feminesque:

Lol everyone’s joking about avo toast and millennials but the thing is, in Australia, it’s not just young people who are impacted by the housing crisis and the extreme commodification of property/housing. If you retire without owning your own home you are fucked. You are so fucked. There’s nowhere to rent that you can afford. In fact, if you’re on an average income and you’re not able-bodied, or married, you’re probably fucked. Women retire with a lot less superannuation than men and often when they leave relationships they also leave their homes and have to start again in a career that was probably interrupted if they have had kids and they will also be paying for childcare in that case too and really…

It’s so fucked I cannot impress upon you how fucked it is.

If you are a 37 year old mentally ill snowflake like myself who is over-educated and comes from a disadvantaged background… you’d better hope your mum doesn’t need aged care because you? will be homeless. We don’t have the rental culture that the US does either so it’s not like we can ‘just rent somewhere in a cheap neighbourhood’. There is nowhere cheap (relative to income). Nowhere that isn’t, frankly, an affront to dignity and decency.

Like I can’t even articulate the many and intricate issues that this housing bubble raises and how very fucked the non-wealthy young, the average income and low income-earning, women and the elderly are. And that’s without even addressing the existing homeless who have their own multitude of issues.

Australia’s housing crisis is pretty fucking serious and many of us are terrified. As much as I love that avo toast has become a meme there is also a good whack of nausea that hits me every time I think about it and that there are people who seriously think this is not an external factor but personal failing.