GIVINGUPON A‘FOREVERHOME’
TO TALK ABOUT MONEY IS TO TALK ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS, EQUALITY, SELF-LOVE AND SO MUCH MORE. AND YET, WE’RE SO RARELY OPEN ABOUT OUR FINANCIAL OUTLOOK. HERE, FOUR WRITERS SHARE THE ECONOMICS OF THEIR LIVES COLLAGES ANNA BU KLIEWER
WHEN I FIRST HEARD THE TERM ‘FOREVER home’, I let it circle around my mouth, allowing the sweetness of it to sit on my tongue, like a lick of honey. A ‘forever home’ suggests an end goal. A place where you can escape the precarity of life, a place where you can trick yourself into thinking you can buy safety from the state, unemployment and a fluctuating economy – and then sink into carefully curated bedding and let it all pass you by.
I have moved house so many times that I should have the choreography of picking up and packing away small objects heavy with nostalgia down pat. One is a small cherry-red metal box with bronze hinges. It has followed me since childhood, when I bought it for 50p at a school fête. I used to fill it with shiny coins and stow it under my bed. Now, it joins the other things I have accumulated from a life in flux – golden pothos house plants, my mum’s gilded tissue box, stacks of magazines – all at the mercy of a housing crisis that has forced me from tenancy to tenancy since childhood.
Stuff has a way of becoming part of this choreography, and I’ve slowly come to the realisation that, one day, I might be able to give it all a home for good.
I have grown up in between the cracks of constant house moves – council estates, old car showrooms and mouldy houseshares. Moving around teaches you two things: that housing is precarious and the reasons why cannot be simply solved with a mortgage. In the biggest housing crisis of a generation, the lure of house buying is still seen as aspirational. Not only because it can be cheaper than renting (on average, private renters spend 31% of their income on rent, compared to 18% of those paying mortgages), or that it may provide the security that renting doesn’t (as long as you can pay your mortgage and the market doesn’t crash), but because it still represents a tantalising, glistening fantasy. Framing it as a luxury often makes it harder to think of it as a right.
I grapple with, as much as I delight in, the idea of home ownership as an escape from a chaotic, destabilising world. While writing my book about the housing crisis, I used part of the advance to put down a deposit on a flat with my partner, benefiting in large part from his generational wealth, in the hope that I might find some peace in staying still. Yet I have not stopped feeling like our security is precarious.
I have something no one else in my immediate family has – aplace of my own. Now I ask myself new questions: what responsibility does home ownership give me? What activism can improve conditions for long-term renters? Ho
