Making a livable space, to one’s own taste, to fit one’s own needs, is a perfectly human activity, one that our shared humanity obliges us to preserve for one another. In making our houses, we make worlds: we experience what it means to be creative, inventive, curious, and capable. Living in a place of one’s own is for everyone. It’s not for sale (paywall should be down). Houses aren’t an investment opportunity. Dignified housing isn’t optional; it’s not just for people who happened to buy property before a bubble, or whose parents left them a house, or who inherited a down payment, or who work at jobs that pay a salary high enough to afford something, or who have an in on a house before it hits the open market. Housing is, very simply, for everyone. More than just the fact of a room and a roof—the ability to determine how to live in one’s own house is for everyone. A fundamental thing, to be able to make a home.
We overlook our landlords’ back garden and the back of their house. It’s cold in Dublin, cold for Dublin, as I write this in early January; it’s not as cold as some places, but cold nevertheless, in a city where some people still heat with fires and where there are many people sleeping outside, in a city where damp permeates the walls no matter how long you run the heat. In the mornings, any morning when the overnight temperature has been below 10° Celsius (50° Fahrenheit), our windows are fogged with condensation that takes an entire day to clear, if it does. The water runs down the windows and collects in gutters on the sill. We mop it out, spray the windowframes with vinegar, and still: black mold and gray mold grow on the painted frames, the metal frames, the sills and the window glass. I can see the back windows of my landlord’s house, and they are never foggy. Not even on the coldest mornings.
Every time I talk (or think) about the conditions of housing I share with so many people, I am reminded of James Baldwin writing about “the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No, this is not true, how bitter you are!’” and the steadiness of his insistence that he does know the conditions of his nephew’s life, and his own, because he was there and the “innocents”, his white fellow-citizens, were not. The accusation of bitterness, or shrillness, is on my mind when I write to my landlord and adjust my tone to seem conciliatory rather than demanding; or when I talk about what tenancy does to human beings but try not to make anyone in earshot feel bad for owning property; or when I reveal the facts of my life—the material facts of damp, mold, cold, expense, precarity, ugliness, and inflexibility that are the conditions of rented housing—to others, but try to make a joke at the end. Sara Ahmed, writing that “When you expose a problem, you pose a problem”, helps me understand Baldwin, and my own life, too. Bitter? No, I am not bitter—I am trying to be direct. I am trying to see my life clearly and to be honest about the conditions of it. I’m trying not to let myself imagine that if we could just get a house of our own, everything would be better. I’m trying to remain in the discomfort of posing a problem. I have the lived knowledge that poorly maintained, poorly insulated, expensive, disempowering, unhealthy and even unsafe conditions that are sometimes impossible to remediate are the conditions of life for nearly all people who rent, and that these are not, generally, the conditions of the lives of those who own the places we live. And yet our lives, including the vital activities of our housekeeping and homemaking, are not second-class lives.
Dear [Landlord],
Thank you for your email. I wanted to remind you that our lives and our comfort are paying your bills. My lungs have not been the same since we moved in, despite our consistent efforts at mold removal. And although you generously outfitted the apartment with your cast-off furniture and chipped plates, you may be surprised to hear that your table-lamps, dishes, IKEA paintings, and scented oil–diffusers are all packed away neatly in the apartment’s one storage cupboard to make room for the pleasing, beautiful things that we have collected over the course of our lives and like to live among. Yes, Landlord, we like our things, and we like to make the place we live reflect our preferences. The picnic furniture—fluorescent yellow seat cushions, rigid iron-and-wicker frames—that you provided in lieu of kitchen chairs takes up a lot of space in the kitchen, but we have moved it to the side so that we can have our own chairs at the table. We can’t do much about the huge, slightly broken couches you put in the apartment, but we have moved them around to suit our taste, and we have found ways of padding the seats with cushions so that sitting on them for longer than ten minutes doesn’t hurt the back. I won’t even mention the moths we have eradicated, or the dead animal we have been trying to find in the wall or in the attic, that you seem to be in no rush to address, or the fact that there is a significant crack in our ceiling that arrived with last summer’s heavy rains that you have yet, six months on, to find a roofer to check out.
I am aware that you are responsible for property taxes, for upgrades and improvements to the building, and for certain other legal requirements the state imposes on landlords. Are you aware that the current average rent in Dublin is €2300 and that the average salary is around €3200 per month? We pay slightly less than that average rent to you at the end of each month. What does our €25,000 per year become, in your bank account? In ours it might be savings toward a down payment, or an emergency medical fund, or money to send to family members, or contributions to others’ emergency funds. Maybe we would buy books with it? I honestly can’t imagine what an ‘extra’ €25,000 per year would be like, or imagine a world in which that would feel anything other than embarrassing.
Let me make a modest proposal. You already have a house of your own. Let us free one another: you give us this apartment, which has, after fifteen years of tenants, more than paid for itself (the sale price appears in the public record) and we will take care of the property taxes, the mold, the dead pigeons in the attic, the boiler upgrades etc., from now on. As we will no longer have rent to pay, we will put our yearly €25,000 toward housing—down payment contributions, emergency fund, whatever—for someone else. I look forward to your thoughts.
Best regards,
[Quixote].
In Ireland: Community Action Tenants’ Union. Wherever you are: Tenants Together.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, people are living in rubble, and near and far people are living in tents. My god. Homes, safe, warm, dignified, and freeing, for everyone, everywhere. A little thing we can do from here. And this (US), and this (US).
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
The exhilaration of imagining this email landing in a landlord's inbox is enough to sustain me through today. Thank you.