Going home
With my clothes and books packed in my dad’s car, I put Elton John’s Tiny Dancer on the stereo and waved goodbye to Orange.
The lyric “Looking back, she just laughs” resonated with me then — I was so happy to see my NSW regional home town fade into the background.
I was an insufferable teenager, with big dreams of making a life in the city (and I had long planned that Elton John moment. Blerk).
For a decade, I made a life in Sydney — I married, had two daughters, worked in my dream job, made excellent and interesting friends, and once, I even drank frozen rosé (that was lame).
But, like many people my age, one thing I wasn’t able to achieve in Sydney was a stable home, even while renting.
Some people ask why home ownership matters so much. Why can’t my whingeing generation of entitled twats just rent forever?
Well, here we go: We lived in six rental properties in 10 years, paying more rent and moving further from convenience as Sydney’s housing market went berko.
Our eldest daughter was three as we left Sydney, and she lived in four flats, our youngest was one and she lived in two.
This was our rental history:
From 2007–2010 my husband and I lived in a one-bedroom flat in Cammeray for between $310 and $330 a week. We gave notice on a rolling lease and went backpacking.
In 2011, we found a one-bedroom flat above a café in Crows Nest for $400 a week. At the end of our 12-month lease the landlord, who lived next door, gave us 90 days notice so the café’s chef could live on site.
But he and his family and their staff grew hostile as we took that time to find a new place, so we rushed into moving into a teeny one-bedroom granny flat in Rozelle for $440 a week.
Given more time we would have thought ahead to life with a baby in a tiny space. As if by C.S. Lewis magic, the granny flat seemed to shrink to the size of a matchbox by the time our lease expired in April 2014, when our daughter was six months old.
Then we moved into a three-bedroom house in Lilyfield for $500 a week, a rent deal offered because the place was decrepit, sinking, and the house next door was being demolished and rebuilt.
Our elderly landlord died and we were given 21-days notice.
Flung back into the rental market in 2015, we were shocked to find it was very expensive, very competitive, and completely and utterly depressing.
Again, with salivating real estate agents on our backs to get out of the Lilyfield house, we were forced to rush into a two-bedroom townhouse in Marrickville for $540 a week.
It was a long way from the station, and a long way from our daughter’s childcare in Glebe.
We had a second daughter in February 2016, and the walls again closed in before our eyes.
After our lease expired, we gave notice and moved into a three-bedroom flat in Earlwood for the eye-watering, budget-breaking, suffocating price of $700 a week. We were on a busy road, in a superficially renovated flat with an array of problems (like being able to see through the floorboards into the garage), even further from public transport, work and childcare.
But this was it, we thought. We finally had the space and time we needed to consider our future.
Despite assurances the owners had no plans to sell, they put the flat on the market about six weeks after we signed our lease.
“They want to buy a great holiday house on the south coast!” the real estate agent told us, his shit-eating grin audible over the phone.
I’ve watched people my age get disemboweled on Twitter or opinion pages when they write about similar experiences — and I acknowledge some of our decisions may not have been wise, but they were exacerbated by a competitive market and flaccid tenancy laws.
So allow me to respond to some of the ridiculous criticisms I’ve heard.
“Classic millennial inner-westy, you don’t even need to live so close to the city.”
Oh, shut up. We spent months and months looking to buy houses in Penrith, Emu Plains, Emu Heights, Blaxland, Springwood, Faulconbridge, Woy Woy, Gosford and Point Clare.
We had a deposit for a house, some of it saved, some of it from the generosity of our families (I know, hang, draw and quarter me ASAP), but our offers were always trumped by investors who could afford to throw an extra $50,000 into the wind, thanks to negative gearing.
Over the years, the houses in our price range — even those that were a 90-minute train trip away — went from quaint fixer-uperers to sad, almost unsalvageable shacks, with holes in the walls, termites, jungle yards, asbestos, and konked out kitchens.
“Your generation is just not prepared to make sacrifices.”
What? Paying various investors’ mortgages off isn’t a sacrifice? Being powerless to do anything about mice, slugs, ancient kitchens and bathrooms, mould and mildew problems and unspeakable carpets in rentals isn’t enough? What about having no space in dreary apartment blocks where you can hear your neighbours puke, or have sex? How about wearing the same clothes we wore at uni? How about only *just* being able to pay rent and bills, with holidays and meals out nothing more than a daydream.
“You eat avocado on toast”
Actually, no I don’t. And this argument has been debunked by actual mathematics. When people my age consider just how much they’d have to save up just for a 20 per cent deposit in Sydney — often three or four times their entire salary — an occasional meal, or a daily coffee isn’t a drop in the ocean.
“Why did you have kids before you bought a house?”
If we waited for the perfect place and time in Sydney, I would be the first floating head in a jar to have a baby.
So we made the decision to move to Orange, where the house prices start with a “three” or “four” and don’t end in “million”, where we’re not mortgaged up to our eyeballs, and where we don’t have to worry about finding a new house every year.
It’s not perfect. I had to give up a job which held great meaning, and the thought of that makes me weep (sometimes on the phone to my boss!). My husband stays in Sydney a few days every week. But the girls have a backyard and a garden and we’ve watched their imaginations unfurl. We have space, some extra money for fun, and we don’t have a landlord.
I know Sydney won’t miss me, but I do worry one day there won’t be room for any starry-eyed tiny dancers.
