Once upon a time, my grandmother and my father lived in Buenos Aires. Both were teachers, and both worked hard. They actually paid the house were they lived, the house were I was born. One of the forming, and repeated, speeches of my infancy is to hear any family member on how hard they worked, how respectable was to own a house paid by the honest work of teaching high school. When I think about it today and make some age calculations, I realize that probably a initial part of the house was paid by my grandfather. But it does not matter. When my father married, my mother came to live in that own house of him. There was a sense of deserved stability.
Now, most of my current friends have never experienced endemic inflation, let alone hyperinflation, neither had considered the disastrous consequences -for the individual- of a seriously mismanaged economy. The late story of that house is a great explainer. When I was 8 years old, we flew to Venezuela, so the house was rented. Eventually the rent stop covering maintenance costs, which brought repeated arguments and fights between my parents. It was sold when I was about 17 years, and the money was split between me and my sister. My half paid my first car, a second hand VW beetle, the half of my sister paid her a round trip to visit our argentinian family. When I was 28 I moved to Switzerland, and what I could scratch from selling the beetle helped me pay a one way plane ticket to Basel.
In the relative stable economy of Argentina, the work of two persons along twenty years bought a house, around the sixties-seventies. In the eighties that economy went bananas and depreciated a house to a car and a holiday. Then, the Venezuelan economy went bananas too, and all what was left was a piece of a plane ticket.
Terribly enough, this is not even half of the tale. As I said, the house was an anchor of stability, a valuable possession acquired with the honest work of my grandma and my father. But then my parents married, and, as it should be, all possessions were shared. When we flew to Venezuela, the house became, for my mother, the possibility of return. For my father it represented a painful lie. He believed, once, that hard work was rewarded, that the idea of the middle class made sense. But then again, Argentina almost killed him, and he never wanted to go back. The less he had to do with this house, the better. My aunt, his sister, had attorney powers given by my mother and my father to administrate that house. So my father convinced his sister to sell the house, without telling my mother. And so I ended up with my first car. When my mother finally heard that the house was sold, she told my father: “put all the money in my bank account now, or you won’t see me ever again”. When he did, she asked me and my sister what did we want, and she got it for us.
For me this story, then, is a great explainer of what it really means to live in a third world country, in a place that the idea of investing for a better future is something between a fantasy and a delusion. But not only. To me it also means that an anchor is not only a provider of stability, but also a dead weight capable of sinking, among other things, a marriage.
So I hear the growing discontent of the dutch people with the wildly hot house market. I remember how this matter disrupted spanish politics, and I expect pretty much the same to happen here. But I also wonder about the lack of creativity of our current leadership. Yes, we all talk about the right to own a house. We all seem to believe that an own house will give us all the stability that we need. But will it, really?
Maybe we need something else than stability.