For years, whenever my friends and I have despaired of the housing market and our precarious place within it, we have eventually landed on the same dark joke: there’s nothing any of us can do until our parents drop off the perch.
The median rent in Sydney – the city where I live, largely by dint of being born here – has just hit $800 a week, a sum that represents more than half of a median income, and well beyond what is defined as affordable. This is the system that we are living with, one in which housing is a commodity, an investment, a means to accrue and hold wealth, rather than a basic need and human right.
In the past five years house prices have risen by nearly 50%, from what was already a record high. In the past month three of my closest friends – including one who lives alone – have been hit with rental increases of more than $100 a week. In 14 years I have moved house nine times, only once by my own choosing.
To be clear: I don’t think the problem is intergenerational, or that the housing crisis has been caused by one generation screwing over another (at least, not entirely). The problem is structural, it is political, and it is cultural.
There are many other places in the world where home ownership is the exception, not the expectation, and where renters have actual protections and powers as a result. Where wealth isn’t concentrated in a housing market that must therefore always continue to rise; and dignity in retirement isn’t based on having to own your house outright.
It’s just that as individuals, it’s difficult to imagine any other way in which our situations – and these structures – might change.
Generational change is inevitable – that much is true. So many of us feel so powerless that the best-case scenario we can imagine is inheriting our share of the family home after our parents die.
Like all dark jokes, this one works because its premise isn’t something that anybody wants. It is a thought that’s truly awful. Painful to even contemplate. It feels like a deal with the devil.
My parents built their house on the suburban fringe of Sydney shortly after the birth of their first child, my brother. It was not an investment: it was a place to live and raise a family. There were plenty of years when money was tight; the suburb was still developing much of the infrastructure – schools, shopping centre, public transport – that make a place desirable, or just convenient. They both worked hard. It wasn’t easy but it was possible.
It isn’t quite luck but something close to it – economic conditions, decades of public policy – that has turned their home, like the homes of so many of their generation, into a valuable asset. They didn’t expect a world in which their children would struggle to find a foothold in the property market, and pay such high rent in the meantime.
It is difficult to reconcile that what might count for luck for many of my generation will be the passing on (capital gains tax-free) of that valuable asset, knowing that this can only come at so awful a cost.
No one wanted this. And yet, here we are.
I am what the internet has decided to term “an elder millennial” – which is to say that I am in my 40s. More and more of my friends are marrying and having children, more and more of us are well established in our careers, but there are still very few of us who own a home. Very few of us, that is, who aren’t living from 12-month lease to 12-month lease, with frequent rent escalations, with furniture that has been disassembled and reassembled more times that we can count.
Of those who own their homes, I know of only three who have managed to get there without access to their inheritance – one moved to a small country town (before the pandemic, which has made even this far more difficult); and one moved into her parents’ home and lived there, with her partner and small child, for several years so she could save. All of the others drew on their parents’ estates.
This is why our dark joke works: it has the smallest grain of truth within it, deep within its horror.
Fiona Wright’s new novel Kill Your Boomers (Ultimo Press, $34.99) is out in April
