The Sociology of A Place To Call Home Part 1
by Sandshoe (Honshades)
I began writing this essay considering the issues raised by Tent City in Martin Place in Sydney.
I noted on the Mayor of Sydney’s website there are 60,000 on the public housing waiting list in NSW. That is around three times the number in SA reflecting a larger population pretty well.
There are 105, 200 plus people homeless in Australia. 24,000 are said to be homeless in Melbourne alone. Homeless sleeping rough in inner city Adelaide is up 44 percent from last year. 20,000 plus is well more than that now surely as a figure for Queensland (2014 latest) and similarly 10,000 in West Australia. The categories by age are frightening, the old, the young, the disabled, mentally ill and just plain broke. They need services, meals, supplies of blankets, nothing more urgent than a roof overhead that offers a sense of home.
There are the boarders, rooming house lodgers, people sleeping motels, on living room
couches. There is the population that has no choice as well but to rent, but wants security of tenure hoped for by home ownership and regard themselves as homeless. About 30% of housing in Australia is rental property. The Australian rental market is not the greatest. Renting imposes short term housing solutions on many who yearn to buy their own home. A common experience is of a battle ground.
One of the outcomes of having to move house repeatedly is stigma that is a close associate of prejudice and its poster child, discrimination. It evidences in ways beyond imagining. My experience as a renter who has lived in maybe a hundred different rental properties and housing includes a medical professional, a young doctor, at a surgery immediately above my then new workplace … local to my new rental address … tell me to stop doctor shopping.
Well and good if nothing ever happened again as bizarre as this was relative to my conservative history of medical presentation. Renters I know from years of experience walk a rocky road accessing housing and related services that have to be re-established each time they move houses, districts and, sometimes, towns and countries.
A segment of the population does not want to own a home because they cannot forsee meeting rates and maintenace costs, cannot perform essential maintenance themselves or do not want to be tied to a location view employment prospects, access visiting rights with children and so on. Rental is my mindset. My thinking about renting as a choice different from intention to own a home has progressively led me to consider the difficulties of the rental market as incitement to protest and revolution.
In whatever frame and howsoever revolution is visualised, middle- and low- income earners and those on less than the average wage logically cannot do anything else but oppose the levers driving land prices and home ownership costs upward to dangerous and dizzy height. Little people by which I mean compromised by unbridled capitalism are the bodies left behind in a debris of failed housing projects, compromised tradespersons, investment strategies gone maliciously wrong, of course mum and dad investors and so on, among them renters.
So many grubs with grubbers and so little time for everyday people who will not live fantastically long and healthy lives as a direct result of their straitened existences.
Housing policy that fails to spell out people need a roof overhead sounds paradoxical, but I believe we find that is so evaluating our everyday experiences, our friends’, families’, our struggles to keep a roof overhead as well as pay utilities, feed and clothe ourselves, access education and training, organise and attend social get togethers, go on holiday, keep our kids in the manner we would prefer them to some small degree or larger be accustomed, not to forget so many of us never see our kids of whatever age as we go round on the hurdy gurdy. Everyday people live a much-of-a-muchness hand-to-mouth existence that varies only by a few degrees house to house, suburb to suburb, town to town.
Neighbour to the next neighbouring house and further, if we are ourselves not poor by official definition or measured by relativity in a culture of haves and have-nots, we are in some way poor as a result of our personal circumstances, how many people we
provide for, charities we feel an obligation to support, sports and service clubs we give to and on it goes, hobbies, obsessions, conditioning and addictions included as we are only human that we seek the readies to pay for our Achilles heels too.
No question we are vulnerable. Unsure if there are more recent figures but I make it the Australian median weekly income is $662.00. Median rent is $335.00. To spell it out median rent is looking towards 50% of median income. Median household mortgage repayments (monthly) are $1,755 and not to neglect figuring in rates, rubbish, roof repairs and there is everything else.
20% of the population has an income less than $650. To spell it out median rent is more than 50% of median income.
Look at Newstart Allowance that I call the dole (unemployment) in disguise. Consider the ramifications for housing that 75% or so of recipients are single.
The base rate is $535.60 that increases to $579.30 for 60 year olds and over. Median rent is way over income and if the recipient owns their home they receive no assistance to maintain it. If the recipient is a renter they receive a payment of $132.20 maximum in rent assistance per fortnight. Consider median rent is $335.00 a week so a renter paying it has to find $538.00 a fortnight.
Do not go past go. On paper leastwise a Newstart Allowance recipient who is not a home owner is not housed. This is not a housing policy. All the rhetoric in the world and documents that detail allotments of health and transport services to suburban and regional and rural populations cannot change the undeniable.
If a single recipient of a Newstart Allowance owns a well furnished mortgage free brand new home with solar panels on their new roof overhead and new water tanks in
their back yard holding sufficient rainwater to see them through a year, they can breathe relatively easy they only have to secure everything else they need to eat and sleep well out of a payment of $267.50 a week. Best they own a brand new car that is under guarantee so they can shop around for food bargains and bulk buy ‘cupboard’ milk to pay for car registration, licence renewal, ambulance cover, houshold insurance, the rates and phone, internet and for clothing.
‘Of all households’, 36% of homeowners have a mortgage. Only 31% do not.
30% rent. Give or take a few percent here and there and there. The Great Australian Dream in its parallel universe for all that it is everyday unattainable in its form of ownership of a house that is a home with a yard, outlook and a barbecue with at least a blow-up paddle pool stored in the garage for the kids pulses yet like a power house … incredibly… even children witnessed by me first when I met High School sweethearts some years ago now who had a savings account for when they married and purchased a house, actualised The Dream.
What if this driver I visualise as so powerful, The Great Australian Dream for one when its actualisation is impossible needs a shake up to let some of our national psyche down off a hook it’s dangles from, helpless, frustrated, non-reactive, complacent even when a dream regardless it will not materialise engenders hope.
I was a home owner when I heard a University lecturer expound the premise in 1980 that rental housing is a potential choice not a default position and home ownership not all its cracked up to be. Until then I had never thought about rental from the viewpoint of choice.
How did I? To illustrate a thought process I need to provide a backdrop of personal experience.
Two years earlier I had moved with three young children from Queensland to live in Adelaide in South Australia with a partner. I was awarded a generous allotment of University of Adelaide subjects as representative of subjects I had completed at the
University of Queensland in Brisbane stretched over the years 1968, 1969 and 1974. By 1980 I was 30 with three young children and a classic sandstone home in a state of disrepair, a relationship to match.
I undertook to graduate to establish employment and sufficient income asap to relieve my husband-to-be and step-father to the three children of the load he was carrying as primary provider. I wanted to graduate certainly before my ageing parents did not see it through to know I had, but as well to help provide shelter, food, clothing etc for a projected larger family of children in the future.
Having completed two full time subjects in History at the U of A, I had achieved equivalence of one Major (three years study in the one discipline). To graduate now I had sufficient Minor subjects. I needed one other Major in a different discipline, I needed to choose one only further full-time subject from either the Politics Department or English Department given the U of A had awarded me equvalence of two years full-time study in each.
Politics seemed to offer a wider field of opportunity and the subject ‘Sociology of Power’ lept off the Handbook page.
I wanted to define myself as having power and understanding power. An interest in a career in Local Government rekindled especially grown originally out of ‘dropping-out’ from the Queensland Department of Education into the social tumult of the counter-culture in the 1960s. Skirmishes with local coucils and local Progress Committees was par for the course for alternates building home made houses.
I was surprised the class ‘Sociology of Power’ attracted only a handful of students. I had thought it so interesting a concept I presupposed a lecture theatre or auditorium. Classes were delivered in the intimacy of staff offices. Especially my outlook was introspective. I did not worry at any topic and draw attention. My no-frills kick-off position undertaking to pass the one subject was to graduate. I was compromised by fatigue and the demands of a domestic household.
Professor now, Jim Kemeny, grabbed my attention however when he presented the consideration that rental housing is a potential choice. He outlined what I heard as an
idealistic in part and ideological alternative dream of a rental housing sector of tenants and landlords bound by law and common respect for the other’s purpose and relationship to housing.
We each become sophisticated in our lives in one detail or other, usually in the most unexpected ways whereas my experience had been naive in this respect, dependant and certainly powerless in regard to bigger decisions of quality of lifestyle and domestic arrangement. That the Great Australian Dream had holes in it and neither did I dream it, but complied with it escaping persecution of one variety or another, had never crossed my mind. The presentation was a housing policy set in an understanding of diverse housing needs and expectations. This was a discussion about housing policy that dealt with considerations of financing, relativity and a practical analysis of what a Dream means, who its players are and their stakes, tenancy law, contemporary shortfalls in the law, a projected future in which tenants had maximum opportunity to participate in housing policy with non-intrusive real estate agents, that they would hold rights that are the proper rights of tenants investing in being housed in a maintained home, not begrudging paying rent, enjoying diminshed friction that was otherwise rife between landlords and agents and tenants. More Australians would settle in rental if the relationships between landlords and their agents and tenants were well legislated to establish equity and pride in tenancy, that the relationships were valued. If the Great Australian Dream was not the dominant driver of the housing market, born out of a cult of individualism and desire for a higher and higher standard of living, for freedom from tenant-landlord relationships, instead more people would opt to rent but be happy, to achieve the goals of their day-to day pursuits without housing stress.
to be continued…
Christina Binning Wilson
Therese Trouserzoff said:
Hi ‘Shoe and Mark.
I’ve been a bit flat out and not a tiny bit buggered lately so I’m woefully late to your story. But it’s certainly been worth putting off reading it until I have time.
This email comes from Palm Cove north of Cairns. FM and I are taking 9 days off to draw breath and think about what to do next.
My contract at the Smith Family finished and they offered me a permanent job for 30% less money. This was my reward for getting the effing project done ahead of time and in good shape. So – believing in the cause – supporting disadvantaged kids to help them get through school and into tertiary education – I shook hands on a deal based on the lower pay but also on working a four day week.
Then they tried to chisel me another effing fifteen percent, citing some bullshit from the HR department (anyone remember my pieces at the old ABC’s blog “Unleashed” – “All Bosses are Bastards” and “The HR Department are Bastards too” ?
And FM’s long run at the private hospital is looking precarious again. She was running three successful IT projects – including – incredibly a great one we worked out to make it easier for specialists to book theatre time at the hospital – and increase the number of patients and revenue – and the dopy arsehole executive over-ruled the CIO and canned two of the three projects. The other dead project is a ground breaking one in Australia – tracking patients electronically through a chip in their ID wristband. This saves a huge amount of clinicians’ time, improves patient safety and shows up less efficient procedures.
So right now we um, have an 85% reduction in income ! In SYDNEY – Jeezuss. Hopefully we can make that a temporary situation.
As you know, we own a chunk of 1890s house – Cambria – just up the road from the Pig’s Arms and the Comm Bank holds the mortgage on enough of the rest to keep our noses to the grindstone. And at 64 I’m fucking sick of the grindstone.
I guess the difference, my lovely mates, between renting and owning is merely that one gets to deal with a better quality of counts (remove the vowel of your own choosing) as an “owner”.
On reflection, it seems to me that it’s not Emm and FM who “own” Cambria – Cambria “owns” us – and silently demands that we clean and care for her and pour cash into tradies’ bottomless pockets. And the running costs like insurance are frightening.
We have one winner – we have that 5 KW solar array – and now we might as well shell out for the battery and effectively go off-grid.
Looking forward to reading the next couple of instalments in your story.
Fond regards,
Emm
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sandshoe said:
Dear Em, I am a woman of many parts in this respect that this tale is an extended one by its nature I want to arrive at a difficult to resolve concept the housing story is told the way I have lived it, incorporating reflection that points to the issue we have as well of unattended issues for these poor migrants abandoned by this silly pimple of a man with his silly face of pomposity and intransigence, this silly situation where just recently I paid a thousand plus dollars for electricity or will have shortly when I now finish paying it off that is keeping me stuck on the grindstone you refer to. Except my situation is different from your grindstone, it is just a different grindstone.
We are the victims of a situation bigger than us for all we want to believe we are equal to it. The reason it is bigger than we are is the economic and social manipulation that goes on where we cannot participate and are marginalised by relative to the people who make money out of only money and win, the people who make money out of land and capital investments whether the land belongs to them or the capital investments belong to Mickey Mouse. The shit hits the fan for however we strive and whatsoever we know, contribute and would contribute better were we not labouring under stress caused by housing ourselves and our families or parrot.
That is the essence in some empathetic part regards meaning, that the two of you have worked creatively and hard and have a hell of a continuing struggle to do so.
I was very much interested to read you have been sparked by having a little time and as well by the article to write to to it. We miss you and I reckon I say that for us all and that we appreciate the battle to maintain Cambria.
Thank you the insight of where you are at in regard to Cambria and your lives sharing the battle. Reading you are taking time off at Palm Cove is a delight that I can see your surroundings in my mind’s eye. You’ve got not a bad team here that you are the Boss. So loved.
With love and appreciation
Shoe
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Mark said:
Jesus H Christ Mikey ewe is my hero, I told you so over dinner. Hang in there boyo you have my total support and remember I still hold the record for being barred the most.
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sandshoe said:
Typo or somethin … Para 12 … To spell it out median income is looking towards 50% of median income.
Should read… To spell it out median rent is looking towards 50% of median income.
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Mark said:
Done Christina. What a beautiful name.
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vivienne29 said:
Even where housing is available and prices no where near Sydney or Melbourne, we have homeless. Rental prices vary a lot but they are more realistic. Newstart is too low. For the jobless and homeless it is a vicious circle. Governments are doing too little – it’s bloody disgusting.
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sandshoe said:
Beyond imagining how disgusting disgusting could be. Right on it’s bloody disgusting.
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Big M said:
The reality is that, in most towns and cities, there is Fuck all accommodation for the homeless. Males are particularly vulnerable, but single women are making up more of the numbers. We do see some homeless women with children at work, but they often seem to land on their feet with various charities keen to look out ‘for the kiddies!
I rented for the first few years of my married life. It was okay initially, with a reasonable landlord, and real estate agent, but the the ‘rental roll’ was transferred to another agent who simply kept increasing the rent. That transformed us from a couple who looked after the unit, repainted every room, etc, to a jaded pair who didn’t give a f;!?#*. Yes, it goes both ways.
I did read a book about making one’s fortune from real estate. One of the premises, from a bloke who owned about five hundred properties, was to treat tenants like humans, make them want to rent that house, make them want to pay their rent on time. I don’t think it caught on!!
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sandshoe said:
I lost a comment I answered to your comment here. Last night. I am now testing this page to see if I can load anything now. (Sorry about the reply to your comment. It’s gone).
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sandshoe said:
In the comment I wrote and sadly lost, I referred to this matter of the number of men who are far and away the majority of the homeless, Big M. It confuses me why we don’t have refugee camps to manage homelessness. We have to manage it. I keep on reflecting on the Resettlement Programs in Europe at the end of the Second World War. They were massive. The difference is there was will. Making tens and tens of thousands of people responsible for their exposure to the elements and wandering from shelter to shelter is incomprehensible. It’s a difficult issue that now we have increasing numbers of families living in cars for all the allocation of women to shelters to house the kids. Another outcome is that people less frequently access health services until they are corralled into a shelter. It is one of the first things that is organised that they are taken to present to a health professional or was, leastwise and I hope that still happens.
Yes, people don’t give a brass razoo about their rental properties when they are neglected or the rent is increased beyond tolerable, Big M. The roundelay of moving rental picks up speed too. Be interesting to see the breakdown of how many rental properties a renter lives in. One day I will see if i can find some stats on it.
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Mark said:
I’m with you 100% by the way.
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Mark said:
TISM = This is serious Mum. Or for the Jones boy Mom.
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sandshoe said:
TISM = This is serious Mark.
As I told you I have moments of greatly being dumb (the avatar debacle), let me tell you two adult ‘children’, extended family and in even different countries address me as ‘Ma’, alternately ‘my old ma’. I got a laugh when I saw your Jones boy reference. ‘Mom’ is my sister. She is in Canadar where they have this quaint trait addressing their mothers as if they battle to stop illicit foodstuffs (pilfered chocolate maybe) from popping out of their mouths. It’s so… retro. 🙂
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Therese Trouserzoff said:
i loves you, mate. You are so unbelievably kind. Brotherly hug.
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Mark said:
Wow, I mean wow.
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sandshoe said:
Hello dear Hung. You’re a funny cheeky chappie. You even were able to apply humour to this choosing images for it I amaze at your capacity to find a way.
Hung, I so appreciate the work you’ve done receiving this demanding and long essay, reading it and putting it up. I wrote all of it to my surprise pretty well off the top of my head. It took hours of editing for me to pull this first part into a shape. I hoped to do it well enough to communicate it is lived experience written from the heart that I feel strongly about housing, we’ve got it very wrong. I’ve put in energy. It’s something I wanted to say one day in an environment where it would be read come what might onto the page.
Housing is such a distressing subject now however the homeless situation has arrived at the low point it has. I feared it , of course or 20 years ago I would not have foreseen I wanted to say as an ultimate essay before I get too old this is my housing viewpoint. However we only think we know until we’re standing in it. The way it is zooming as a consequennce in front of everybody is… too shocking… but that’s the rest of it. It reads ok to me now I’m seeing it laid out and spaced. I hope the rest interests you and I do your wonderful attention to it justice.
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Mark said:
This is an excellent story. I am in awe.
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sandshoe said:
Thank you kindly. Truth will out but. I’m blonde on the inside truly.
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Mark said:
I am just waiting to see if Port beat the Bulldogs, hate close games. 🙂
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Mark said:
Port won thank Gordon. I have sent an email to Mike to try an figure out what is going wrong with your log in. Hon seems ok but sandshoe not so. Now I can’t see why Mark can log in but not shoe. I would love to solve this problem.
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sandshoe said:
The like button is cantakerous. I think I know why.
I have to make sure I have not left a random google page logged on using the detail of the old email account (honshades). When I log out of the random Google page and log back onto this PA page by using the log in of the second email account (sandshoe), I can’t upload a succeeding comment until I Iog in yet again as sandshoe.
It’s got something to do with security having the old email account and the new one,
However I see the comment STILL sits in moderation regardless I am well and truly logged in as Sandshoe.
I wonder if it is to do with the cookie cache….
Maybe need to clear History in settings…
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