have and enough garden space for them to play in. It doesn’t matter that the once modern model of the nuclear family is now faded and falling to bits, that one in three marriages will end in divorce and increasing numbers of people are realising they have no obligation to fulfil the “having children” part of the contract of adulthood. In the mainstream pursuit of happiness and success, handing your life over to a mortgage is apparently still up there.

The question is, why?

As an aspiration, it’s always been foreign to me. My parents bought their first and only house together when their youngest child (me) was already 15. I imagine they were, like most home buyers, driven by a desire for stability and a place that their children could always come back to no matter how far they eventually strayed. It felt nice to have a nucleus we could return to, not least of which was because it also operated as a free storage unit for a portion of my early adult life.

But then my mother died, and the house began to ache with her absence. My father sold it to a young family, moved to Queensland and bought a place with a guest room for his children to stay in. There are guest towels for us to use and guest shampoo, and we always ask before we look in the fridge. Stability doesn’t look like it used to.

But aside from this “stability”, what does one get from home ownership?

Gone are the days when a nice corner block could be purchased for a handful of beans and an honest handshake, where the just-starting-out could pool their tiny resources and purchase a roomy sandstone in Brompton or a weatherboard in Fitzroy North. The median house price in Melbourne suffered a recent “blip”, but is still hovering around $530,000. Units, once an option for single people or the child-free couples aspiring to get into the housing game have actually increased in price, with the media price registering at $433,500. These are impossible figures for anyone but those who are either already wealthy or are looking to add to their growing property portfolios. For the average person, home ownership is a fool’s game.

Given the increase in investment properties being swept off the market, it makes no sense for our tenancy rights to be so rigid. For landlords to issue yearly leases that can be withdrawn at any time fuels a desire to commit to 30 year long financially ruinous obligations, simply to avoid having to endure the humiliation of having another adult tell you what you can and can’t put on your walls.

There are admirable ways to spend your money that don’t involve strata fees and council rates, but they’re often disparaged as frivolous or ill-advised because they allow a person to experience life as it’s happening, rather than squirrel comfort away to be properly appreciated at a later date. To travel, to eat in ridiculously overpriced restaurants just to see how small the servings are, to live in the centre of everything and enjoy the variety that has to offer, to know that when your heater is due for a service your landlord is the one who’ll be paying for it ... you may do all of these things or none of them, but they aren’t inferior dreams to uphold just because they’re frivolous.

The structure of the modern family has changed so much over the last 50 years – has, in some cases, disappeared entirely – yet the ideals of home ownership are still hanging from the wires of a proudly erected Hills Hoist. Our values have grown up, and so have we. Yet here we all are, transfixed by the flickering light as we gather around the hearth of an impossible dream.