Excuse the watermark, I stole the image from an apartment site I was looking at.
Sometimes I wonder why I pay so much to live where I live. I have lived in 6 different apartments/houses since I moved out of my parents' house, and in each of them I lived in a trendy and accessible neighbourhood. If, say, I wanted to move to a place that was a 10 minute drive outside of town, I could have that whole house pictured above, to myself. Meanwhile, I'm in a cute & trendy 1 bedroom condo while, while cool, has no counter or storage space to speak of. I'm so urbanized, that in Austin, Texas last year, I was completely dumbfounded that there wasn't always a coffee shop within sight. Growing up in Vancouver, I became accustomed to being able to look up on any city street and see 2 or 3 coffee shops within my eyeline. In Austin, however, I had to occasionally walk 5 blocks without seeing one.
I love that I am half a block from bars, restaurants, and a grocery store. In fact, at every single place I've lived, there have been 3 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk. Although I never talk to any of these people, seeing people surround me on the pavement everytime I step outside makes me feel a kind of camaraderie with my fellow human population. I feel less alienated, I feel like I'm part of something. Even though I may never have the cash to spend at the trendy boutiques lining the sidewalks of my neighbourhood, I feel oddly comforted that they're there. Even though I never talk to these people, I like that I see them everyday. When I feel too alone in my apartment, sometimes I take walks and go to coffee shops for some inexplicable urge to be surrounded by human life.
I have a 15 minute commute by foot to my work in the morning and a 4 minute commute by transit. I love this. But, sometimes I wonder how little my life would be affected by, say, a 10 minute move Eastward. I could then afford a house and a garden and a big porch. However, that location wouldn't afford me the social cache of living in a "trendy" neighbourhood. I read an article by an economist recently that calculated that, since he paid 200 thousand more for the convenience downtown digs than he would've out in the suburbs, the privilege of walking to work rather than commuting cost him around 100 dollars a day. For me, I think a move out to the suburbs is associated with settling down and becoming, god forbid, responsible. Because, clearly, it is an irresponsible, irrational decision to waste a few hundred dollars extra a month for the privilege of being surrounded by people I never talk to, stores I never shop at, and bars I never frequent. Oh and, lest we forget, the theater which hosts plays I never attend, and the concert hall I never patronize.
In a way, I think the fact that Vancouver real estate prices are astronomical anywhere I'd want to live has contributed to my resistance to returning there. I don't know if I'll ever have the cash to buy a home (and it's looking more and more like a pipe dream, based on my current working class paycheque-paycheque existence), but I like to know that it's a future possibility, however remote.
Of course, there are significant environmental benefits to living downtown and car-free. Really, none of us deserves to be taking up the room that a house and yard consumes. Still, though, I love the idea of space. I think this is why I am reluctant to move to New York, a city that I absolutely adore. I just can't imagine being constricted by walls and boundaries that are closer in than those I have now. I know some people want a house to fill a family with, but I really just want space to cook big dinners, and a room to write in, a studio to jam in, a darkroom to develop photos in, and a dancefloor for my friends to party on.
I wonder how it will affect peoples' sense of nationalism as, due to changes in lending policies following the mortgage crisis, so few of us are able to own homes. It is a very American idea that we are each entitled to our own piece of land. And now, as relative salaries diminish, this American ideal is inaccessible to most of the population. Can we feel as tied to a country if we are unable to own our own piece of it? The importance of ownership is a central tenet of capitalism, and I wonder how capitalism will change as space diminishes and ownership becomes out-of-reach for many as the middle-class continues to erode. But, I can't help but feel that the space that surrounds me affects my sense of self immeasurably.
When I think about the meaning of space, I can't help but think of Gaston Bachelard's text "The Poetics of Space": "to sleep well we do not need to sleep in a large room and to work well we do not have to work in a den. But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both....Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest."
A house is tied to our pasts, our future: "a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated...if one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-openm one would have to tell the story of one's entire life."
There are countless metaphors that equate the interiors of our home with the interiors of our mind. The places we inhabit can be imbued with many emotions and memories: they can remind us of lost loves, haunt us about unfinished projects, and annoy us about the emptiness in our lives.
The houses and spaces we have inhabited are intertwined with our memories and our past, and I often wonder what it does to someone's psyche to be rootless, or, even, homeless. As soon as I go to my cabin at Sakinaw or to my mom and dad's house, I feel that I have returned "Home". I have many friends whose parents have split up and moved to small apartments and they really have nowhere that represents their childhood home to them. It is funny, I have never felt that anywhere I've lived has been a real "home". To me, the idea of a "home" is associated with stability and a kind of permanence, and all of my homes have been definitively temporary. Lately, I think it would be nice to impose my vision of an ideal home onto a place I live. It would be nice to feel that kind of connection and that kind of intent to stay put. But, of course, knowing me, as soon as I renovated things to my liking, I would probably freak out at the lack of adventure in my life and leave to discover unknown places.
There is a dichotomy in my mind between my urge to carve out a beautiful life and a beautiful space in one city and house and make it my home and the desire to unburden myself of my belongings and attachments and set out on another adventure with only a backpack to my name. Humans are horders. It's why we shop, why we want our own piece of the pie, why our ancestors traveled to North America to seize land from the Native Peoples. It comforts us to have something all to ourselves. But, what does that do to our psyche when variable interests rates can take what we have away so easily? We have all read countless studies of the link between pervasive poverty and extreme political views, but what does it do to our political future when an entire generation grows up unable to get their own piece of the proverbial pie? What happens when we graduate from school with an average student loan debt of 30,000, credit card debt of 3,000, and are unlikely to ever own a home? 30 years ago, you could've obtained a decent job after University. Now, University grads (well, okay, us, that is me, who majored in Creative Writing and English Literature, with a Minor in Russian Literature in Translation) are lucky to be making 12 dollars an hour. We are not in the middle class. We are not about to achieve the American (Pipe) Dream. We are the working class. We are poor and getting poorer. In a way though, there is a kind of strange comfort in knowing how to be poor. The economy doesn't really affect me personally, at least so far. I've never had any extra money, so nothing has changed. No wonder I find socialism so attractive. I have nothing to lose and nothing to tie me down. So, where do we go from here?
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