There’s an old song which captures it rather well — the essence of the middle-class dream, as it were. The details might differ – note that Seeger’s little boxes are the BIG boxes of today, and they’re not always on the hillside either. I think of the sprawling, new-build suburbs. I spent three months working in Auckland once. I rented a spare room in what felt like a palatial house occupied by a family of four. Who the architect or property developer had in mind when they built it, I don’t know. That it was far beyond what a family of four needed was patently obvious. This house, as with many of these houses, presumably came at such a price that having a boarder was something of a necessity. AirBnB’s have a similar function when it comes to paying for such places. Again, I have stayed in some of these rooms when I needed a place in the city.
I have come to know what to expect on this front. In my personal experience, the occupants of these houses are often fairly new migrants. When I knock on the door – or, as is more likely these days, when I interact with whatever technological entry system might be in place – I know exactly what to expect. These migrant families are the decent, hardworking, polite kinds of people that tend to be model families. I sometimes wonder if they come to live in such places through deliberate and conscious choice, or that it is simply because this is the housing stock that is available to them, and then they find a way to make it work.
The noticeable thing about these suburbs full of sprawling houses is that they seem to be typified by a lack of any culture at all. For sure, inside the houses there might be something that points to a culture of origin, but even that isn’t always the case. Many feel more like edifices to a cultural no-man’s land – monuments to a lifestyle where the wide-screen TV takes up the better part of a wall, where the furniture is spotless, and the dog (if there is one) is regularly taken to the groomer and does not have a hair out of place. Such dogs don’t smell of dog, they smell of perfume.
The development and uptake of such housing and lifestyles strike me as being something akin to the “American Dream”. Even far away from America, the basic idea is the same: hard work and prosperity go hand in hand. Together, they necessarily result in a certain level of outward affluence. The house must be large, spotless and fashioned with all the latest conveniences. Ideally it needs to have space around it. The streets must be smooth. There must be plenty of room for cars. Then there are the minor accessories that sometimes come with such houses – the cushions or canvases emblazoned with words like: “Live, laugh, dream”, “Hope”, “Family” “Love”. They are sprinkled around like so many little reminders. Now, I am not suggesting that it isn’t possible to do or find those things in a palatial house within a sprawling suburb. But the positive values being promoted don’t require that kind of lifestyle in order for them to flourish. There is something vaguely ironic about having these words splashed around the interior of an immaculate, corporate-consumer castle.
Walking in these kinds of suburbs, I try to imagine what it was like before there were any palatial houses at all – when the land unfolded as acres of rolling harakeke (‘flax’) swamp, with the birds wading and squawking and flitting about, the hum of insects and a warm sun. It is still possible to find it in places. Even the most sprawling of suburbs generally has a park or two where it is possible to walk and visualise what it would have been like before the strange human tendency to build large, tacky boxes all over the place took hold. There is a sharp contrast between the natural beauty of the landscape, and the desire to clutter it up with sprawling suburbia –a suburbia resplendent with large shopping malls, cinemas and car parks.
Seeger’s song can also be referring to state housing. This is perhaps a different idea altogether – that of having large numbers of identical-looking houses built to the same design, as a low-cost means of meeting public housing needs at scale. I am not sure that the sprawling suburbs I have described above are at all the same thing. Those kinds of suburbs feel more like a physical testament to values of growth and material consumption. There might be some who say that this is simply what modern building standards demand — that these large, over-the-top boxes are in fact the minimum standards of a family house in today’s world. To which I would say: are we just slaves to these standards? Whose interests do they serve?
That these places seem to have high numbers of relatively new migrants may just be a reflection of the fact that the sub-set of those living there who rent out their spare rooms are those who are more financially constrained, and that this may be something more common amongst the new immigrant population than those who are more established. It could just be that migrants are more open to sharing their homes with visitors. Maybe it reflects a desire to move to a country where it is possible to live the suburban dream to the fullest. Or it may be that those who have lived in those areas for longer simply refuse to pay the ridiculously high prices that landlords and property developers tend to demand, while new migrants may be more willing to work long hours to pay for this ‘dream’. While these high rents are exploitative, a line-up of willing, middle-class immigrants will ensure they can stay that way.
Seeger’s song touches on the typical life stages of those living in the “ticky, tacky boxes”: first school, then university and finally some kind of professional career. Of course there is value in these things, just as there is value in thoughtful housing development. But, if they are simply a means of living a mindless ideal of consumer-culture, then it would seem nothing more than a way of reproducing the same system for generations to come, complete with all its inequalities and wastefulness.
A final point is the extent to which any of this is self-chosen. Seeger’s lyrics suggest that it is imposed from outside – that “they all got put in boxes” whether they liked it or not. To me this is an interesting consideration. How much can any of us really choose our housing and lifestyle? There is this sense that we are limited to what there is – we might have in mind an ideal kind of house that would be just right for us. Maybe it’s small, simple, well-insulated, and energy efficient. However, many factors are likely to constrain our choices. These factors include everything from affordability and availability, to land zoning, building standards, and cultural ideas of the ‘normal’ house. If we refuse to keep paying into a culture that celebrates a very large and tacky box at the centre of its housing ‘dream’, then we might just find ourselves living at the margins of that society.
Image Credit: A.I.
Fuzzy Brown Line 