The dominant reaction to Reserve Bank head Philip Lowe’s helpful suggestion to renters that they consider flatsharing was irritation. Mine was a brief musing that it might prove the seed of a reality TV venture, once Lowe has departed from the bank, possibly before this article is concluded.
Picture this: a young Married at First Sight-style couple, sparkling Anglo, Gazman-outfitted, arguing viciously in their lovely overpriced apartment. Suddenly a helicopter whoosh, and someone’s on the balcony opening the screen door. It’s Philip Lowe, head of the RBA!
“Troy,” says Philip softly, as the music starts, “I think what Madison’s saying is she wants to be treated like a woman, but not like a girl.”
“And Madison,” Philip turns to the angry ice-blonde, “are you sure you’re not asking Troy to be everything all at once? Both your rock, but also open and emotional?” Grateful, they nod, sobbing, in recognition, as a banner for RuPaul’s Drag Race unfurls to occupy a third of the screen.
With that sorted, as the grateful couple wave, Lowe is whisked away, off to disentangle a love triangle in Montmorency. I would watch that. You would watch that. You’d have to, because the mortgage on your concrete shoebox means you’ve cancelled your streaming services. It’s free-to-air all the way, baby.
That is what was at the root of the negative reaction to Lowe’s intervention, a reaction he and others appear to have been a bit stunned by. The proposition that no one has considered flatsharing as an answer to rental pressure is the opposite of the case; people looking for a place have this as their first thought, not their last.
The return, or persistence, of shareflat/house living is what haunts them. It is what people are seeking to avoid at all costs. For many of those coming out of their mid-to-late 20s, staying in sharehousing is what is to be avoided. The idea that it may be indefinite, and become normal, is a nightmare. And a measure of utter social failure.
That truth is what should drive an assertive politics of housing. It is part of the wider political-economic truth of our time, which is that the social contract — “the deal” — of neoliberal capitalism has broken down, and what is on offer is the very opposite of what was promised.
Neoliberal capitalism and the two ‘deals’
There have been two phases of “the deal”. The first was the high Thatcher/Reagan/Hawke neoliberal period, when you were promised both readily affordable housing and necessities and luxuries steadily reducing in cost. This arc continued until it was knocked on the head around the end of the 1990s.
By the time of the 2000 dot-com crash, the private sector controlled housing supply, high immigration was used to discipline the labour force, and lower tax regimes created a steady squeeze on social services, at the same time as an increase in demand that they cover ever-larger areas of life.
So version two of “the deal” came in. Rents and housing costs would rise, wage power would lower. You adjusted your expectations from house to apartment. You got used to medical “gap” fees and overpriced private health insurance. But in compensation, the world was now a cornucopia of diversion. Screens, cocktails, cheap airfares, cheap stylish furniture. For millions, life was taking on a different shape to that of the post-war decades. Hours were increasing not decreasing. Wage power kept falling.
But luxury and small necessity prices fell faster, and in that gap a life could be had. Because you could buy $2 socks and a $10 lamp at Kmart, you could buy an espresso martini at a bar, not drink a longneck at home, watching Lowe reunite an estranged Christian mother and non-binary daughter.
Well, now that deal is over too, killed by the inflation resulting from the pumping in of trillions in free money, not targeted to any increase in productive capacity. The cornerstone of that deal was your own housing space. The scaling down of expectations concerned how big it would be, free-standing, garden, etc. That it would be your own space was non-negotiable.
After abnegation
Commentators have noted the degree to which changing cultural expectations have had a role in the supply of available housing — that we have smaller households and more of them. But they have done so with the expectation that such expectations can be culturally reengineered, a la Dr Phil’s suggestions.
That is society seen through the eye of capital — the person as a mere work unit, capable of being retooled to system needs (40 years of social constructionism in the humanities chiefly served as capital’s agent in deconstructing the notion of a full human nature, on which a socialist politics depends. Discuss in the comments. Harvard footnoting please).
One will be very interested to see whether a return to sharehousing for full-time workers will take, and what effects it will have. Lowe and others don’t appear to understand that cultural-psychological changes are as real as actual bricks and mortar.
Until the 1960s, capitalism’s rule was aided by the persistence of pre-capitalist cultural frameworks — dutifulness, protestant abnegation, fatalism, a sense of differing class rewards as legitimate — creating a hybrid system in which capital had the freedom to seek maximum accumulation, while generations of workers internalised limits to their demands upon it. One major task of activists was to try and make that contradiction visible to working people, so that strikes and political action could be conceived.
But those dutiful cultural forms, combined with sheer scarcity, were very powerful — structuring people’s lived experience down to that of bodies and space. You lived with your parents until you were married. And even after. You could hear your dad fart two rooms across, you fought with your husband’s mum. It was crappy, but it wasn’t unbearable. Your weird uncle or your exciting/sad/mad aunt lived with you. Or your family took in a lodger or two to cover costs. Or such people lived in boarding houses, in one room, and a shared lounge/dining room, where they ate together whatever the landlady served up. Because people felt more joined together, even with strangers, the presence of all these bodies felt less of an impingement. Not no impingement. It wasn’t intolerable, but it was the thing to be escaped from, the prize.
That had cultural effects, hidden by history. People now wonder why so many accepted the apparent torpor of the new brick-veneer suburbs in the post-war years. It was, a spirited old woman told me of moving to Glen Waverley in the 1950s when it was dirt roads and no sewage, not merely that they were sealed from damp, easy to clean and spacious, but that “you could fuck with no one hearing you”. One looks out at the planes of terra-cotta roofs seeing only tedium. In fact, it pulsed with eros, an expression of freedom.
The sharehouse paradox
Now that cultural-psychological revolution has been completed. Now we want a space for ourselves, or shared with those we are intimately, bodily connected to. That “intimacy skin” is coextensive with the desired living area. People are currently experimenting with all sorts of collective living arrangements, but virtually none of them work off the illusion — one that briefly flourished in the 1970s — that private space can just be surrendered; that people can remake themselves to be essentially tribal in social-psychological form.
This can be seen in what might be called the “sharehouse paradox”, or maybe threshold: that everything valued in the sharehouse experience at 21 is, by around 27, the exact reason to escape it. It’s a total flip. “The kitchen’s a disaster”, “we talk about our problems together all the time!”, “music’s always on” are the remarks that can be said ecstatically at 21 and are usually muttered at 3am through grinding teeth at 27 or later.
Now that might be changing. And many people might be getting some positives from later-life sharehousing, especially apartmenting. But I am suspicious of the series of stories on such households, which flowed a few years ago. I wonder how many persisted, were seen as a permanent solution — or blew apart, redoubling their participants’ determination to have a space, any space, of their own.
Thus, for most people, as we are formed now, and living in the atomised, conflictual, contractual public world of the present, the private home has become more of an essential psychological haven than it once was. We have the spectacle of the head of an institution of accumulation and propriety telling people to share a living room, pass the patchouli, while a rising generation put at the centre of their lives the right to “chill”.
“Chill”, a concept that really didn’t exist in that specific form 20 years ago, seems to me to be essentially a reversioning of the third part of the eight-hour day slogan: eight hours work, rest and recreation. Recreation, re-creation, becoming oneself again. That is what one requires a place of one’s own for. The public world is a hot zone of demands, media, contestations, negotiations — very different from the shared cultural space of a monoculture — and you need those walls and that space to take the temperature down and feel yourself return to self.
YIMBYs!
This is what is giving the generationally structured YIMBY movement much of its force and energy. Many of the things that progressives poured their/our efforts into over past decades — comprehensive heritage protection to preserve a living city with history, street life, class mix, liveability — are now coming to seem as beside the point at best and obstructive at worst.
Some caveats on that later, especially heritage (you will never win in Melbourne! We will protect our brutalist multi-storey car parks!). But for now, you can see the potential force of the movement, because it combines a concrete economic demand with a wider sense of right. That’s especially so when remarks by the RBA governor have a Hunger Games aspect to them, tossed off from the stage to the youthful masses about to disembowel each other for a two-bedroom apartment.
If the right to expect to be able to afford a modest space of one’s own is used by the man who controls the supply of capital as an excuse for a moralising instruction to lower one’s expectations, then that is surely as neat a sketch of the failure of Australian capitalism, even on its own meagre terms, as you could ask for.
This is not an asking for fully automated Ferraris for all communism-type thing. This is the exposure that after decades and decades of full-time work under an unchanging 40-hour-week regime, we appear to have accumulated nothing that would allow us to build rapidly and straightforwardly to satisfy the most basic human needs.
But of course we have. We have the capital. For 70 years, from the 1920s through to the 1990s, Labor and the left fought to get some people’s control of the capital supply. Now that we have it, Albanese’s Labor won’t use it. Instead it gives us a wretched parody of an affordable housing program, and cynically uses the desperation of the population to sell it as better than nothing.
This is simply cover for the true nature of the Albanese government. It is an austerity regime, more in the character of the UK Cameron-Clegg government or the Abbott government of the post-2008 crash years. It should be using its powers over the money supply to make real housing shifts happen. Instead, it is ruling for capital, and its appointed officers offer helpful homilies to the deprived. And my God, while I was writing this, helpful Phil told people that maybe they should work more hours, and find a second job.
This is the agenda: US-style capitalism, where people scrabble for work simply to make ends meet, and everyone prides themselves on their perpetual exhaustion. Tune in next week as the head of the RBA brings his sunny demeanour and wise outlook to Ramallah, to sort that Middle East nonsense out. Coming soon to Ten Peach. Viewing is compulsory.
How badly has Philip Lowe missed the mark? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
