8

Forever Home

Once, as we walked hand in hand across the park, Serge observed that dogs liked my voice. I blushed — it was an excellent compliment. I found myself coming back to it often, and the more I thought about it, the more I understood that if dogs liked my voice, it was because a dog taught me to speak, at nineteen, when I was pliable and eager to please. It was an enjoyable idea, like a real-world version of the t-shirt that claims ‘All I know about life I learned from my dog’.

The idea that dogs are faithful and devoted is anthropomorphic and romantic. In fact, dogs are a successful companion species (they are thriving; conservative estimates place 525 million domestic dogs on Earth right now) because they are skilled at getting their needs met. Anyone who has trained a dog has also in turn been trained by a dog. Some of this is common sense. You learn to predict their behaviours, and adjust your own accordingly. Some of this is more profound. A dog teaches you how to love, not in a romantic or emotional sense, but in a practical way. Love as a verb: to love.

Mishka the wayward kelpie cross was with me for over a year before she found what rescue organisations have, adorably, come to call a forever home. I felt awful letting her go. In many ways, she had become my dog. Living with Serge and I had restored her confidence and trust. She learned to chase a stick without worrying that it would become a weapon. She learned to focus a little better, to stop scanning the horizon for threats. She also helped me with my grief. I might never get over Cassady’s death, but Mishka showed me that I could love an animal again, and that dog companionship, as praxis, was not lost.

On the day she left, her eyes were white, wide and frightened, staring out of the back of her new person’s station wagon. Betrayal! Abandonment! I wanted to grab her, throw my body over her, tell the kind old man who already loved her, no deal! But I bit my lip and walked away because I knew something Mishka did not. Her forever home was a fifty-acre olive farm at the base of a mountain range. The twilight was purple there, and the dawn golden. She’d sleep nights on the end of the bed, and in the morning, she’d survey her fiefdom. What’s that, Mishka? Could it be? By the olive grove: sheep.

My second foster dog, Boyfriend, arrived six months later. Serge and I had been reticent to take on another hound. Our new lease did not permit pets (though I have never had one that does), and we were enjoying some of the benefits of radical doglessness: the impromptu weekends away, the guiltless late nights, and the freedom to leave butter out on the bench. Nevertheless, when Boyfriend trotted down our hallway and sat his gangly mass between us on the couch, we were goners.

Boyfriend was just my type. Butch but pretty, with striking eyeliner, and brown markings that formed a dapper suit jacket over his broad white chest and pink stomach. He could jump up and put a paw on each of my shoulders. He was bossy and aggressive in his affections. After a month, I fell in deep love with him. It was as intense as any human crush. We lay on the couch looking into each other’s eyes. We ran on the beach, swam together in gentle waves. We took long drives in my recently acquired ’93 VW convertible, Boyfriend’s giant ears flapping in the warm summer breeze.

If Cassady taught me how to care for others, and Mishka taught me the importance of working with your instincts, Boyfriend taught me how to win friends and influence people. I have never seen such a good illustration of the BDSM concept of ‘topping from the bottom’ than Boyfriend playing with other dogs at the park. He could make himself as spry as an Italian greyhound, as low to the ground as a dachshund, as gentle and floppy as a puppy, as careful and slow as an aged labrador. Whatever the dog, he would find their level and play to it — or rather, play just below it so that they felt themselves in charge, despite his 40 kilograms of rippling musculature.

‘He has such a good nature,’ people said, enchanted, watching him play so gently with their toy spoodle, cavoodle, or doodle.

They were half right. Boyfriend was a nice guy, for sure. But he was a politician, too. He was in the practice of getting what he wanted. He wanted to be the centre of attention. He did not want to hear the word ‘no’ or its guttural, growly doggy equivalent.

Boyfriend was nine months old. This is the most common age for abandoned dogs. Their puppyhood is spent and, if they have not learned a thing or two about living with people, they become unruly or even downright unmanageable. They need help, as all of us do, to grow up. Despite this, when I first brought Boyfriend home, I was amazed at how well behaved he was. It was a ruse. He had me pegged. I realised how foolishly I’d anthropomorphised him when the rescue organisation sent around the behaviourist to assess him.

‘The thing is, you are meeting his needs before he even articulates them,’ said the behaviourist.

She stood in my lounge room, arms folded, talking only to me. Boyfriend skidded and cavorted between us. He took a flying leap off the couch into the space between us. The behaviourist ignored him.

This drove Boyfriend crazy.

Desperate to get her to look at him, he worked through every trick in the new-dog book. He rolled around at her feet, showing her his belly. He yelped as though he’d been shot. He ran around in circles, sheep-dogging. Spun on the spot chasing his tail. He picked up a magazine from the coffee table and shredded it, looking up adorably. Then he peed on it. He jumped up and barked and cajoled and tried everything again until, exhausted, he did the only thing left and sat placidly at her feet. Only then did she look down and give him that validating scratch behind the ear.

‘He wants to set the terms of engagement. You need to set them first,’ she said sagely.

It was a daunting charge, and contained another lesson. Part of growing up, I thought, is learning to articulate your needs. This can feel near impossible for humans in a time when one of the key economic activities is generating needs and meeting them before a person even has a chance to formulate them.

I, shopped out and cultured up, had very little idea what I needed, but Boyfriend seemingly needed everything he could get. It was undeniably fun to let him set the terms of engagement, to watch him thrive, his personality developing faster than his caboose. This is the master–slave dialectic, I thought as Boyfriend pulled me down the street in his no-pull harness. Dog training: a perpetual struggle to the death between human and nonhuman, in which neither can die.

Because of Boyfriend’s advanced social skills, I too met new people. The dog park near our house became my first proximity-based community since I left the city I grew up in. I looked forward to daily chats with fellow dog owners. I came to rely on them: sometimes chatting to the people at the park would be my only social interaction in a day. Other times I’d go there after a long shift at the produce market, and someone would hand me a cold beer and we’d shoot the shit for an hour or so while the dogs played. Finally, I had friends from other generations, friends who worked and lived in entirely different ways from me. I had stumbled into a ‘bumping zone’, said my friend Kelly, who worked in community development. It was a spot in which different people collided with one another, broadening their worldviews. Bumping zones, she assured me, were crucial to both community consolidation and social change. But they are also endangered zones. The curated online worlds and real-life social cliques we mostly inhabit these days tend not to bump but to snowball, as similar people all together add false bulk to their own narrow worldviews.

I was pleased. It was a golden period.

It wouldn’t last.

When Boyfriend got an excellent adoption application, I cried for a week. Serge and I stayed up late, glumly talking over our options. Could we keep Boyfriend? We desperately wanted to. But to keep him would mean fixing our lives hastily. We would always need to have some outdoor space, which meant, as rent increased, we would need to think about moving rural. I thought about Stacy’s house in the country. Would I be involved in the local community, like her, or isolated, as my mother had been? How would we deal with the commute, my six o’clock starts on Sunday morning in the city? I would have to find another survival job, or I could try to get work at a regional university or online. Serge’s job would always be in the city, though. We would need to be very organised about work. Boyfriend did not like to be alone for long, so we would have to make arrangements. We checked the prices of doggy daycare. We wondered if we could, eventually, get another dog for company. An attractive, yet radically other, hypothetical life blazed in front of us.

‘This is what people do when they decide to have kids,’ Serge observed.

He was right. We were even displaying the characteristics of Millennial Mom: we were cautious, anxious to be the perfect parents, and ready to lay down our cash to do so.

‘It’s kind of worse, because there is much more infra-structure in the city for kids than for giant dogs,’ I said, scrolling through an outlandish price list for dog-walking services.

We could do it, though. It would be hard work to organise, but it would be worth it to have Boyfriend in our lives forever. Maybe it was just what we needed. Like the Pope said, it’s easier to give your love to the dog.

Wracked with anxiety, we drove out to meet Boyfriend’s potential adoptive family.

‘Maybe they’ll be jerks,’ I said hopefully.

I drove with my fingers crossed on the wheel. Let them have a fence made of puppy skulls, I thought. Let them have trucks with offensive bumper stickers.

Instead, they were a large family who loved one another, and lived on acreage beside the sea. Two other well-cared-for dogs ran to meet us at the gate. Boyfriend immediately struck up a rapport and got playing. The humans showed us their various outdoor living spaces, sharing anecdotes about all the great quality time they spent together enjoying their property and their totally intact and functional adult fantasy. They were wistful, full of love, and charmed by Boyfriend, already imagining him as one of them.

Serge and I cried on the drive home. Boyfriend, sandy and satisfied, slept on the back seat.

‘The thing is,’ I said, in one of the many painful conversations we had to reassure ourselves that we were doing the right thing, ‘if that’s Boyfriend’s forever home, then he will never have to move. He will always have friends. He will never be left alone when his owners go to work. He will hardly ever be bored. We don’t know what our futures will be like, but Boyfriend has the chance to lock it down.’

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ Serge agreed. ‘But it makes my heart hurt so bad.’

I made an appointment with my psychologist.

‘The dog-lover in me wants to say keep him,’ she said. ‘But I think you’re right to be cautious. You don’t know what the next few years hold. There’s a lot of uncertainty in your life, and who knows when that will change. You might have to move interstate or overseas to find a job. You might find you move and you still don’t have financial or emotional security. You’d give that dog a good life, but you might do it at the expense of your own.’

I snuffled.

‘Whatever decision you make, you will be okay. And so will he. So I say hold off. Let him go. You can keep fostering, keep doing this good work that you have started.’

The snuffle became a heave.

‘But listen,’ she said, pushing the tissues towards me. ‘Here’s something you have learned: you are a woman who needs a dog. So spend a few years finding out more about the world. Take all the opportunities that present themselves, find a place for yourself, and then get one.’

I closed my eyes and, through the fog, conjured up a small block, a sea breeze and, galumphing through the trees, a canine with the heft and sociability of Boyfriend, the determination and intelligence of Cassady, and the full heart of Mishka. I opened my eyes before it could turn, panting, to face me.

Forever home. I snuffled into the tissue.

It was a dream-board moment. A secular prayer to the gods of love and real estate.

In Hong Kong, the city with the most expensive real estate in the world, a think tank found that it would take a couple under thirty-five years old 14.5 years to save enough for a deposit on a small apartment. The government, the think tank advised, should get out in front of the crisis and build ‘hostels’ for young people to live in while they save. It’s an evocative real-estate dystopia: rows of young people prostrate in bunks, exhausted, saving every cent of their income for their own tiny box in which to teeter on the edge of one of the most densely populated islands on Earth.

At its most basic level, real estate is code for the amount of private space you can draw around your body. Culturally, though, owning a home can seem like the most important adult accoutrement, no matter the cost. In late capitalism, the American Dream — which involves throwing words such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ around, and is an insistence that a person who works hard can achieve anything — coalesces in the home as a site in which to exercise those freedoms. In the country I live in, we have a more recent and explicit version. Our Great Australian Dream ditches the appeal to higher values and insists that hard work and real estate are essential for a good life.

Like many people my age, I have never been a homeowner. Recently, after being evicted from two rental homes in two years (no fault of my own — the market was booming, and the owners wanted to sell), I wrote an op-ed about the plight of the renter. In it, I expressed my feeling that renters pay top dollar but are usually treated poorly. On Facebook and Twitter, I received a lot of support. My article resonated with the experience of many of my peers who rent in family groups or with friends. Online comments were another matter. Here, people seemed legitimately flummoxed by my complaints. After all, if I wanted to, I could have simply bought a house and avoided all this unpleasantness. Apparently, it was inconceivable to some that there were thirty-somethings walking around without home-deposit-size bank balances, and, if this truth had to be conceded, the fault must surely rest with the individual.

‘Owning a property is not a right,’ ran one comment. ‘If you have made decisions in your life (having kids for example) that now preclude you from owning, then bad luck. Be thankful you have a roof over your head at all.’

Of course I was thankful, in the same way I was thankful to have money for food and access to clean water.

Generational sledging is ugliest when the subject is real estate.

Every Australian of my parents’ generation seems to have a story about a terrace home with water glimpses that they almost bought for twenty grand and a hand job. These stories — monotonous, formally identical with those of lottery tickets lost or found — bubble up with the warm beer at intergenerational social events. They sour the coleslaw and cause sausage chunks to stick in the throat.

‘Did I tell you about the three-bedroom terrace on the harbour that your mother and I . . .’ says Dad, again.

I plug my ears with indignation.

Some people his age bought those houses and now they are wealthy. In Australia, real-estate investment is class consolidation. Being locked out of the housing market is, for middle-class young people, like having the privileges your status implies suspended indefinitely. Stamped with some official line: ‘The middle class is currently under review. Check back later.’

In 2014, Australia’s federal treasurer, Joe Hockey, stated, like a dullard commenter on an online op-ed, that ‘if housing was unaffordable, no one would be buying it,’ and advised entitled young people that the first step to buying a house is ‘getting a good job that pays good money’.

Right. Yep. Got it. I’ll make a list of great advice I’ve been given regarding home ownership and put this pearl right up there next to ‘move somewhere cheaper’ and ‘don’t eat out’.

As always, though, the sledging goes both ways. A memorable article in The Sydney Morning Herald deployed generational warfare, accusing older people of Bogarting all the freestanding houses. Won’t you think of the children! the article cried out, insisting on the deprivation of those forced to grow up in apartments, bonsaied and gnarled (presumably like those in developing nations?). Clickbaiting, the comments section began with the prompt ‘should older homeowners be forced to downsize?’ It was the kind of copy I used to bang out at the radio station. Another real-estate dystopia flashed before my eyes: retirees marched out of their lifelong homes by armed guards as hordes of children descended on well-tended Victorians, trampling the daffodils, swinging from the cracking boughs of the crab-apple tree, as their hip, young parents looked on.

In Australia, as in many parts of the world, population growth has led to housing shortages, and high purchase and rental costs. Two of our capital cities are in the top-ten most expensive housing markets in the world; Sydney is number two. Unsustainable sprawl creeps from their perimeters into the scrub and farmland beyond. We suffer from a lack of housing diversity: four-bedroom ‘McMansions’ are out of reach for lower-income families, while tiny apartments in toaster buildings are suitable only for students, singles, and trippers. Inner-city real estate is unaffordable, outer-suburban life isolated — unless you happen to be one in a growing number of families sharing apartments on the outskirts of the city, in which case your troubles have a different timbre.

Unsurprisingly, homelessness is on the rise in cities globally, and yet the view that the fault for this lies with the individual still holds prominence. In Melbourne in January 2017, while the mayor reportedly began talks about the forced removal of the homeless, the Victoria Police Chief Commissioner insisted that the people who are sleeping rough are not homeless at all but ‘choosing to camp’ because ‘there’s more people to shake down for money’ in the summer, when the Australian Open is on. In winter, though, the Herald Sun insisted that homeless freeloaders were flocking to Melbourne for ‘free food, clothes, showers and dental treatment’. A more sympathetic article in The Age ran with a photograph captioned ‘a mother and child pass the homeless people camp on Flinders Street’, contrasting the procreative image of adult success with the abject failure of being homeless. When I saw this picture, I remembered how Serge’s boss had turned up his nose at this rising visibility of homelessness. ‘You don’t want your kids to have to see that,’ he had said, over his morning latte.

Housing unaffordability is not limited to capital cities. Australia also achieves a global ranking of ‘severely unaffordable’ in areas outside the cities: Wingecarribee and Tweed Heads in New South Wales, and the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, are all brightly decorated. In 2015, the median price for a house in the Bendigo suburb of Ascot rose by 31 per cent. And there are other problems in the regional centres, too. Kelly recently came back to the city from a desert town where she had been living for more than seven years. She wanted to reconnect with city life, needed the infrastructure that was there, but also, at thirty-five, she wanted to settle in her desert home if only fracking was not affecting the groundwater. ‘I just can’t afford to buy a house in a town that will have no drinking water in five years,’ she said. She wasn’t referring to her bank account, but rather to the increasing political divide in which rural areas are seen as resource hubs to support the cities, at any cost to the people who live there.

Sometimes buying a piece of the land brings a whole new insecurity. Officially declared ‘affordable’ places such as Karratha, Port Hedland, and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, and Gladstone in Queensland, quake in the aftershock of the mining boom. What kinds of investments were these places before and then after their minerals were extracted? What kinds of homes do they make now?

Decreasing home ownership for young adults is a global trend. In the United States in 2014, home-ownership rates for people under thirty-five dropped to the lowest ever recorded and then, in 2015, soaring rental costs saw a slight nudge in this trend, as young people tried to work out whether to pitch their tent on the rock or in the hard place. In the last quarter of 2016, these rates were only slightly (.08%) lower, but the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic took the smallest share of home ownership, with the lowest recorded ownership rates since 1965. And rent is steadily increasing in most cities. A Harvard University–run study predicted that by 2025, fifteen million North American households will spend more than half their income on rent.

In my state, recent changes to tax laws for first home buyers will give middle-income earners looking to buy their first home a leg up into the market. My mum sent me through the news item marked with a row of exclamation points in the subject line. I read it through twice. This will help me, I thought joylessly. I couldn’t shake the cringing feeling that this help came at a higher cost than the figures on the page. Giving middle-class young people placating tax breaks to maintain the illusion of a stable economic reality is a short-sighted approach to a problem that is exacerbating the gap between comfortable and homeless in this country. An equitable solution would limit tax concessions on investment properties in order to halt the eternally increasing cost of houses, or better yet, make renting affordable and secure for tenants. House prices, even with concessions, are still too high for the majority.

Apart from the expense, my own experience as a renter is of begging and hustling for small repairs, being treated as an enemy by the people to whom I pay a third of my income, and finally, inevitably, being booted out unceremoniously when the market looks tasty. As a renter, particularly in the inner city, you are to take what you are given and be thankful. A friend recently relayed how a property manager, after rejecting her application for a bedsit, had asked why she didn’t just get a boyfriend she could move in with. When I got the keys to my first rental in Melbourne, there was a shrivelled roast chicken in the oven that was certainly not on the condition report. Nevertheless, the renter must treat the real-estate agent like a high-ranking government official. I wear high-heels when house-hunting; I carry a smart black folio full of documentation. I lick arse and smile thank you.

Unsurprisingly, then, the appeal of the Dream endures. To have your own space. To be free of the rental grind. To put nails in the wall and plant a garden. To live with an animal — without the fear of the neighbour dobbing you in to the property manager. To make friends with your neighbours. These are seductive adult fantasies many of us have been training for since we were children playing house.

Despite my own lack of a stable income, I have been obsessively monitoring real-estate websites for years, typing in search words like wishing on stars.

‘We could afford to move to [insert far off pseudo-city here],’ I would quip to Serge, enlarging interactive sales maps.

He would smile dubiously. There’s no point talking to me when I have floated away in the real-estate bubble. My brain no longer functions logically. It becomes clogged with bathroom fixtures, off-street car parks, and rooftop entertainment spaces. I become convinced that only home ownership will make me feel, finally, like a real adult. Even though I know that what most people own isn’t a home but a mortgage product, I still scroll through floor plans, heart aching, trying to imagine a more habitable future.

I was surprised one morning when I discovered that my bank was more than happy to preapprove me for a home loan — my lack of stable income and the infamy of the recent subprime mortgage crisis notwithstanding. My jaw dropped in disbelief when the hold music cut out and the kind young man on the other end of the phone line said, ‘Good news, Miss Doyle — we can preapprove a loan of $330,000. You can go and start bidding today!’

It was a Saturday. I was hung-over. Melancholic. Looking for distraction from the adult fantasies of others in my Facebook feed. I had been despondently browsing real-estate sites and had called the bank on a whim. I flushed with a strange pride when the operator evaluated and praised my ‘good financial conduct’. He was not concerned with my casual employment. He could see my savings history down to the school banking program, to those dollar-coin deposits. Back then, I used a bank-supplied plastic moneybox. It was a space alien, squat, not grey but orange, descended from a far-flung intergalactic civilisation to recruit six-year-old terrestrial banking customers.

The man in the call centre could follow my financial life story all the way to the overcautious adult I had become. He could see, at a glance, the $10 bottles of red, the vast sums spent on rent, and my tricky method of never letting my credit-card debt exceed my savings, carefully balancing the two so that I have both the illusion of thrift and of largesse. He could see enough to surmise that I’m the kind of gal who could service a fat loan. Does that sound dirty? I mean it that way: service my fat loan.

Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? I take a third job to meet my repayments and avoid homelessness? I’m forced to sell early and the bank takes the property, along with my repayments, while I fall into penury and debt? They don’t have debtor’s prison anymore –– or at least, not right now.

Full of adrenaline and aspiration, I dragged Serge to an auction.

‘Welcome to Edgewater Towers,’ declared a framed 1960s print advertisement. ‘Fabulous Manhattan living comes to Melbourne.’ The print hung strategically in the lobby of what I later learned was the first privately developed high-rise apartment block in inner Melbourne. I had just finished watching the final season of Mad Men, so to me, it was a pop-cultural omen. The apartment for sale — three conservatively valued rooms with views of a rollercoaster — had shag carpet on the wall. In my mind, I was already rubbing up against it, singing ‘Zou Bisou Bisou’.

A small crowd squeezed into the lounge-room-cum-kitchen.

‘I think you should buy it,’ Serge whispered in my ear, his passion for shopping transferred effortlessly to big-ticket items.

‘I don’t even know how to bid.’

‘Do you want me to do the bidding?’

Was he serious? I could smell last night’s bourbon on his breath.

We did not discuss the pile of unpaid bills on top of the fridge or the fact that Serge already carries an unmanageable debt. Neither of us mentioned how the last home-ownership conversation we had involved building a semi-permanent tent out of plexiglass on a semi-remote piece of coastline known for its wind and sand flies. All at once, we were ready for a new life. We were ready to make our own Great Australian Dream come true. We felt good. We felt grown up.

The auctioneer opened the bidding at $250,000.

Serge squeezed my hand. ‘Should I?’ he said.

Earlier, he had dragged me away from a woman who was telling me how the body corporate fees were astronomical. ‘She’s trying to psych you out,’ he explained.

‘Do I hear two hundred and eighty thousand?’ said the auctioneer.

Serge looked at me expectantly.

‘Four hundred and fifty thousand,’ said a voice from the back.

Annnd, we’re out.

Our hands slackened. We giggled foolishly as the roller-coaster rattled and crashed like nothing you would find in Manhattan. I suddenly remembered that in 1979 it came right off those brittle wooden rails and crashed into playground lore forever. Perhaps someone stood in this very apartment and watched it splinter and fall, listening to the screams, unable to finish their apéritif. That person probably bought the joint for twenty grand and a hand job.

‘Five hundred thousand.’

A gasp went up. This was double the real estate agent’s estimated price.

I looked around at the auction contenders. A woman with a flash handbag and a severe hairstyle, gripping a black folder, refusing to smile at her eager twentyish daughter. A fifty-something couple in his ’n’ hers boat shoes. A middle-aged woman who, when the auctioneer goaded her by suggesting that another bid might secure a beach lifestyle in time for summer, admitted she ‘already owns one in this building’.

‘Even better — buy this for a higher price and your own goes up in value,’ said the auctioneer. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is one smart investor.’

Rollercoasters splintered and fell in my mind’s eye.

Finally, a couple in their late thirties secured the place. She looked pregnant. He looked shaken. They may just have gone $200,000 over budget, but you have to follow the dream.

Some millennials are taking ingenious routes in order to secure their piece of the dream. Serge’s best friend Nora, her two sisters, and their parents, partners, and children all went in on the mortgage on a huge stucco palace in a rapidly gentrifying inner-western suburb of Sydney. The home, with its columns, fancy brickwork, and outdoor pizza oven, was probably built by a successful Italian family some time during the disco era. Nora’s family split the house into multiple apartments. They all live together, sharing babysitting duties and gardening in a way that is sometimes utopian and sometimes smothering.

‘There are downsides,’ Nora said. ‘Like, I look out my window and there’s my whole family standing there. I don’t really get the option to not engage. It can be hard to establish boundaries. But the pros outweigh the cons, for sure. When I moved in, I was pregnant. I was also alone. It was kind of a case of having a plan versus having no plan, you know?’

I did know.

‘I couldn’t afford to buy, or even rent anything on my own — at least, not anywhere I would want to live. I probably would have brought up my kid in a share house rather than move out to the middle of nowhere.’ She paused. ‘That probably sounds really boojie.’

I understood her cringing feeling. There is something icky about middle-class people in Australia, a country with a deplorable colonial history of violent displacement, whining about housing, insisting on living in the suburbs we like to socialise and work in. There is something gross, too, about newspaper articles insisting that Australian children need backyards and that apartment living is totally unsuitable for families. But the idea of Nora and her child in an apartment, hours from her friends and family, her work and community, made me feel anxious anyway.

‘I was just thinking the other day how lucky all our kids are. They get their own space, but there are always other kids around to play with. Plus, my sisters and I help each other with the domestic stuff, and we all chip in for a cleaner,’ said Nora, reminding me of Gillian and her polyamorous triad.

Multiple generations in one house is an increasingly popular way to deal with the cost of housing in the United Kingdom, too. In 2012, The Independent reported that there were more than 500,000 households containing three or more generations, predicting that another 50,000 will be added by 2019.

And anyway, arrangements such as Nora’s are not innovative, but hark back to other places and times. In traditional Chinese culture, multiple generations often live in one household. It’s not unusual for Spanish and Italian households to contain parents, adult children, and grandchildren. The nuclear family is, tellingly, a Western term that came to prominence during the post-war prosperity in which my parents grew up. It is an exceptional moment in history, not a long-term standard that we should expect to last forever.

The current conversation about real estate is mainly about the loss of what have been seen as middle-class entitlements. While inner-urban millennials with the resources and skills to turn a shed into a tiny house can be celebrated for their ingenuity and ethics, and siblings who pull together to buy together are adapting to a cutthroat market, people living in public housing, squats, or on the street are still treated with disdain.

There is disdain left over, of course, for kiddults who live with their parents for too long. In Japan, they are dubbed the parasaito shinguru, ‘parasite singles’, and scapegoated for social problems ranging from the ageing population to the economic recession. In the United States and Australia, they are ‘boomerang children’, because when you throw them out they come right back to you. In Italy, a cabinet minister described adults who live with their parents as ‘bamboccioni’, translated variously as ‘big babies’ or ‘big dummy boys’.

At thirty-three, Alex is a bamboccioni of the Melbourne suburbs. He lives in the backyard of his parents’ brick home in a cul-de-sac reminiscent of Ramsay Street from Neighbours, along with his two younger brothers, and, at various other times, his older sisters and their partners. ‘I did move out for a little while,’ he told me. ‘The rent was huge, and the house was cramped and kind of a dump. At some point I had to come home for health reasons, and then I just stayed. I mean, it’s really nice out here.’

Alex showed me his bungalow at the edge of an extensive and neatly trimmed lawn. His bed looked too short for him. It was flanked by an old lamp and a La-Z-Boy recliner. His books were piled in neat stacks, and he’d tacked a couple of newspaper prints to the wall above an old upright piano. It could be the room of a teenager, albeit a very studious one.

‘I don’t know if I’m, you know, infantilised, because my mum is just over there,’ he said, laughing, pointing to the big house. ‘I suppose it took me a long time to find myself. I was in my late twenties before I started to understand who I was and what I wanted — or what I didn’t want, which is sometimes an easier place to start.’

Alex doesn’t want a lot of the same things that I don’t want. He doesn’t want to work full-time in a job he hates. He doesn’t want kids. He doesn’t want to pay rent. He embodies almost every reason the media totes for labelling my generation as irresponsible kiddults. I asked Alex what he thinks about that, and he laughed. ‘I think fuck off! I have been responsible for myself since I was seventeen. I just happen to live at home because that way I can save. And because I like it here. My brothers are here too. We all get along. We look after each other.’

We went inside to meet his family. His mother hugged me. There was a cheese platter. There was champagne with strawberries in the bottom of the glass. It was a warm and gorgeous night. Dinner was served as to a television family. A window above the dining table looked onto a reserve where neighbourhood dogs chased sticks and rolled jubilantly in the cut grass. A soccer ball bounced against a fence.

‘I told my neighbours you were coming around, and they said to send you over to them,’ said Kathy, the matriarch. ‘No one can get rid of their kids ’round here.’

A heavily pregnant daughter and her partner picked at a plate of crudités. One by one, Kathy’s sons emerged: healthy, suntanned men who worked together as electricians and parked their new vans in a row on the lawn.

‘Do you think you will ever move out?’ I asked the youngest.

‘I think Mum might be giving me a nudge,’ he said, smiling broadly and cutting another piece of smoked Gouda.

Kathy’s face contracted into a happy wince. ‘You should get a sense of it,’ she said, and I got the feeling that in this family, moving out is an important experience, like travelling or sports. Something you can always come home from.

We plated up four kinds of barbeque and switched from champagne to shiraz. I made a gag about wanting to move in too, and Kathy laughed, pleased. Then her face settled into a look of utter seriousness. ‘You are always welcome,’ she said.

Perhaps she wanted an extra daughter, I thought, or perhaps she was looking to palm off a son.

We sat down to dine amid sepia-toned scenes: Kathy’s parents, sheep farmers from the country. Her grandmother and great aunt walking their horses into the schoolyard. A dapper-looking gent in what looked like the 1940s, crouching by a swell motorcycle. Alex’s Dad, Mick, in his heyday, with a splendid handlebar moustache.

There were also baby photos, of course. All five children and their friends at various stages of 1980s and 1990s shame.

The difference between the photos of Kathy’s family of origin and those of her own kids was as distinct as their lives. She was shipped off to boarding school from the farm and never went back. After high school, she trained as a nurse, living in dormitories guarded by nuns, until she and some friends could afford to rent their own house. ‘It was all so much fun!’ she said. ‘But these are different times.’

Kathy and Mick didn’t seem worried about their bamboccioni. The dinner was characterised by a distinct lack of judgement: no mean quips, very little sarcasm. The boys cleared the table.

‘Do you have to leave?’ said Kathy, when, at eleven, I said my goodbyes.

I wished I didn’t. If this was my family, I might have got myself another wine, another bowl of ice-cream, and taken a nap on the couch in front of the tennis.

Then again, I might not. I was out of home at seventeen, aching for life to start. At that age, adulthood meant independence; it’s only now that I see it also means connection. How do you find this sense of permanence and community when the nuts and bolts of your life — your home and your neighbourhood — is leased to you on a twelve-month basis?

Seeking my own alternatives, I took off early from the produce market one Sunday and drove east to the oldest intentional community in Victoria. It was a drab summer afternoon: overcast, with the promise of swelter. I’d been working since dawn — stacking carrots, giving advice on which grain to choose for which purpose, listening to the desperate rubrics of people who think that organic food will cure their cancers and make them immortal. It did strike me that I might not be in the right mood to go and hang out with real hippies, but the commune only opened its doors once a month for a work day and tour, the first point of contact for those searching for another way to live.

On the website, the community manifesto resonated with my experience, even though it was written in the late 1970s. It spoke of the isolation of the suburban nuclear family. It discussed pollution, crowding, unaffordable rent, lack of public infrastructure, and loss of community. An accompanying photograph of the residents showed a happy group of adults and children, assembled together in a rotunda. Some clutched tinnies of local beer or glasses of plonk, some held the hands of children ready to scamper out of the picture. It looked like a pin-up family Christmas, with not even a fuzz of dreadlock or a swirl of tie-dye to suggest anything countercultural.

My spirits lifted as the city diminished in my rear-view. The highway, a by-product of sprawl and unsustainable industry, is my happy place. I love driving fast over long, straight flats. When the sprawl finally gave way to the more picturesque valley beyond, I felt light and free. I passed through the golden wine country and climbed a mountain, singing Loretta Lynn loud, singing it right to the end of the album, at which point I realised I was lost.

‘Turn left,’ insisted the schoolma’am voice of the GPS, gesturing into a plunging wisp of track snaking through the thick bush.

I ignored her, going offline and further up the mountain. Somewhere near the crest, I almost T-barred a slick black BMW paused dangerously, mid three-point-turn across the narrow road. The harried driver regarded me with wide, desperate eyes. ‘I’m trying to find an intentional community that’s around here,’ she said.

‘Me, too!’

Frankie, a thirty-year-old from the affluent bayside suburbs of Melbourne, was commune shopping. She was also a dream interview: a millennial malcontent, anxious about adulthood, looking for alternatives in all the hidden places. She’d spent the last six months learning permaculture principles at a place in Queensland, and was now looking for somewhere to settle in Victoria. She wanted to split her time fifty-fifty between the southern bush and the northern rainforest, and avoid the blasting heat of Australian summers. Frankie had known ‘since high school’ that she wanted a different kind of living arrangement, she told me. She was single, polyamorous, optimistic, and scathing of nuclear families and suburban life. Or perhaps scathing was too strong a word — all her opinions were carefully tempered with university-taught defensiveness. She prefaced every statement with disclaimers like ‘I hear what you are saying, and I totally respect that, but …’

After we located the commune, we wandered around the grounds until we found John, a sixty-something hippy dressed like a sports photographer, with a Gandalf beard. In an old Victorian house that acted as a community-centre-cum-clubhouse and smelled like Play-Doh and toast, he delivered a portentous monologue about the 245-hectare site, which used to be a country hotel. His co-residents, the younger Ethan and Emma, arrived to balance out his measured perspective and call bullshit at every opportunity.

‘I’m one of the newer members of the community,’ said Ethan, a handsome man in his mid-forties. ‘Well, actually, John is the newest.’

John blushed red under his beard. ‘I was a member in the 1970s for a few years,’ he said. ‘I’ve been away for a long time.’

Sledging! Frankie looked uncomfortable, but I felt right at home.

The community, while founded around shared values and as an alternative to what everyone I met there referred to as ‘mainstream society’, still had some fairly mainstream social characteristics.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Emma, smirking at the display of competiveness between the two men. ‘Everything you’ve got out there is concentrated here.’

We snaked out across the ridgeline. Clusters of houses, organised by personality and lifestyle, dotted the clearings in the bush. One cluster belonged to young families with kids, another to single people in their midlife, still another to retirees. It was the whole lifecycle arranged perfectly in the scrub.

‘This is the best cluster,’ declared Ethan, in his British accent, waving his hand across a small glen like a lord. ‘For this is where Emma and I live.’

He showed us the mudbrick and strawbale homes favoured by the community members. They reminded me of the hippy houses in the town where I was born, an architecture of mid-century optimism. The separate dwellings ostensibly shared a garden, but no commune members toiled there, as in the paintings of socialist realism. Frankie looked disappointed. ‘Do you have much time all together?’ she asked.

Ethan and Emma exchanged a searching look.

‘I think we had a thing last Christmas?’ said Ethan.

Frankie looked destroyed.

‘At the beginning, all we did was build,’ John explained. ‘We kept saying to one another, won’t it be great when the building is done so we can get down to community building? What we didn’t realise was that working hard together like that was the community.’

It was a cliff note to the history of all utopian movements: once you build your utopia, you have to live in it.

We three women hung back as the tour continued. We bashed our way through the scrub and, with the skilled precision possessed by most female outsiders, casually got to the core of one another’s lives. Frankie, so earnest she seared my corneas, reminded me of Julianne Moore’s character in the movie Safe, with her sensitivity to city toxins and her yearning to be sucked into a pristine bubble. Emma was more pragmatic, tempering her New Age affirmations (‘You have to be the change you want to see in the world’) with some refreshing frankness. ‘I’m not one of these vagina worshippers,’ she told me, confidentially. ‘A lot of that menstrual moon-goddess stuff goes on up here, but you can leave me right out of it, that’s for sure.’

I laughed, rolling my eyes in agreement. If I lived here, we would be BFFs in no time.

As Emma showed us her tiny house site, I locked eyes on a tall young man with scruffy hair and rippling, work-wrought muscles. Suddenly, I was transported into a possible future: me and the hotty in a mudbrick, working on collaborative welding projects, tending the garden, and practising some hardcore naked Reiki.

I smiled coquettishly.

In fact, this kind of future was the only possibility at the commune. Its heteronormativity and failure to cater for other models of living was the thing that initially made Emma reticent to commit. ‘It can be pretty isolating for a childfree woman. Mostly it’s families, and all anyone wants to talk about is their kids, their friends’ kids, teaching the kids, what the kids think, wear, do. It’s so boring. I used to have a single girlfriend up here, but she moved away. It just got too hard for her.’

The vast space, the great slope of the mountain, suddenly felt as sad as a cocktail lounge at closing time.

‘What’s your story?’ Frankie asked me, breaking the morose silence.

My cheeks flushed with guilt. I’m a writer! I wanted to say. A parasite! Don’t talk candidly with me, you wonderful, earnest people.

But actually, we three had a lot in common. I was drawn to this kind of arrangement for similar reasons to Frankie and Emma — I wanted to feel part of a community, I didn’t want to work three jobs to service a city mortgage, I didn’t want kids of my own but I liked the idea of having them around (especially the teenagers, whom Emma was proud to be a confidant to in difficult times). I wanted long evenings talking politics, literature, and floor plans while the possums scurried through the scrub and the dogs barked in the valley below. And I’m an uncomfortable mass of contradictions, as they all were. I’m territorial but desperate for connection, like John; pragmatic yet idealistic, like Emma; competitive and irreverent, like Ethan; thirty and searching for a satisfying life, like Frankie. Oh, please love me, shelter me, have me at your collective table!

‘I want to find out more about the alternatives,’ I said instead.

Frankie nodded enthusiastically. She had some of the same fervour I saw in the eyes of the Business Chicks, despite her opposite worldview.

A car pulled up, the boomer occupants smiling sharkishly. ‘Are any of you interested in the Deans’ place?’ the driver asked.

‘We’ll talk about that later,’ John muttered.

We all felt suddenly undressed. Ethan tried to cover by making a joke about hawkers, but it fell flat. The beast of real estate had run his sharp claw through the scrim of ideals. A tiny tractor moved a flock of sheep through a green square below us. Rows of olive trees stood to bitter attention.

‘So there are vacant houses for sale here?’

‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘We have one that has been empty for almost five years. There was one family who were interested, but the cluster has to vote unanimously in favour of them. The last buyers didn’t get the vote.’

‘How much is it?’

Mark stalled. He talked about shares and full membership petitioning and how moving onto the commune is a process. He talked about the future and the past, and about the philosophy of the place.

Finally, he gave me a number.

Annnnnnd, I’m out.

Safely ensconced in the unintentionality of the city, I wondered what my generation’s model for intentional living would be. Are we too jaded and locked out for utopian aspirations?

Al doesn’t think so. I read about the twenty-year-old ‘entrepreneur and change-maker’ in an article on a real-estate website. (It’s not lost on me, the transmutation of the old cry ‘I’m only reading this for the articles’ from the porno to the real-estate classifieds.) In the article, Al talked about the power of our generation. He insisted we were at a better moment in history than we thought. He focused his change-making drive on the way that millennials arrange their lives. Base, his newest business endeavour, sought to ‘create and invest in spaces and experiences to cultivate communities, culture, and personal growth’. Al, it seemed, had found a way to capitalise on both the imperative for young people to share space in an increasingly expensive rental market, and their need to feel as though their lives are making an impact, in a time when activism and getting involved in the community is a matter of clicking ‘share’ or ‘like’. Base would be a ‘curated sharehouse’ for ‘nomadic changemakers’. Something like a cross between Big Brother and a hippy commune in an inner-city warehouse. But all the locks on the doors would open with an iPhone app. That was an important feature. When I interviewed him on the phone, Al repeated it twice.

The idea for Base came to him when he was doing the festival circuit, introducing crowds at Rainbow Serpent and Burning Man to his vision for ‘living onely’ — that is, ‘coming together, alive’.

‘What if we could work together to create the abundance, the sustainability, and the love that we truly are?’ he asked an audience of fourteen-year-olds in his TEDxYouth talk. ‘We are a rainforest, the sun can be a shared vision . . . My mission is to become the mycorrhizal fungi that the trees use to communicate.’

In my experience, share houses usually communicated via passive-aggressive notes and suggestively placed cleaning products, but that was the past, according to Al. The future is Base: abundant, onely, and fungal.

An ardent young man, Al possessed a tick-like propensity for dropping nonsensical motivational platitudes. ‘You only see the wind when it causes a disturbance,’ he said. ‘That’s a quote I like to use.’ He was fervent about the power of the internet. And sharing. And diagrams and permaculture. He took the idea for Base to an incubator, one that ‘incubates people rather than ideas’. He toured similar ventures in the United States and then came back to Australia, looked for a corporate sponsor, and began curating the Base applicants.

‘They had to be hungry and driven,’ he told me. ‘With a clear idea of where they are going. Being driven towards something. Or away from something. We asked them, “If you had the wealth of Bill Gates, would you drive it in a particular direction?” We asked them their favourite colour, why they are wearing the shoes they are wearing. All these choices are important. You drive the car you drive for a reason.’

I swallowed.

Al saw his generation as driven towards connection. ‘It’s hard to find people without a social conscience now,’ he said, sounding not unlike the Goldman Sachs report on marketing to millennials. ‘People are so connected; they have networks all over the world. But when we want to look someone in the eye, give them a hug, all this anxiety comes up. Today, all these autoimmune diseases come from stress. The stress we put on ourselves. We are so reactive. We want to control everything. We are not breathing properly. But also, we are not outletting.’

For Al, all words were well-placed to become verbs. As he spoke, his speakerphone picked up the yogic gush of city streets across the car windscreen.

‘Base is a way to approach that. It’s a hybrid space. A hostel doesn’t have a sense of groundedness, but in a typical share house you don’t have that influx of ideas. We are asking, how do we bring the tribal living philosophy into the modern world?’

I did not ask him which particular tribal living philosophy he was referring to. Probably not one with a gift economy.

‘We want to use the space as an incubator. Some of the profits will be to develop the space. But a portion will go into a hedge fund to invest in the ideas that come out of the space. The ideas that come out of Base will be a lot more heart-centred,’ he said. ‘We want to create exponential impact . . . And residual impact.’

So far, all impact is theoretical. But after a spate of press coverage (the article went minor-viral in a look-at-this-douchebag kind of way), Al began making connections that were less about social change and more about real estate. If Al can play his cards right, he could become a new kind of ideologically packaged pseudo-landlord, a real-estate curator.

‘We want to create a culture,’ he insisted, earnestly, as though he were actually born and raised in an incubator and emerged just yesterday, sticky, feathered, and tweeting. ‘The culture can be seen as the wind — we want to create the wind. That’s just a little analogy I use.’

‘Cool,’ I replied. Because what else can you say?

It’s easy to rag on Al. He is everything people hate about millennials. And he is his very own real-estate dystopia: the one where young people are so desperate to control their space and make money from it to boot that they are willing to draw up minor cosmologies and enlist everything from ancient ritual to actuarial principles to make it seem meaningful. But like all canny investors, he also has some insights into what is trending — in this case, the way that younger people live now, and will in the future. Al insisted that living arrangements need to make space for the fact that his generation (it’s my generation too, though I feel curmudgeonly beyond belief) are more nomadic and connected. Base will have ‘nomad rooms’ for short stays because the occupants might have ‘collaborators’ across the world who they haven’t met IRL. Its occupancy will fluctuate — a continual flow of new ideas and perspectives filtering through the space, incubating everything, fungal and otherwise.

I was fairly sure that Al had never read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, with its evocation of youth in storage, renting their bodies and minds while they save money and energy through induced hibernation. When I asked about the future of Base, I realised that Al’s future was posthumanist, not in the Gibsonian sense but in the way anticipated by Ray Kurzweil, who insists that soon we will reach the singularity, a point where technology hits the exponential curve, nanobots self-replicate, and we can saturate the universe with intelligence.

‘Living is life,’ said Al, explaining his position. ‘It’s not just where we actually sleep. Living is exactly that, life.’

Another dystopia emerged, this from his pen: scribbled diagrams of the concept of onely unfurled across the sky, blocking the sun, the stars, and every private thought you ever had. The whole universe as just more real estate for our asinine self-contemplations.

A feeling of desperation rose in my gullet. I could taste metal, as if I’d been sucking on a brass coin. Al reminded me of the rupture that snakes through my cohort. There are those of us who believe that our eco-branded property development, or corporate breakfast Ponzi scheme, or tech start-up, or social enterprise, or diet will change the world, and there are those of us who stand on highways holding doomsday signs up to each other and trading wisecracks as another Prius drives by. Is this just the timeless division between the earnest and the cynical, or is it something particularly of-the-now? As a highway-sign holder, it feels as if the entrepreneur pin-ups can see the danger, but cannot think outside the vocabulary of acquisition and innovation they were raised on. In late capitalism, social change is a commodity.

I needed to get out of the house and into the anonymous streets. I wanted to interact with the world as it was. I wanted to experience the kind of connection I often found in being just one more human trying to get along in an imperfect but pleasant day-to-day. I rode my bike through the back streets of my gentrifying neighbourhood. In Melbourne, people are out and about all the time, even midday. Young mothers in activewear pushed strollers along café strips. Men with beards overtook me on sleek, minimal bicycles. Groups of friends occupied tables at outdoor cafes and bars.

This, I thought, is what would pass for German sociologist Jürgen Habermas’ ‘bourgeois public sphere’ today. The place where democracy exists. A bumping zone. A place where people come together to discuss civic life. Though actually, here, they were more likely to be discussing real estate.

I passed a development site every couple of blocks. Lately, it seemed as though advertisements for these off-the-plan apartments were aimed particularly at me. Billboards showed happy bearded men on bicycles and happy groups at cafes, reflecting the neighbourhood back at itself, insisting that you, yes you, belong here. Buy in now.

A few years ago, a study of water usage revealed how many new apartments were empty, owned by offshore investors who would rather wait out the term of appreciation than trouble with renters. ‘Ghost Tower Warning’, ran the headline.

I rode past an old warehouse site with banners out the front. It looked like a display suite, and I was drawn in, despite myself, yanked through the doors by my real-estate obsession.

The warehouse was actually filled with a local university’s interior architecture graduate exhibition. I wandered around, looking at the models and plans, struck by the depressingly urgent contexts they took on. Projects cited increasing urban homelessness, the need for public space in the face of diminishing residential space per capita, the imperative for meaningful intersections between architecture, the body, and everyday life: architecture as a way to endure increasingly volatile environmental conditions and scarcity of resources.

The images and models, however, all looked oddly similar — greyscale figures in their twenties and thirties, some alone, some in couples, a few children. Shadow-puppet lives in hyper-functional spaces. The labels read ‘Toilet Pavilion’, ‘Bathing Pavilion’, ‘Meditation Alcove’. It was the design equivalent of a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ sticker. One project showed the skeletal substructure of a building, revealed post-catastrophe as a usable space. In the drawing, a young couple gazed, unthinkably, at an artwork (flood- and fire-resistant, I assumed) hanging on a steel beam. In other images, people stared at the exposed brick as though this, in view of events, had become an anchor for calm reflection. Through all of these stark, designed worlds, lone youthful figures tramped, wearing headphones, suggesting rich inner worlds, despite life in a bunker or the ruins of the city. I sniffed the air: the sweet odour of apocalypse.

Looking around the actual space of the exhibition confirmed that we were already living in this context. We were all staring at beams and exposed brick, listening to something privately through headphones. Contemplating shelter and the problems that arise beyond it. We were all anticipating, aestheticising, buying and selling our crisis.

The idea of an intentional community, of having the means to make a decision about where and how to live, is a dream for many people. Policy that substantially restricts property investments and tax breaks might change this somewhat. So might rent-capping and long leases. But for all my dystopian imagination, I can not see an Australian government making these kinds of moves in a way that will genuinely allow lower-income people to afford housing. Especially not the kind that advises young home-seekers to ‘get a good job that pays good money’, or awards tax breaks as a palliative measure for middle-class expectations instead of addressing the broader economic reality in which we come of age.

Serge and I would not be moving into a commune or any of our parents’ backyards. We couldn’t share 40 metres of converted shed, even if a team of designers came around every Sunday to beat us over the head with The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. We didn’t take out a mortgage on an ultra-modern shoebox, despite the bonus that the bank would be able to hose it down and flip it for a profit after we slay each other in it.

Finally, and more pressingly, we did not keep Boyfriend.

Boyfriend left. He trotted down the hall as casually as when he arrived. He did not look back. We were torn right up to the last week, when we received a letter, like a missive from our mean reality. Our landlord was selling; we needed to vacate in twelve weeks.

‘I guess we did the right thing,’ I whimpered at the dog park the last time, as I said goodbye to my friends.

I had lived in this neighbourhood, within walking distance of this dog park, for the longest I’d lived anywhere. I had been expecting this moment for some time, anxiously watching our letterbox for the tell-tale agent’s stamp as the two-bedder up the street sold for $1.2 million.

Looking through the rental listings, Serge and I considered our options and suddenly found ourselves articulating very different needs, both in terms of housing and what we wanted from our lives. It was a shock, even though we had been squabbling. We were still unable to have conversations about the future without dredging up the silt of the past. We were exhausted, desperate, and confused.

When Boyfriend left, it highlighted, once more, how we did not know the shape of our adult lives, either singularly or together. We had been a couple for seven years and engaged for two, but after our eviction, instead of reigniting the wedding discussion, we took two separate leases and prepared, intentionally and with love, to live apart.