One Thing: please don't make me live in the roof

I have joined the hordes of people looking for affordable dwellings

On the weekend, I did my favourite thing in the world: I stood awkwardly on the side of a leafy inner-city suburban street with about sixty strangers, about to look inside a stranger’s home, paw through their belongings, and imagine how my collection of cheap art and dog beds might fit inside. How this one bedroom apartment might soon be the place I watch Gilmore Girls on repeat.

The hope that we collectively held, as a community, was that this stranger’s home would one day be our own. But this is also why none of us talked to each other - because it could only, at the end of the day, belong to one of us. We were not inducting ourselves into some kind of commune or cult - we wanted this mouldy shitbox to be our new dwelling.

It’s the moment before the real estate agent arrives that’s the most tense, where everyone is scoping out the competition, looking for signs of weakness, or advantage. It’s cutthroat out there in the rental market, the housings and cost of living crises stripping back the pleasant masks we wear in public, and showcasing our empty shark eyes and hungry little petulant mouths, screaming for the luxury of an abode. Filthy little goblins squatting in garbage, all pretence at brotherhood or humanity stripped away by our disgusting addiction to roofs and decently priced apartments with a surprisingly large courtyard.

I was with my new boyfriend, and couldn’t work out if his kind gesture to join me on the rental inspection quest would be a benefit or something the opposition could exploit. On the one hand, many rental real estate agents are middle-aged women who find two non-threatening homosexual types totally adorable. On the other hand, many real estate agents are real estate agents (a potent combination of evil and stupid), so would therefore probably be homophobic. I couldn’t tell! I haven’t found out about this particular place yet, but I’ll let you know. All I can be sure of is that anything bad that ever happens to me is on account of homophobia, including not being leased a rental property, and not because, say, I’m a freelance writer with indeterminate income who lives with a giant horse.

horse

While it’s clearly a crunch here in Melbourne, I still haven’t seen anything remotely resembling the zombie hordes that you’d have to contend with in Sydney. One year in Sydney, me and my ex had to move house FOUR TIMES IN ONE YEAR. The prices are high, the properties are ridden with mould, and you have absolutely no rights. I’ll never forget the time I lost my deposit because the landlord refused to fix a burst pipe and we had a river through the living room for two nights.

Many years ago I was looking for a sharehouse in Sydney with my friend Clare, on behalf of a group of us (they all later lived together in a house without me, that famously had a pipe that sprayed shit everywhere during their housewarming). There were four of us looking, and Clare and I stood on a hot Newtown street one morning with hundreds of other people, the line stretching so far down the street that it met up with another house inspection. Luckily part of our friendship was about being compulsively on time to things, so we were right at the front.

When we went in, we had to claw our way through couples trying to take measurements, through groups of friends who were clearly bandmembers who had decided to ruin their lives by living together, through optimistic yet foolish university students who didn’t realise that they had to fight with groups of 30 year olds with jobs for the same houses. Remember those scenes in The Walking Dead where they’d put on garbage bags and cover themselves in zombie guts and walk through the packed masses of dead people? No reason.

It looked like a decent place, only light patches of mould, a bathroom from this century, a dishwasher, a lack of visible murders. In fact it was so nice that Clare and I started to wonder what the catch was - why could our quartet even afford it? This looked like somewhere an adult might live. But after a while, as we were buffeted from room to room with each surge of people, we realised what the catch was: we couldn’t find the fourth room. We pushed back against the flow, trying to see if we’d missed a door, if there was perhaps a studio out the back - but nothing. Finally we found the real estate agent, standing on a chair with a hand full of rental applications, people snatching them from her hands like they were war bonds, and they were old timey people who knew what war bonds are, looking like a housewife in an old misogynistic sitcom who is scared of a mouse.

With a sigh, she took us to each room. In the third room, we stood confused, until finally she pointed up. “The fourth room is up there” she said.

“Heaven?” I asked.

Instead she pulled down a trapdoor, and a set of rickety stairs led up into an attic. It wasn’t a terrible attic, you could definitely keep your incest kids quite comfortably up there.

But the real question was - were any of us close enough to live in the roof of our friend’s bedroom? “I can’t do it” I said. “I always have to pee at least twice a night”.

I would have hated to disturb someone by unfurling a clanking ladder over their bed and descending down it in the middle of the night, like a huge sleepy spider, like Wee Willie Shelob. And Clare pointed out that it would be a massive buzzkill if the downstairs room owner was having sex and suddenly your roof pal’s face appeared above you (which was optimistic, considering we all met doing improv comedy). And if it’s good enough for the creeps from true crime podcasts who live in people’s roofs, then who are we to dismiss it out of hand? But ultimately we decided it was a dealbreaker.

But we did actually discuss the idea of SOMEONE LIVING IN THE ROOF ABOVE SOMEONE ELSE’S BED because that’s how bad the rental market it.

Wish me luck.

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I’ve recently been reading about the newspaper/ magazine booms of New York in the 60s and 70s, because I’m that kind of nerd, and one of the things I was feeling sad about was that I never got to write cute little “slice of life” columns. And then I remembered I have my own publication where I make all the rules and questionable decisions, so ONE THING is gonna be that.

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