Housing Climate: From Plastic to Concrete - by Miriam McGarry
ISLAND | ISSUE 158This piece was written as part of the ‘Writing Climate Futures’ project, supported by a City of Hobart Dr Edward Hall Environment Grant.
I was home from Melbourne and helping Steph sort through her clothes – a hierarchy of keep / Vinnies bin / cleaning rags – as a packing ritual. The owners of the Huon Road rental could not resist capitalising on the Hobart property boom, and the house was being placed on the market. I was reclaiming a pair of jeans I had loaned her, collateral from the era we had share-housed, when Jack shouted from the bathroom, ‘Look at this sky!’ It appeared as if the entire mountain was on fire. ‘Hobart blue’ was replaced by a brutal and swelling terracotta. A closing barricade. A shroud.
We rushed outside and stood bewildered, taking photos of the heavy russet backdrop against the overgrown purple lavender. Suffocating and monstrous. It was the colour of stuplimity – a hue of astonishing horror, coupled with an overwhelming and sedated inability to take action. We were stuck, spellbound, staring at a potential Pantone swatch for ‘Sunburnt Country Cliche’ or ‘Climate Augury’.[1]
Driving to Hinsby Beach, it felt like we were travelling at the speed of smoke –the sky racing us to the water, expanding out of my peripheral vision as we moved through Sandy Bay and Taroona. Bobbing amongst the seaweed, we looked back at the coastline and imagined the waterfront homes being claimed by rising sea levels. We were drowning in landschapspijn, a Dutch word that translates as ‘landscape pain’.[2] A feeling of solastalgia, climate change-induced homesickness of loss. Ducking under the waves, we tried to wash away the weight of the grubby sky.
Everything was bathed in a new catastrophic filter. The landscape was exposed as a site of entropy and danger. In real time we watched a slow-motion disaster become a visual and material reality: climate change is every day; apocalypse is now.
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In ‘Writing on the Precipice’, James Bradley explains that:
to write about climate change in Australia is to ignore the degree to which these processes are themselves manifestations of much larger economic and historical phenomena, unable to be understood without taking into account the unequal distribution of wealth between nations, the role of global capitalism and consumer society, the legacies of empire and decolonisation. Yet to write about those larger economic and historical phenomena is extremely difficult without ignoring the particularities of the experience of climate change for individuals and individual landscapes. [3]
What does it mean to write about climate change in Hobart, in a way that acknowledges both local and global landscapes? Tasmania is touted as one of the last places in the world to be affected by climate breakdown. The island is no longer just a ‘mainlander’s dream’ for investing in (until recently) affordable property. It also offers potential sanctuary against impending climate-based catastrophe. The physical isolation, clean water, moderate climate and pure air are qualities not only spouted in large-scale tourism campaigns aimed at attracting Sydneysiders to purchase property. These environmental conditions also provide protection against the initial onset of extreme climate events.
Hobart is connected with, contributing to, responsible for, and impacted by the global experience of climate change. But the capital of the 26th largest island in the world also has its own environmental, social, economic and cultural particularities. The City of Hobart acknowledges that while climate change is a global issue, the solutions are local.
The difficulty of understanding both large and small actions is described by Timothy Clark as a ‘derangement of scale’. In attempting to comprehend the wide-ranging environmental impacts of climate change, he writes, ‘to move from large to small scale or vice versa implies a calculable shift or resolution’ but ‘with climate change ... when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often mockingly useless’.[4] The bushfires of 2019’s angry summer were felt locally, but the conditions that created them are globally entangled.
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The lure of the southern island is already being felt, as sea-changers re-route their seasonal migration patterns in a ‘new normal’ of baby boomers moving from Queensland to Tasmania. Realestate.com cites Hobart as a ‘hot spot’ – one of the world’s top 20 places for property growth due to its ‘cool climate’. It is particularly marketed to those over 50 who can no longer cope with the oppressive heat in Sydney and Brisbane. In local media, farmers from drought-stricken areas of New South Wales have been described as ‘climate-change refugees’, as they relocate from the mainland for greener pastures. Property analysts talk about ‘rediscovering’ Tasmania, rewriting the state’s brutal history of invasion and perpetuating the ongoing colonial mentality. Cold is the new cool.
“Cold is the new cool.”
Across the ditch, New Zealand has become the second home of Silicon Valley tech-villain Peter Thiel, who in 2018 purchased his citizenship alongside a 477-acre doomsday property. In the event of a global catastrophe, the PayPal co-founder will jet out of Manhattan to his southern lair, in an attempt to ride out the apocalypse unscathed. Before this, Thiel advocated for ‘seasteading’, whereby the global elite set up offshore tax havens by creating floating empires at sea, outside of government jurisdiction. Under Thiel’s vision, the imperialist link between ownership of land and generation of capital is realised in aquatic terrain. As Robert Macfarlane articulates, ‘in today’s Anthropocene, the affluent experience the future in the form of technology, while the poor experience the future in the form of calamity’.[5]
Tasmania offers opportunities just as attractive as New Zealand’s for climate-change panic rooms. While no amount of spatial-solutionism can ultimately protect the uber-rich from the effects of climate change, the initial impacts will be felt disproportionately by those who have least contributed to it. Tasmania has the highest proportion of low-income households in the country, and as Ashley Dawson describes, when hurricanes or bushfires hit areas of disadvantage, they simply gouge ‘the grooves of extreme inequality even deeper’.[6]
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I sat in a North Hobart park with a friend, discussing the mooted cable car development and high-rise hotel proposal. Was the community energy put into protesting these developments a distraction at the cost of focusing on larger issues? I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but a messy handful of fragments felt somehow part of the same plot, as if zooming rapidly in and out on Google Maps: stress over securing a lease, the cruise ship in the river, people still climbing Uluru, the approval of Adani, 50 million empty homes in China, the tar sands oil pipeline.
Claire-Louise Bennett describes her desire for moments that connect across scales, ‘when the inner, the outer and the beyond are caused by simple things to somehow merge, that one briefly feels like home’.[7] From my cracked-walled share-house to the Great Pacific garbage patch, there is a prickling connection between inequality in the built environment and an extractive relationship to land. In the park, we looked at the assembly of cranes, like hungry beaks over the city as the pink sky darkened.
Urban development and climate breakdown are not separate issues. Simon Levin argues that, ‘when we observe the environment, we necessarily do so only on a limited range of scales; therefore our perception of events provides us with only a low-dimensional slice through a high-dimensional cake’.[8]
Our brains struggle to process concerns over rising sea levels alongside urgent stress about making monthly rental payments, but the two are not unrelated.
“Our brains struggle to process concerns over rising sea levels alongside urgent stress about making monthly rental payments, but the two are not unrelated.”
When faced with the ‘hyperobject’ [9] of climate change, a high-rise hotel or waterfront development offers an accessible entry point to an overwhelming problem: a slice of the cake that links across scales of personal bodies negotiating public spaces, planning policies and global economics that inform the built environment, border and boundaries, and the uneven effects of a planetary climate emergency.
In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells provides an unrelenting barrage of information in his 12-part prophecy of our climate future: Heat Death; Hunger; Drowning; Wildfire; Disasters No Longer Natural; Freshwater Drain; Dying Oceans; Unbreathable Air; Plagues of Warming; Economic Collapse; Climate Conflict; and Systems. It is near impossible to comprehend the entire climate catastrophe at once, as our imaginations cannot (or do not wish to) expand to hold the full extent of climate breakdown.
But we can imagine a house.
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In October 2018, a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that we have 12 years to contain climate change. Richard Flanagan highlighted that despite this bleak and urgent call for political leadership, ‘Our emissions are still rising. And that is why this is a crisis unlike any we have ever faced. On present trends much of Australia will become, quite simply, uninhabitable. And what remains liveable will be small bands of our country.’ [10]
If climate change means we will be inhabiting increasingly narrowing spaces, how will those already displaced from land or excluded from housing be accommodated? Who is missing from visions of our climate future?
“If climate change means we will be inhabiting increasingly narrowing spaces, how will those already displaced from land or excluded from housing be accommodated? Who is missing from visions of our climate future?”
Researchers at the University of Tasmania estimate that there is a current shortfall of 1400 dwellings each year in greater Hobart alone. Over the next 12 years – the period of time the IPCC warns we have to take action to prevent catastrophic environmental emergency – Hobart will require a minimum of 16,800 affordable homes.
It may seem counterintuitive to advocate for a resilient climate future by encouraging the building of housing. Cement production is responsible for 8% of global emissions and is the world’s biggest industrial cause of carbon pollution. It is viewed as the antithesis to environmentalism, as a material manifestation of humans attempting to tame nature. But climate justice necessitates access to housing – and high-density affordable housing that is supported by accessible, affordable and frequent public transport offers an implicitly low-carbon mode of living. As Daniel Aldana Cohen explains, ‘the city-dweller’s fight for a cheap, decent room, and urban movements’ struggles for affordable, decent housing close to the people we love and the things we need – these are frontline in the pursuit of climate justice’.[11]
In 2020, single-use plastics will be banned in Hobart, following a 8–4 vote by City of Hobart aldermen. Since 2013, retailers have been banned from supplying lightweight plastic shopping bags to customers, and residents have become accustomed to remembering their backpack or art-gallery-emblazoned tote. But as our housing market demands more plasticity – flexibility to accommodate diverse needs, and an ability to adapt to changing climate pressures – how do we move from legislation on single-use plastic to policy on concrete houses?
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The City of Hobart expects that the changes in climate most likely to impact upon the city’s infrastructure, roads, local community and environment are ‘a magnification in intensity of extreme events’. As sea levels rise and fires increase in intensity and frequency, the city will be shaped by dual forces: climate events and real-estate capital.
While responses to climate change must consider technological adaptations (the City of Hobart highlights the role of electric cars and renewable energy), we cannot design ourselves out of climate change. Climate change requires an ethical and political reimagining to create a decolonised approach to how we value both land and lives. We cannot rely upon building our way out of homelessness and rental unaffordability without moving beyond a model of real estate as commodity to one of housing as a necessity; to shift from urban development as a site for investment to creating cities as places for living.
In Tasmania, rental inspections have become claustrophobic events. In a highly competitive and urgent environment, prospective tenants crowd into cracked-tiled kitchens, imagining concealing the hole in the wall with a poster and planning to forfeit the living room to create an additional bedroom. Between January 2013 and March 2018, the state has seen a 60% decrease in rental listings. Of this diminished pool of housing options, only 22% of listings are appropriate and affordable for people who rely on income support, and less than half are accessible for people earning the minimum wage. One in ten Tasmanians are suffering from housing stress and in 2018 the average waiting time for priority applicants for Housing Tasmania properties was 72 weeks. If the timing is especially unlucky, that waiting list means two winters without reliable shelter.
Fiona Wright describes how ‘the big things are too abstract, somehow, for us to ever really have to deal with, but the small ones ... are our undoing, as they are the things that bring us joy. The small transfers of energy that shock us, sudden and electric. The things that they illuminate.’[12] A plastic straw around the neck of a turtle illuminates, but so too does a plastic bag filled with belongings carried up the slopes of Hobart’s Queens Domain public parkland for another night spent ‘waiting for the sun’.[13]
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After the 2019 summer fires, below the blanketing skies of smoke, the landscape of suffering settled unevenly. As evacuation points closed and casseroles ceased being dropped off to those temporarily displaced, the ongoing ‘slow’ threat of climate change remains primarily felt by those least able to afford the financial costs. It is estimated that approximately half of all Australians are not adequately insured to protect their assets, with non-homeowners more likely to be unprotected. In Tasmania, many coastal homes are no longer covered by flood insurance (for those able to afford insurance in the first place) and by 2030 it is expected that one in 19 homeowners will have prohibitively expensive insurance premiums, and numerous properties will be rendered ineligible for financial protection. As Macfarlane writes, ‘Wealth levitates and poverty sinks’.[14]
The unequal landscape of Hobart was visible on an intimate and more tangible scale during 2019’s Dark Mofo. A ‘tourist bingo’ sheet rolled through social media, listing overheard comments to tick off. One square read ‘upon hearing about the housing crisis “But it’s still so cheap to buy. LOL”’, and, in another, ‘sweet inner-city airbnb with Aesop handsoap’. We squealed with laughter at the accuracy of the scorecard, capturing the instagrammed plates of oysters and kunanyi sunrises from visitors who were ‘seriously thinking about moving here’.
This is not to advance a ‘we grew here, you flew here’ protectionism (especially as it is anticipated that climate change will force 200 million people to migrate globally), but to question the lack of policy levers to ensure basic living standards for residents who do not have the economic mobility of many visitors. In a city where rent is rising faster than income, and the government is actively courting skilled professionals with the ‘Make It Tasmania’ campaign, it is difficult to reconcile seeing Melburnians and Sydneysiders rolling hung-over out of their accommodation while watching the police move homeless sleepers away from Salamanca so that stallholders can set up the Saturday morning market.
A month after the festival, the Labor opposition and the Morrison Coalition government voted against a motion to raise the Newstart allowance by $75 a week. This income support – previously called the dole – has not been increased since 1994 (beyond adjustment for CPI). In that period, median weekly rental payments for a house in Hobart have increased from $104 (1996) to $500 (2018).[15] Community Housing Minister Luke Howarth called for a ‘positive spin’ on homelessness, but there is no easy smoothing of this terrain when you are living on $489.70 a fortnight.
“The landscape is rendered elastic as it stretches in ‘value’, moving further out of reach of residents. Unstable housing in an unstable climate.”
The landscape is rendered elastic as it stretches in ‘value’, moving further out of reach of residents. Unstable housing in an unstable climate.
Regardless of whether your interests are in accumulating personal wealth or redistributing it, climate change will inevitably reshape the economy. The property market is expected to lose $571 billion in value by 2030 due to climate change and extreme weather.
Imagining a climate-resilient future for Hobart requires planning for public housing to address the already unprecedented homelessness crisis as well as new arrivals of people displaced by climate change, and a strategy to protect the clean, green and liveable city that has afforded the state its recent economic growth. As architect Finn Williams has described, designing for the future requires planning for a ‘bigger here, a longer now and a wider we’.[16] It will require a reframing of the Australian dream of home ownership in the sprawling suburbs in favour of new models of high-density, low-carbon, affordable housing. Moreover, it will necessitate a recognition that this dream was always exclusionary, built upon dispossession and the myth of terra nullius.
In Dark Emu, Bunurong writer and researcher Bruce Pascoe demonstrates how, before invasion, Aboriginal people constructed villages that were ‘not just functional occupation centres, but places of solace and comfort in often difficult terrains and climates’.[17] As Hobart faces increasingly inhospitable climate events, how much solace do residents find in the built environment? Elderly pensioners unable to pay rising power bills are experiencing hypothermia in their homes, people in public housing live in properties blooming with mould, and shipping containers are proposed as emergency accommodation solutions. The Treasurer described Tasmania as experiencing a ‘golden age,’ while domain.com.au reported that Hobart was having a ‘rip-snorter of a year’ for property growth and ‘liveability’.
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Rob Nixon describes how the slow violence of climate change occurs ‘gradually and out of sight’. Nixon makes visible the global daisy-chain of resource grabbing, displacement and exploitation (over ‘there’) and its links with public sector austerity and private wealth acquisition (‘here’). At the same time, Nixon demonstrates the power of re-scaling our thinking about climate change, to consider the whole terrain of local conditions and global movements. He writes, ‘I am talking about ordinary people making the link between their communities being treated as disposable and the assumption that the environments they depend on are disposable as well’.[18] This connection has been most clearly communicated by First Nations communities around the world, who have been disproportionately affected by the violence of climate change. A group of Torres Strait Islanders has lodged a climate change case with the UN Human Rights Committee against the Australian Federal Government, where rising sea levels on low-lying islands have exposed grave sites, flooded homes, destroyed crops, and threaten to displace residents from the land to which their culture is connected.
In Tasmania, shifting climate bands have resulted in species redistribution and the loss of giant kelp forests, threatening Tasmanian Aboriginal women’s cultural practice of making shell necklaces.
“In Tasmania, shifting climate bands have resulted in species redistribution and the loss of giant kelp forests, threatening Tasmanian Aboriginal women’s cultural practice of making shell necklaces.”
In Hobart, the connection between a mentality of disposable environment and disposable community is less direct, but the privatisation of kunayni (Mt Wellington) for development, as well as families sleeping in tents at the showgrounds, are extended links in the same strangling chain. There are obvious associations between climate change mitigation and improving housing affordability; of lowering power costs through converting to Passivhaus standards, making assessments of a home’s energy efficiency mandatory at sale or rental, or encouraging high-density building. But beyond eco-friendly approaches to the built environment, the geographies of inequality require more than architectural responses.
Wendell Berry wrote that ‘people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.’[19] To defend what we love, we also need to have basic needs met – of food, water and shelter – and a particularising language that can marry the poetics of place with the functions of policy. After the summer of 2019, the connection between Tasmania’s climate future and existing issues of rental availability, public housing and environmental destruction was written across the ash-covered landscape. In Hobart, the link between ‘housing and climate is coherent: the two challenges are one’.[20]
In his development of a new vocabulary to give meaning to Anthropocene experiences, Glenn Albrecht created the term ‘soliphilia’, meaning ‘love of the interrelated whole’. The word recognises a kind of globalism that isn’t about economic expansion but acknowledges connections across time and space. It is a word that captures multiple scales. It expands the concept of love of one’s own place (‘topophilia’) to a broader love of the whole.[21] Many narratives of environmental activism are predicated on protecting one’s own land and acting as a guardian of that site. But what if that ‘ownership’ has been denied? How do you foster soliphilia without a sense of home?
When we got back from the beach, Jack was removing a framed picture from the wall, one – according to their rental agreement – they should never have hung. The rusty colour of the near-submerged terracotta-tiled roof in Reg Mombassa’s ‘Homes and Gums in Flood’ was echoed outside in the sky. The state was on fire. At the same time, Queensland was under deadly water. In Canberra, the government was debating coal subsidies and negative-gearing. We closed the door to keep out the smoke and put the saucepans into well-worn packing boxes. ▼
Homes and Gums in Flood, by Reg Mombassa (with kind permission of the artist)
NOTES1 The 2019 choice of Pantone’s colour of the year is ‘Living Coral’, described as providing ‘comfort and buoyancy in our continually shifting environment’.
2 Robert Macfarlane’s ‘word of the day’ on Twitter, 29 April, as part of his Lexicon For The Anthropocene project.
3 James Bradley, ‘Writing on the Precipice’, Sydney Review of Books, 2017.
4 Timothy Clark, Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, 2012.
5 Robert Macfarlane, Underland, 2019.
6 Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change, 2019.
7 Claire‐Louise Bennett, Pond, 2015.
8 Simon A Levin, The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology, 1992.
9 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, 2013.
10 Richard Flanagan, ‘I’m willing to go to jail to stop Adani and save our beloved country. Will you stand with me?’ The Guardian, 2019.
11 Daniel Aldana Cohen, ‘A Green New Deal for Housing’, Jacobin, 2019.
12 Fiona Wright, The World Was Whole, 2018.
13 Leon Compton, ‘Waiting for the sun: The realities of sleeping rough in Hobart’, ABC News, 2019.
14 Robert Macfarlane, Underland, 2019.
15 1994: ABS. 2018: Tenants Union.
16 Finn Williams, ‘Brian Eno’s ideas have unexpected resonance for architecture’, Dezeen, 2018.
17 Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, 2018.
18 Rob Nixon, ‘Writing About Slow Violence’, Huffpost, 2011.
19 Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, 2000.
20 Daniel Aldana Cohen, ‘A Green New Deal for Housing’, Jacobin, 2019.
21 Kenneth Worthy, ‘Soliphilia and Other Ways of Loving a Planet’, Psychology Today, 2016.
This article appeared in Island 158 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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