Do you feel like you belong to the community you live in?
I personally recall moving over a dozen times before I left high school and I wonder whether that has had an impact on my need to put down roots and feel connected to a community.
Australia is a mobile society. Many people do not live in the same place they grew up in, be that the same house or same town. A third of our population are born overseas and only a third of people stayed living at the same address in the last five years, according to the last ABS sensus in 2021.
The Great Australian Dream of owning your own home, in the current climate, appears to be fast drying up. It is possible to buy but it seems less likely to be where you actually want to live.
Space and aesthetic can be vital to feel comfortable and to be surrounded by people you relate to: your tribe. It provides room to grow and build dreams but this seems to be restricted to those already with links to the bank of mum and dad or with their foot in the door. So you need to compromise.
Is it better to buy where you can afford, potentially in a rural town that has arguably fewer employment opportunities or is not connected to your tribe? Or to stay surrounded by the bustle of noise for the sake of convenience and potential access to healthcare?
Perhaps starting from the ground up provides opportunity to build your dream house with space but with a long drive to anywhere convenient. Or a renovation could end up becoming a money pit that is never ending and never completed.
I recently heard about the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and the tensions of idealising the imagined home of our futures:
‘Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house...Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts--serious, sad thoughts--and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.’
Gaston seems to suggest that you should not realise our dreams for it may lead to lack of direction, but he fails to consider those who have not had the opportunity to have a solid foundation of a home and continue to be jostled by waves of uncertainty.
Reality may, however, be the decider, with the ship already sailed on buying the ideal home.
If there is no foot already in the door or there is no bank of mum and dad, perhaps continue to dream and it will manifest…
”If you build it they will come”
This is actually a misquote from Field of Dreams (1989 movie) in which ‘all that once was good, could be again’. Granted, this is in relation to America and baseball but the sentiment still stands. Just maybe there is a glimmer of hope for a house of dreams where we feel we belong.
