Building Permanence
Building Permanence
Clare Coffey
On the Philosophy & Aesthetics of Home Renovations
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
This summer, I’m making a home where I’m not supposed to—which means it’s time to plant again. In the front, beneath the window, I’m putting in Philadelphius Lewisii (mock orange) bushes. I’ve already put a raised bed on my patio and camas lily bulbs all over the front yard; given time, they’ll hopefully naturalize. Elderberries will go along the perimeter wall, sunflowers for my neighbor, and perennial asparagus in the sidewalk median. A failed experiment with raspberries has shown me that only Oregon grape is trusty, stout, and hardy enough to cover up the hideous white vinyl fence around my patio.
The inside is mostly furnished how I want: beeswax candles in the fireplace I’m not allowed to build a real fire in, polished wood everywhere, pewter candle sconces on the walls. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to do. In the kitchen, I could rip up that awful gray vinyl plank (so incongruous with the rest of the hardwood) and put down southern yellow pine, finished with own hands. I’ve hung pegboards and shelves and potracks all over the walls, making (in my humble and correct opinion) the most elegant and rational use of the tiny space possible.
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My two main hobbies, hanging out in redneck bars and improving my apartment, both cost money that could be saved for a down payment and getting on the proverbial property ladder. But at least the former hobby is legible as a treat for my beer-loving self. But past the point of obsessional devotion, which I reached long ago, the latter hobby represents, at best, a gift to some faceless stranger or an uncompensated investment in my landlord’s property portfolio. At worst, it represents the loss of my security deposit to somebody’s baffling inability to understand that the walnut shelves I bolted into the wall belong, and that the plastic blinds I tore down don’t.
But I can’t stop. It’s not because I think I’ll be in my apartment forever. It is simply that I am madly in love with it, and thus not subject to the admonitions of reason. I love my home’s graceful wood trim, the afternoon light that turns everything golden as it streams through the big living room window, the cheerful but battered white cabinets that haven’t been updated since the 30s, the composition of its familiar sight lines. I love the budding Norway maples every spring and the stone firepit on my patio every fall. I could not live with myself amidst all this splendor if I didn’t build, if I didn’t give something back to this place, and do my best to make it even more beautiful—for itself and the people who will come after me.
I struggled to explain this necessity to someone the other day when I, doubtless a little too eagerly, detailed my plan to put a pellet stove on the sun porch. A pellet stove would make the room much more usable in the winter time, and you can find used stoves fairly easily. The only issue is finding a reputable contractor to cut the vent hole and install it without asking a lot of questions about who legally owns the property.
True, my interlocutor agreed, but a pellet stove would be a hassle to cart away when I move. But that, I yelped, as she ever-so-slightly backed away, is the beautiful part! I’m going to leave it all—the Adirondack chairs, the raised beds, the picnic tables and front yard fire pits, the pegboards and pellet stoves and chicken coop—for the next people. They’ll walk into an even lovelier apartment than I did, with the infrastructure of a good life set up and fewer wheels to reinvent.
Here we see, in the immortal words of Taylor Swift, is how my covert narcissism might disguise itself as altruism. Secretly (not so secretly) I believe that one particular corner of this fourplex and the surrounding yard is my dominion, to arrange and order in the best possible way for the all the other people who might not have quite as strong a grasp of what’s best. The poor dears.
And if my improving crusade didn’t already start from a place of crazy, it will probably leave me there. It’s a long and complex dance, two steps forward and one step back. I plant camas lilies in the yard; my landlord mows them down. I offer to replace the vinyl fence with a cedar one out of my own pocket and labor; no thank you, comes the reply (it was a mistake to ask in the first place), vinyl is easier to maintain. I can paint the bathroom, but it takes time to save up and sniff around the clearinghouses of used goods for the tile, the stainless steel, the southern yellow pine. The pellet stove must wait on a contractor. And every day I’m running out of time.
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I am running out of time because an apartment is by nature impermanent. Most people inhabit them under the assumption that in two years, five years, seven years, they will be moving out. Apartment dwellers are, by a vague cultural assumption, people who have not put down roots, who are unencumbered by a family, who need to be free to move for a job or a lifestyle change. They are the face of old arguments for restricting the vote to landowners only: only landowners de facto have the kind of stable commitment to their community that allows for and entitles one to political participation.
And of course, even if you would gladly stay in your apartment forever, you may have no choice. The landlord could sell the apartment, move a family member in or more likely, slowly but steadily raise the rent until you have no choice but to pull up your stakes and start again elsewhere. The longer you stay in your apartment, the more apparent it becomes that you value it, and that you might be willing to pay more for it. A landlord’s desire for the security of well known, long-term tenants may push against this trend but more often than not, the practical reality is a disincentivizing tax on stability.
This reality probably forms part of the reason I get looks when I describe my (admittedly sometimes obsessive and grandiose) plans. A house—a house of your own, on which you have taken out a mortgage and to which you have the deed—is where you pour your heart into home improvement projects. An apartment is where you bide your time. Of course, even this dichotomy is more complicated than it appears: your home ownership is subject to your repaying the bank who owns your mortgage; and even if you bought your house outright, your ownership is still subject to property taxes. The only people who truly own are possibly those who legally own nothing, who have found a faraway corner in which to mill their own logs and build their own house, whose claim to the land is protected only by obscurity and their guns and their dogs.
But for the most part, the dichotomy holds. You can reasonably plan on an attachment to your house in a way you cannot for your apartment, and you can cultivate your house knowing your choices will last—ideally your whole life or, even more ideally, for the next generation.
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This binary approach, codified in our cultural narrative and the economic reality around renting versus owning, treats permanence as a market commodity, either as a financial investment or a consumer product. But the kind of permanence involved in house-holding and housekeeping—of choosing and shaping, of caring for and maintaining, and above all, of building and bettering—is not static or commodifiable. It is an outwardly directed orientation towards the good of a place for its own sake. It holds an expectation that your labors will transcend the ephemerality of your own pleasures and that others will enjoy the fruits of your work.
Individuals participate in this orientation in different ways and to different degrees. But it is a fundamental human orientation, as old as the mandate to tame the earth and subdue it, as old as the Eden we gardened before the Fall. It cannot be reduced to a commodity, any more than the formation of families or the pursuit of wisdom can. It is the particular mark of our unique status as God’s regents on earth, given soil not to exploit it but to wisely rule and share in God’s creative work.
I don’t think the covert narcissism of my desire to arrange a material micro-Eden for future inhabitants is mere narcissism after all. It is simply at dissonant odds with the dictum of the renter: only make those changes which can be enjoyed while you are there. The limits of your personal pleasures are the limits of your action. At the end of the day, I’ll stand by my obsessions.
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Reducing the capacity to create permanence to a sole perk of home ownership is perhaps defensible as a kind of seniority rule. Put in your time in the no-man’s land of renting, and eventually, you’ll graduate to home ownership. And for some, that rule is probably how it works. But for decades now, conventional wisdom has treated homes as a financial investment rather than a personal attachment.
For a home to succeed as a financial investment, however, its value must rise at a faster rate than inflation, a scenario impossible to square with the need for houses to be affordable for the majority. Low inventory, rising prices, and for some, heavy student debt burdens, all mean that a home of your own is not something most can expect to graduate into. Forty-one percent of people between the ages of 35 and 44 rent their homes. By the time they hit the 45-54 group, it’s only down to 33%. That’s a long time to wait before laying down roots.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, the financialization of home ownership is having its own strange effects. HGTV’s enormously successful TV network is built based on the idea that home renovation should be both unceasing and pegged to the possibility of future sale. Homes need frequent “updating,” and the updates, justified by the resale value they add, should chase the tastes of a theoretical future consumer. Your relationship with your home should become as alienated as that of renters, always deferring in favor to some future inhabitant while simultaneously trying to leave that inhabitant nothing that might connect them to you. All your work is merely a kind of staging.
What I call building permanence—the ability to imaginatively amend the structure, composition, character, and ecosystem of a place rather than merely decorating it—cannot be pegged to a financial stake. Our renting-versus-buying dichotomy is simply not working: cutting off large swathes of the population from the universal call to engage in the good work of shaping the world, and warping the attitudes and incentives of homeowners themselves.
So where do we go from here? Building more homes obviously matters. Investing in quality, affordable alternative housing styles like trailer parks (long maligned because of their association with the poor) would allow even more people to own the four walls that shelter them, with all the associated possibilities. But these possibilities need to be extended to non-owners, too.
One way to do this might be to extend the duration of the normal lease longer than a year, as is common in Europe. Another might be creating a right to garden: landlords must accommodate tenants’ reasonable attempts to plant trees, bushes, and gardens (perhaps it could even be extended to a right to raise food and my beloved chicken coop would not be so embattled). Some degree of democratic oversight could be required in the maintenance and landscaping of larger scale apartment buildings, allowing political input for the space if not direct involvement. Landlords could be required to allow tenants to carry out upgrades and non-specialized repairs themselves, counting necessary upgrades against their rent. There would be issues of liability, of course, and endless haggling over where the boundaries of “reasonable” lie. But this is, after all, what the legal profession is for: developing the baroque precision that can hold two competing claims to a piece of land in equitable check.
As for me, I won’t be waiting for a new legal regime to be the change I wish to see. I was raised to tinker and scheme and finagle. But I was also taught to leave a place better than I found it. I feel about landlords the way some people feel about God: I don’t really believe in them, although I accept that they are at the moment an inescapable social fiction. The world cannot be divided up into parcels of absolute and exclusive possession. It belongs to everyone, as do the responsibilites of its care. Wherever I live, everything I touch and use is mine to care for and work for and love, for as long as I remain. Legal ownership would be nice someday. But until then, I do not require a title or a deed: only a sufficiently discreet contractor.
Clare Coffey
Writer
Clare is a writer living in Idaho recently published by The Bulwark & Plough
Photography by Echo Yun Chun
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