"Too hard to buy a house"

comes the cry. "Housing is too expensive" and "Young people can't get a foot on the ladder of the housing market these days" and... well, you know how it goes.

My parents married in 1947. Yes, not long after WWII. There was a severe shortage of housing, of building materials for houses and the land on which to build houses. There were many people out of work too. 

The Senior Cat was a teacher in a small country town (village to those of you in Upover).  There was no spare housing at all. He had been boarding with a family, sharing a bedroom with another teacher from the high school. It was not an ideal situation and marrying Mum meant that finding something else was not only urgent it was absolutely essential. 

One of the local farmers had a galvanised iron shed on top of a small hill just outside what were then the boundaries of the town. It was unlined. The floor was just packed dirt. Some old linoleum was found, a spare wood burning stove was found. Other odds and ends were found. The windmill was connected to the water supply and a "long drop dunny" was dug for use. My parents moved in. They lived in it for the next two years. They sat on fruit boxes and ate at a collapsible card table. When it had been cleared at night lessons were prepared under the light of a kerosene lamp. 

I came along at the end of the first of those years and it was my home for the first year of my life. I have small memories of the place from occasional visits to it when I was around two years of age. 

My parents considered themselves incredibly fortunate because, as teachers, they were eligible for one of the new "Housing Trust" places being built in the township proper. These were "fibro-asbestos" homes that the government was putting up as quickly as they could for essential workers. Some of those homes are still occupied today. They are very basic structures. They are small. They had no air conditioning. In winter you heated the house by opening the oven door of the wood burning stove and allowing the hot air from the oven to escape into the room. 

Three years later the Senior Cat was promoted and transferred to a larger school in the city. For the next few years we lived in a house my paternal grandfather had found. We shared it with one of my mother's aunts and her five children. 

From there, as the Senior Cat was promoted from one place to another, we lived in housing belonging to the government. My parents had no choice. It was all there was. It was a roof over their heads and they considered themselves fortunate to have it. The rent they paid was the same as anyone else would have paid for similar accommodation in the city. 

It was not until the Senior Cat was finally given a city appointment we stopped living in departmental housing. (My parents then moved into my mother's old family home as her mother had just died.) It was only then they could even think about buying their own home. That was not easy but, late in their working lives, they managed it. They had actually ceased working when they finally moved into a home they could really call their own.

Now though it seems that newly weds want their own home, or they are told they want their own home. They are told this is what their parents and grandparents had and they have a "right" to it as well. The present government is telling them this even while telling them there is a severe housing shortage. They are being told they "need" a range of white goods and the garden needs to be landscaped right up to the patio. 

My parents generation had none of this. Middle Cat and Brother Cat took thirty years to pay off the mortgage and did the improvements themselves as they could afford to do it. I saved every cent I could and found a place for my sleeping mat less than two years ago. It does not have many of the things considered "essential" but it has all I need - and I know I am lucky to have it.

Getting a foot on the housing ladder is difficult. It was always difficult. I suspect part of the problem now is what people are being told they "need" and trying to find somewhere with what they actually need. There's a difference.