‘It has begun to undo my head’
Living with housing insecurity
The famous photo of Michael Joseph Savage carrying a dining table into the first state house in Miramar was staged, but at least the sentiments of that first Labour Government were genuine. I was reminded of that image as I looked through real estate online, because in deceased estates the old cumbersome tables are gone, but there is often still a piano which are the worst things to shift.
There is something too formal and forlorn about the pianos: people don’t stand around and sing beside them in the evening like they used to. They are usually out of tune too, I guess the modern equivalent would be a smartphone with a cracked screen or a bung cord. I love looking at real estate online, it exercises my imagination.
Floral axminister in an abandoned room stops my heart probably because you can’t smell it. But lately it has been less of a hobby since I have been almost homeless now for more than two years, so I am always refreshing the latest listings looking for somewhere to live.
Sometimes I get distracted and look at small towns like Westport. Houses are cheap in Westport and people are less likely to have destroyed the vintage kitchen and bathroom with a flimsy renovation. Then I get even more distracted and decide to buy a fancy but ugly resort in Kahurangi National Park. Dreams are free so they may as well be outlandish.
But not having secure housing has begun to undo my head a little, plus I’m clumsy anyway and now I have forgotten the rules of my former kitchens and spill things in other people’s houses and forget to use a plate. When I first heard someone say muscle memory I thought what a lovely phrase, it suggests our bodies adapt to our spaces as much as our heads. These days I don’t even bother to try to learn which switch turns on which light in a house. I just sort of bash at them all uselessly in the dark like a gorilla.
I am one of the people Paula Bennett referred to defensively as not really homeless, when we first started admitting that housing was a crisis. Before she started refusing interviews as the minister in charge of housing, she stated it was fine to sleep on other people’s couches or out the back in their sleepout or in their garage and then sometimes in a car. Not quite homeless, but transient.
Maybe it’s ironic she now works for a real estate company since she’s sort of impossible to dislike because her angles on the state of things are so brazen and optimistic. And despite the relentless optimism in the face of reality either of us could find ourselves homeless, I suppose. The thing we don’t like to admit about the homeless is that it can happen to anyone. Although walking down Queen St as a semi-homeless I noticed it seems to happen to Ma¯ ori more, so it’s perverse for Pa¯ keha¯ to fret over our privileges like they do.
The other thing we don’t like to admit in this country is that with all the resources and space in the world, things have got progressively worse for people looking for somewhere to live, not just stay.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would probably describe me as homeless adjacent, since she is such an excellent communicator. Although, I have stopped listening when she talks about being kind. It sounds as out of touch as those pianos.
Even though I’ve had mixed experiences with landlords, I’m not interested in attacking them as an overlord class, the speculators and dreaded ‘mum and dad investors’ are just actors playing their parts on a neoliberal Monopoly board. The problem with the market has been the collective lowering of expectations about what people should be forced to pay versus
what this gets them.
Landlords that I have talked to honestly seem to believe things have got harder for them, and this baffles me, but I don’t say anything to their face because I want them to let me rent their house. Making sure a house has a heat pump is fine, but if the healthy homes legislation does not increase the access of the poor to good housing, it actually makes it more competitive as landlords raise rents to cover their costs in a shrinking market.
Open homes for rentals used to be unheard of, now people compete to live with the mould. Recently, I was paying most of my weekly benefit to rent a tiny converted laundry that had a microwave and a hotplate. Netflix came with the deal and power, but if you ran the hotplate and the microwave at the same time the fuse blew out.
There was a shub, but the shower wasn’t connected so I felt like a giant 42-year-old baby with my legs hanging out the side every time I tried to wash my hair using the toothbrush cup. When I first moved in for my sixweek stay, I thought the bunk bed was cute, albeit too close to the toilet, and decided to buy a tiny oven to go with the tiny aesthetic, the kind a single retired person uses because they were raised on thrift. Except the landlord found out about my Briscoes oven and said there was no way I could use it in the converted laundry she described as cosy. This upset me. Being able to bake is important. Crispness matters.
The last time crispness mattered was 1943, when landlords had to provide a tenant with something to boil and bake in as it was and is still part of the first Labour Government’s Housing Act. Getting a contemporary landlord to comply with the law is fraught because of the power discrepancy. I don’t actually believe the new legislation does enough to address this imbalance. Or that I should have to go the Tenancy Tribunal to grill cheese.
The bunk bed also started to get me down, like I was an adult child returned to my childhood home as a failure, like I was camping in my own life around the hearth of Netflix.
I was surprised to learn that two-thirds of houses in New Zealand are owner-occupied, because for the other third things are so precarious.
Alongside the Government’s Covid response it explains the election result, that landslide of relieved homeowners turning red. It doesn’t explain why Ma¯ ori are living in motels on their own whenua, neoliberalism is an inadequate ‘‘ism’’ for that tragedy. Colonisation can seem just as abstract too, but honouring the Treaty shouldn’t be. Ma¯ ori first became enamoured with Labour because Michael Joseph Savage’s party made such a difference to their lives. All this new Government has done is paper over the cracks in emergency housing and invested in more bridging options that leave people stranded on the bridge. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, shelter is the foundation of the pyramid: having a roof is a primal, necessary thing and it’s hard to get ahead without it let alone self-actualise.
If you rely too much on the individual’s capacity to make things happen, and buy into the myth of resilience as a virtue, then the stable pyramid is flipped and becomes a spinning top. While I pride myself on being able to write anywhere, all I really want is somewhere I can smoke in peace on the porch with the dog at my feet, the anxious metronome finally still. I used to find coffee mug trees ugly, but now I covet that kind of household kitsch. I watch my friends and family move around their own homes and get struck down with envy over the smallest things.
That banal pile of stuff on top of the fridge that starts to accumulate if you have proper roots. I want to be that pile of stuff. I hate washing the dishes, but I see some people through their windows standing at the kitchen sink after dinner at night and I long for my life to be that ordinary again.
I never click on stories about how some bright go-getter afforded their first house in the jungle of the market because they always did it with help. It’s as dissonant as a piano played badly in another room. But I keep looking at houses online because it’s fun to torture myself and I might still find a house like my own home should be, with a permanent place for the sugar and where pets are always OK.