How My Culture Sets Me Up For The Housing Crisis/At Least There’s A View?
Words By Anoushka (she/her)
Welcome back to another year of Rice To Meet You! After a long, rice-less summer, I hope you are looking forward to receiving more useless advice from me.
I am from Wellington and still live at home with my parents. I was going to move out in 2021 but decided against it because rent prices in Wellington made me cry. So while I am freeloading, I do understand how horrifically expensive living in Wellington is. Looking at the cost of living in a Wellington shit-hole made me realise two things:
Moving out before I graduate will mean having to sell my left kidney to pay for it.
Owning my own house no longer seems like something I’ll be able to do.
But then I remembered that I’m Indian and that my culture actually sets me up to one day own a home. In India, once you exit your mum, you live with your parents (or in-laws) forever. For a lot of New Zealanders, it is pretty common to move out the second you turn 18, but Indian parents will never kick you out. A lot of couples in the Indian community will get married and then move in with one of their parents to save money, affording them a house in a market that is very unaffordable. We see no shame in children leeching off their parents—it’s normal and sensible. Plus, being an immigrant means understanding the value of money and what it means to struggle without it. So while I don’t aspire to live with my parents forever, I am glad I can shamelessly live off them until I somehow procure $1 million to buy my first uninsulated, leaky one-bedroom home.
Laurelei (she/her):
Funnily enough, I have become the tenant of an uninsulated, mouldy, and leaky room. To cope, our flat has taken on the mindset that our place is ‘vintage’ and embodies the cottagecore aesthetic. But such a mindset can only go so far when one of the doors has rusted off its hinges and there’s been a few too many rat sightings.
A lot of my other friends have also ended up in equally health-hazardous housing. As much as we joke that this is a “quintessential part of student life,” it’s difficult to stay lighthearted when both physical and mental health is constantly put at risk. I don’t know how my asthmatic homies will survive the winter and it’s strange that we have to pay so much for so little in a country that our parents moved to for more security and opportunities.
When my parents first visited the flat, my mother made the joke that it was “just as mouldy as our very first rental in New Zealand.” If a baby could survive its formative years in a Healthy Homes-defiant flat, then surely my 19-year-old self could survive a year in similar housing. ‘Paying for the location’ seemed like a great idea for someone who’s spent the last seven years of her life taking a 40-minute bus ride into town and back. Now that I’m actually living central? Yeah, I would take a weekly $30 Snapper bill over my current cost of rent in a heartbeat.
In the end, I’m still not entirely convinced that my flat can be “exempt from the Healthy Homes standard of insulation”... but at least there’s a view?