We're very pleased to present this guest appearance from Jennifer Stone, a renter in the Snowy Monaro region, who has recently started a group for renters in the region to connect and discuss local renters issues. The original version of this article was published on their Facebook page.
The home of the silenced
Snowy Monaro renters
welcomes you to come into our place and sit with us a while. There is something
vital we need to tell you, something which concerns us all. If you come to know who we are and our
situation, you will understand.
We come from diverse backgrounds, interests, beliefs and
aspirations, yet we are a family, united by common experience. Though we are
significant in number, we are marginalised, distained, unheard and unknown. We
have no real shelter, but pay a high price to dwell where the walls of greed’s
injustice over shadow us - and block us from a home.
We know our nations’ harsher reality, our nation’s pain. We
offer you home truths, and hope you will hear us. Until we are heard, our
nation is in plight.
Towns prosper when we prosper and
whither when we thirst
While a substantial
amount of our income goes to supporting landlords and real estates, we spend
much that is left in our community. In this way we provide vital support to the
local economy and help it stay afloat.
Our numbers have brought extra medical centres, high schools and
supermarkets to service the community.
We work in almost every sector of the region. Our children
represent a significant number of the student population in the regions’
schools. Amongst us are also pensioners
and those struggling to find jobs in our community. For those on social
security payments without community or state housing, average rental costs are
prohibitive.
The economy is much impacted by the increasing and excessive
rents in our region. Renters face great hardship and are struggling to find
money for even the most essential items. There is a shortage of permanent
rental properties appropriate to our means and needs. As rents are becoming unaffordable, Snowy
Monaro renters are increasingly forced to pay for sub standard housing with
inefficient heating, lacking proper insulation. High power bills cripple our
financial capacity.
If we complain at our conditions or at breaches by the
landlord and real estate, we face eviction in retaliation, and inter real
estate black lists. Indeed there is a special provision so landlords may give
termination notices for “no grounds” – this is so the tenant can not argue
their eviction (even with much evidence of retaliation by landlord and real
estate).
As we are forced to leave a place and go to another, we have
to find bond money, we lose pay days while moving and sick days from intense
rental stress. Children suffer from such destabilisation, as does the whole
community. In general we are in an ever growing inescapable cycle of debt. Our
plight impacts the community’s well being as a whole. We see our regions’
potential for prosperity much diminished as rents become unaffordable - yet the
financially powerful minority, seem blind to this.
We suffer from divisive and
prejudicial myths
It seems there is a myth amongst some landlords who own
local businesses that they are the backbone of the community. They say that
renters are lowly “lazy”, “dirty”, drug addicted, poor “dole bludgers” who are
beneficiaries of their “hard work”. They speak of us as second class citizens,
less important than themselves. Some real estates call the renter “scum” and we
know for sure they treat us as such.
Derogatory myths can create a painful reality. The myth that
the majority of renters are financially poor has now come to express fact. As
houses have become unaffordable, rent has become unaffordable. Both renter and
mortgaged landlord share the pain of immense financial pressure, often in debt
and living beyond their means – an economic climate stirred by the greed and
power lust of just an elite few. This pressure has lead to an economy where
those who have more financial wealth, gain more each day and those who have
less financial wealth, lose more each day.
The average wage hardly changes while rents go up
exponentially. Renters are paying their landlords’ mortgage along with their
own increasing debts. Landlords who have no mortgage are greedily extorting
tenants, renting out sub standard houses at excessive market prices. Such
landlords hold shelter to ransom. As landlords increase their ability to buy
yet another house, renters become more likely to never have a home. The myth
that renters are lazy while landlords worked hard for what they have, purveys a
great falsehood. Indeed, renters work doubly hard for what their landlords
have! We are the hand that feeds the landlord, are we not?
Wisdom heals the prejudice and
division
Those who have become financially impoverished are not worth
less. The financially rich are not worth more.
There is nothing which can diminish the worth of any being. All people are intrinsically valid,
necessary to each other and vital in their unique contribution. No one is
better than or less than another. In truth we are really one, there is no
division.
Everyone creates the community and all are responsible for
the conditions of that community. Prejudicial myths inevitably create the worst
of conditions for all. A myth which divides people by declaring some of greater
worth and others of lessor worth, by any measure, must inevitably lead to a
conflict for power and recognition. This conflict develops a ravishing greed
which devastates and seeks to devalue all contesting its path. This in turn
gives rise to mass poverty, disenfranchisement, marginalisation, cruelty and
suffering.
A harmonious and prosperous community would grow, if it was
understood that we are all equal yet unique, individual yet one. If all are
seen of vital worth, no one would seek to devalue another nor make a house of
greater value than the people who dwell there. Divisive myths of prejudice
blind the powerful minority to their own truth and the truth of their
nation.
The home truths which can heal us – please
listen, please hear us
We are your kin, your sisters and brothers, parents and
grandparents, children, and, generations to come. We are one. In truth, we are
you. What happens to any one happens to all.
No one is at home when all about them are homeless, paying for
insufficient shelter, exposed to greed, extortion, repression, and eviction at
a landlord’s whim. A house which comes
by way of life long debt or subjugation of another can never be a home for
anyone. The nation cannot be at peace, when so many are unsettled.
When values of decency are worth less than values of
commodity our nation is impoverished.
Happiness, not commodity, is the measure of a nation’s wealth. A nation
is truly wealthy when its people enjoy a peaceful home without fear of
eviction, where all may contribute to society through unique expression,
welcome in the nations embrace. A nation is not wealthy if its people are
homeless, enslaved and in perpetual debt. If on paper a house is worth a
million dollars, it is worth nothing to those who cannot call it home - that
paper value serves no one if its cost destroys life. Money on a graph is not
food we can eat and property on a graph is not a place to shelter.
Houses are homes and not commodity. Economists devoid of
moral compass, call out triumphant when run down cottages sell at palatial
prices - while homelessness ravages the nation. Who gains when the majority
have no claim to home, striving to survive, and backs bent to power thirsty
property managers who lack empathy, and distain ethics? How is it that the
financially powerful minority of this nation sanctify greed without question –
do they not see the greater part of their nations’ family in despair. Muted acquiescence to raging greed makes all
of us complicit in the theft of happiness from generations to come.
What we do to another we do to ourselves - when did people
abandon this eternal guidance? The ancient truths have never changed, we reap
what we sow. Seeds of kindness bear fruits of happiness, fulfilling and
empowering all. When the nurturing harvest of this wisdom is ravaged, hunger
for power grows, casting seeds which bear injustice, cruelty, drought and
despair.
There are elderly pensioners eating from cans of pet food to
pay the rent, suffering the pain of eviction when the landlord sells for their
needed profit, did you know? This is our pain as a nation, this is our home
truth.
Let’s meet again and find a better way.
