Sell up or burn it down: Owning a house in Aotearoa

By Inés Maria Almeida

I’m 42. I bought my house in Wellington when I was turning 41, and it happened by accident. Over the last 25 years I’ve lived in 25 different houses across Canada, Europe, Asia and New Zealand: a farmhouse in a small town just outside of Aix-en-Provence, homes of my friends’ parents when transitioning between countries and cities, a villa whose chimney fell through the roof into the living room during the Christchurch earthquakes. These places were temporary homes as I studied, worked, and started a family, but because I didn’t own them there was a freedom in knowing I could always leave. Now that I own a house, my life here feels more permanent. This isn’t a feeling I’m used to, or enjoy much. I’ve lived in New Zealand for 15 years – the longest I’ve spent anywhere outside of Canada – and I’m a citizen but my accent will always give me away as something other. And so I bought a house, not because it was a smart thing to do with my money, but because I wanted to feel less other by embracing a dream that was not my own, but one that belongs to the collective consciousness of Kiwis. At night, when I’m alone with the fire lit, I can’t help but wish a stray spark would set alight the rimu floors and flames crawl up the walls to the wooden ceilings. Then, when I burn it down it’s not my fault.

* 

I grew up in three houses in Canada, none of them notable. Two, my parents rented, and one we owned outright. I can’t remember much about the first house in Timmins, Ontario, where I was born, but I vividly remember our rented duplex on Inglewood Crescent in Thunder Bay. It was a very ugly house with two levels, but in an area of town where I could easily walk to school with my friends, and safe enough that we could bike in the street at dusk. Fake wood panelling, asbestos ceilings, bad carpet, tacky light fixtures; this house had it all. It was dark, built on the wrong side of the street. I rarely had friends over, instead I went to their houses while my parents worked in their upholstery shops. My parents worked hard, like so many immigrants do, and they saved and managed to buy 668 Churchill Drive. 668 was a spacious four bedroom bungalow with a large field next to it where we would play soccer, play tag, and catch frisbees on warm summer nights. My bedroom was upstairs, between my parents and middle brother. The house was about a 20-minute walk from my high school, in a nicer part of town. That’s the dream, isn’t it? To move up in the world, into better suburbs, and better houses. Our “real” house – the one we owned – was bright, but it was in this house that the cracks in my parents’ relationship began to appear. I often fell asleep to raised voices and muffled sobbing. I couldn’t understand Portuguese, but I knew the tone. I fell asleep to the white noise of this every night until it stopped abruptly. My father went to Lisbon for the summer and he didn’t come back. I was 10.

*

My mother was suddenly a solo mother of three, paying a mortgage on her own. She worked every day, often into the night. I would sit at the window in the kitchen, waiting to see her white van barrelling towards the house. She’d get home after I was in bed. I’d hear her microwaving a vindaloo, watching crap TV, and eventually heavily walking past my room to her own. Occasionally, she’d take a Sunday off. She’d prepare a big feast that my brothers and I would eat separately, scattered around the house. After a few years, maybe when she realised that Fernando was never coming back, she renovated. She put in new carpet, and built a sunroom with a large marbled white and green spa and deck off the room that was originally mine. I had now moved into her room, the master bedroom. When Fernando left he didn’t take much, but he also didn’t leave much behind. I think he must have always been planning to gap it. He didn’t accumulate the things we do that turn houses into homes. Just the organ that sat, gathering dust, in the nice living room we never used, and his classical Spanish guitar. Both slowly went out of tune.

*

When I was 17, my mother started dating and finished paying off the mortgage. She was 42, mortgage-free and one week shy of her 43rd birthday when she died suddenly from a brain aneurysm. We had to sell the house to pay for the business debt so we didn’t receive any money from the sale. Instead, we auctioned off our belongings to raise some cash. My mother’s friends came with strangers, walking through our house and placing bids. My science teacher was the auctioneer. By the time I turned 18, I was living on my own on the other side of town, in a flat in a character villa with high ceilings, a bay window, and infested with dust mites.

*

It’s hard not to sound ungrateful when I talk about how I feel about my house. Most days I find myself looking at homes.co.nz to see if it’s worth flicking yet. I want it to crack a mil, and then I think I’ll sell. I’ve been looking at property on the outskirts of Lisbon. When I mention this to my friends, they lose their minds. They say: you can’t sell, you’ll never get back on the market! None of them want to live in Portugal. But the truth is roughly 80% of my salary goes to servicing the mortgage, rates, and body corp fees. On the weeks I don’t have my children, my cat and I huddle in my cold bedroom. Their absence is a living thing that spreads through the house like a mist. On darker days, when I’m not sure how I’ll pay the heating bill, but where I’ve organised a dinner party and spent hundreds of dollars at Moore Wilson’s because this kind of house demands it, I tell myself that I bought this house for my kids. I say to myself, and anyone else who will listen, that this house is their house and I’m just paying the rent. When my kids ask me who will get the house when I die, I say Mabel, our Burmese cat. I’m not serious, but I’m offended that they’re already taking stock of their inheritance as I cook them dinner. In the movie The Aristocats the lady of the manor leaves her estate to her cats, so the butler tries to kill them. Even in cartoons some people will stop at nothing to get their paws on a house. 

* 

My 48-year-old brother in Ottawa only just bought a house in the very trendy Glebe area. Until then, he lived in a series of gorgeous apartments overlooking the Rideau. My 49 year old brother rents one of the most expensive apartments in Akasaka, Tokyo. He’s been renting since he arrived in Japan in 1992. He pays close to $10,000 NZD per month, but it overlooks a cityscape of dazzling lights and is just a short walk from the heart of Roppongi where the good bars are. When I ask him why he never bought a house, even as an investment, he says, “the things that you own end up owning you”. 

* 

What is it that makes a house feel like home? Or a country? Or a city? And when you’re an immigrant, when you’ve always been an immigrant, do you ever feel at home? Home is where we feel the most emotionally attached. But my heart is spread thin across continents, people and ghosts. Which is why my real estate agent is coming over Monday at 2pm. 

*

I’ve painted walls, filled holes, even tended gardens. I’ve bought used furniture and expensive furnishings. I have plants that I water occasionally. I’ve put together cribs, then beds, shelves, and treadmills. But every place I live in feels temporary. The thing about 668 that sticks with me is that it took decades for my mother to build that home. She was sent to Mozambique at nine years old, when her mother died. She met my father and they moved to Canada, and they worked 80 hour weeks building businesses and a home for the five of us. All of this effort and sacrifice came undone in a matter of weeks. Maybe everything is temporary. 

*

I swore I’d never do the same, but I often find myself working side hustles late into the night after having worked all day at my day job, just to pay the mortgage. My friend says to wait until it’s worth 2 million, which going by New Zealand standards, will only be 10-20 years. I think about cracking a joke about not being alive for that long, but I don’t say it. I keep it lodged in my throat and swallow it down, chasing it with a gin and tonic.

*

My real estate agent says I could sell the house for 1.2 million, easy. I think that’s crazy in just under two years, but then a house just sold in Birkenhead, Auckland, for 1.2 million over its asking price. A lot of people talk about the housing bubble here, and how it’s going to go pop. I can’t see that happening. I’m not sure how I feel about this bubble. If it pops, I’m screwed. If it continues to grow, the country is screwed. My friend Lucy is very concerned about me selling my house. She gets her husband, Foxy, to introduce me to their financial advisor. Nick is lovely. He has strong eyebrows, and a kind smile. He tells me that he’s seen my house, “but not in a stalker way”. He used to live on this street, many years ago. Nick tells me that I’d be crazy to sell my house. 

 *

Look, I wasn’t expecting to win the house. And I say win because buying a house here feels like a lottery. The house, she’s a stunner. A wood and exposed brick number with high ceilings that wouldn’t be out of place in Paris, Amsterdam, NYC or Montreal. My reasoning was: if I can’t live in these cities, I could at least pretend I do, in a leafy cul de sac in Thorndon. My friend, also a foreigner, calls home ownership in New Zealand a cult. When I tell her I’m thinking about selling she tells me, “You do you. Just don’t tell people your plan, kinda like you did when you bought the house. You just did it and THEN you told people about the house. A master stroke.” Suddenly, I have a plan.

*

Here’s how the house happened: the real estate agent who helped me and my former partner sell our first house in Strathmore Park called me out of the blue one day and said he had a piece of property that I should see. I told him I wasn’t in any kind of position to buy a house. Our separation agreement hadn’t been finalised, and while I knew a substantial amount of money was coming to me because we bought low and sold high, I couldn’t be sure as to when it would be freed up. He insisted that I at least take a look, and I folded. In less than three hours, it was mine.

* 

I went unconditional, even though I didn’t have my financing sorted. That’s the trick. It was a huge gamble; one that only paid off after I took my KiwiSaver to court, got a bridging loan from good friends, and accepted a 40K gift from my Tokyo brother. There’s a real shame here in admitting that you got help to buy a house. Using the bank of Mum and Dad is the norm, but people don’t talk about it. I paid $_ _ _, _ _ _. I pay around 4K per month just for the mortgage and body corp fees. I cover it, just. 

*

Owning a house has changed me into a terrible person. I realise this when my 11 year old daughter tells me she wants to be a teacher when she grows up. I shake my head and stare her down. Then I gesture to the high ceilings, the giant windows, the exposed brick, and rimu floors of my house (her house!) and say, with my eyes aflame, “Do you think a teacher’s salary will get you a house like this?” As soon as I said it, I felt sick. She rolls her eyes at me and stomps downstairs to her newly renovated room with candy floss pink walls, and fairy lights – the kind of room I longed for when I was her age. Her father is a teacher. He doesn’t own a house but he’s looking.

*

I’m ashamed of everything this house pretends to be. I feel guilty that I own such a house. I’m unsure about whether to sell, but if I do, I hope to not feel like less – less of a success, less of a good mother, less of a member of society, or less Kiwi. I hope to feel less stressed, less beholden to brick, less wedded to wood, and less exhausted because instead of working until 1am to finish an article on the importance of investing in my kids’ future by investing in the American share markets, filling the internet with more garbage content instead of spending more time with them. If I sell, we’ll live in a smaller place, in a less sexy suburb, but I’ll be more present. Maybe that’s what home is supposed to feel like – that glow you get from putting the time in with the humans you love? Or maybe home feels like this fullness I feel when they’re with me because they’re loud and funny and messy and they fill up this entire house with their aliveness. 

*

Today is Sunday, and my kids just left to live with their father for a week as per our arrangement. These kids have two homes. This means they are either lucky or unlucky. They feel at home at each, at least that’s what they tell me when I ask. Both homes are different and are across the city from each other. One home sits on a hill and from their lounge window they can see Wellington at their feet. The other home is in a cul de sac, has no view, but comes with a designer cat in a diamante collar. Sometimes, I want to ask them which home they like more. Sometimes I want to ask them to live with me full-time. Sometimes I think that putting an offer of money I didn’t have on a house I couldn’t and still can’t afford is worth the stress if I’m finally learning that home is wherever these two beautiful humans are – either in the house I own, or an apartment I rent. And that is all I need.

Inès is co-curator of the LitCrawl 2020 event ‘So Sick of Love Songs’, happening on Sat 7 November at Arty Bees.