Young people don’t deserve to own houses
WHO cares if young people can’t afford a house. We all had to spend a decade in fleapit rentals before entering the real estate market, writes Claire Harvey.
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I KICKED some negotiating arse this week.
I scored a massive discount on my home loan by showing the bank what-for and scaring them into shaving five years off my repayments.
Actually, I just rang them up and said I was considering leaving unless they could offer me a lower rate. The very nice lady who looks after me took .75 of a percentage point off my interest rate, bringing it down to roughly the lowest rate available in the market.
Just because I asked. I asked because a) I’d read the Lifehacks special in today’s paper and b) because I am a 40-year-old who is no longer scared to ask for what I want.
Ten years ago I never would have asked a bank, or anyone else, to give me something more cheaply.
I was too self-conscious. And too lazy. I’d rather pay the sticker price on anything than endure the ignominy of haggling. I may be the only person in the world ever to walk into a car yard and pay the price being asked for a second-hand Honda Civic, simply because I was mortified at the very idea of negotiating. Diagnosis: Young and silly.
Way too silly for the giant responsibility of home ownership. And that’s why I think we should stop freaking out about the fact “YOUNG PEOPLE CAN’T BUY A HOUSE IN SYDNEY ANY MORE!”
When could young people ever buy a house (don’t talk to me about 1890)? And what the hell do young people need houses for anyway? They don’t have any business fussing around with window treatments, or worrying about whether the jasmine is growing up the fence incorrectly.
Why are we setting ourselves this ridiculous standard: that if Sydney is to be a liveable city, 22-year-olds must be able to buy terrace houses and fill them with milk crate-bookshelves and those terrible clothing racks you buy when you can’t imagine the responsibility of looking after an actual cupboard.
In my day of being 22 (the late 1990s), there was absolutely zero prospect of owning anything more sizeable or significant than my Mazda 121. I didn’t have enough front to aspire to owning a house, and it certainly didn’t occur to me to be irked that older generations of selfish bastards had snapped up all the housing stock.
The only people I knew who owned anything immobile was a pair of siblings whose parents had given them the deposit for a flat in outer suburban Canberra. Like everyone else, I was busy spending all my paltry wage on rent, Diet Coke and excessively peroxided hairdos that I only now realise made me look like a lesbian.
All was as it should be.
At the age of about 26, I was standing in a girlfriend’s flat admiring her leather sofa (she was 39 and had just had her first baby). I said: “I think I’m going to save up and buy myself a leather sofa like that.”
She looked stricken at the prospect I might actually do something so stupid. “Oh no you are f…ing not,” she ordered. “You are young! Your money is for spending on expensive clothes, in order to look hot.”
She made me promise I would not squander my money on something so insane as a leather sofa that would last me 30 years. And she was right.
I was in my early 30s before buying a flat — a flat! — was even a remote prospect, and didn’t buy any real estate until 34, after I was married, when we bought a house together (my husband came to the marriage with a leather sofa of his own, much nicer than anything I could have afforded).
So I think we should let ourselves relax a little about all the young couples priced out of Sydney’s crazy market.
Property, just like eyeshadow, should be restricted to over-30s with some hope of knowing what to do with it.
And young people can spend a decade flatting in scuzzy rentals with heartless landlords, just like in the good old days. Or they can use the scary property market as an excuse to live with their parents until the age of 35.
Either way, it’s character-building.