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In Corona summer 2020 I am walking through a new development area with a friend.
Somewhere in Germany.
It doesn't matter exactly where, because the residential areas in which young families pay off their 120-square-meter homes look the same everywhere: white prefabricated houses with gray roofs, gray doors and a practical layout (open living-kitchen area below, above the bedrooms, maybe a guest toilet), double garage (on the outskirts or in the suburbs you quickly need two cars), a few half-yellowed grass plants in the gravel front yard (there is no time and money for gardening), kettle grill on the terrace (what else do you have a home for! ), a blue trampoline that was much too big for the children on a tiny piece of lawn (the property was divided into three because otherwise it would be priceless).
My girlfriend and I make fun of the white-concrete-gray idyll of our own home.
We imagine how the people in these houses, who are probably our age or just a little older, program their robotic lawn mowers at the weekend, oil swing hinges, grill sausages, and already know that they will not have sex in the evening in their harmoniously coordinated bedrooms will.
How they get annoyed that they only got the corner property and curious corona walkers like us can watch them every move in the garden.
Life in these houses seems far away and at the same time nightmarish: like a vision of the future that we are still running away from.
We are 30, we talk for hours about whether we are really sure about our relationships, whether we see prospects in our jobs or whether we shouldn't try something completely different after all.
Before it's too late, before we have no choice but to seek financing proposals for white-concrete-gray homes out of pragmatism.
Because rents in the city are getting too expensive and it makes sense to invest in real estate, after all, our parents did the same thing back then.
In general, more and more of our friends are suddenly talking about the fact that you “should actually buy something”, in a tone of conviction, as if they were part-time contractors.
Most of them dream of old villas with enchanted gardens, of half-timbered houses or old farms that they renovate on their own, finally doing something with their hands!
- and yet they are realistic enough to look at the square meter price lists for energy-efficient new construction projects.
Why does everyone suddenly want a house?
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I've already made my first visits to newly acquired homes.
I see the effort to make everything beautiful and modern and individual, with photo garlands on the wall reminiscent of a past life.
"We were in New York, well, before the little one came," my friends say with a regretful sigh, and then they sit back on their sofa in the living room, which is their own, and their eyes shine more openly Proud: We did it.
"Don't you guys finally want to move in together?" They ask me and my friend and look at each other doubtfully, as if something might not be right with us because we live in two separate apartments, and I feel a bit like Carrie Bradshaw, who is only invited to the Hamptons so that she can tell about her wild New York city life.
At the most, my life is mid-wild, and that's probably only in the eyes of people who suddenly say completely unironically sentences like: "My wife really wanted the house" or "The price per square meter was just right" or "We can go on vacation for the next few years Of course, forget it first ”or“ I built the carport myself ”.
Home Sweet Home.
Wtf
.
I don't know how it could happen that Generation Y, of all people, fell victim to a Biedermeier style of their own.
The eternally indecisive millennials with educated middle-class, well-off background, who in their twenties, as the cliché would have it, could not get through to anything, neither to work (prefer to set up a permanent position or yoga teacher training or start-up?) Nor to love (to be there yet up to 45 books written about one's own inability to have a relationship), and who are therefore stuck in Netflix and Instagram addictions in their early 30s because the algorithm makes all decisions on these channels.
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The privileged young people, whose insistence on individuality seemed to stand in the way of every prefabricated way of life: These people of all people are suddenly so, so convinced of their dream of their own home?
Are you fleeing from the overwhelming number of life opportunities in hardware stores and architects' offices?
Do you work through cost estimates at the weekend, do your parents ask for an early inheritance, do you go into debt until you reach retirement age?
Do you make an accurate decision between parquet and laminate, granite or marble worktop for the kitchen, light or medium gray for the living room?
Copying the résumé of your middle-class parents?
Do we have to live like this?
I ask myself: When do you wake up in the morning and think: I really feel like dealing with standard land values and development plans!
And even if I have never planted a flower bed, I now firmly intend to spend the rest of my free time gardening and doing home improvement!
Yes, it may also have seemed a little silly to our parents' generation to suddenly see their peers, who were just very young, as "homeowners" in an adult life with everything that obviously goes with it: debts, obligations, but also the security of having made provisions for the future.
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I have to think of the new development area in my home town in Baden-Württemberg, which is called “Auenland”, as in “Lord of the Rings”.
The uniform idyll that has been created here is even reminiscent of the hobbit world, in which Bilbo, Frodo & Co. live in very similar, grass-covered caves and actually want nothing else from life than it is on the whole good to have and otherwise be left in peace as much as possible.
In the “Shire” the blinds and curtains are usually closed in winter, because the houses are also close together in the country, trees and bushes are not yet old enough to protect privacy.
You have to search for a long time here to find an adventure.
Is this really what the dream of having your own home looks like?
After all, it's not just about affordability.
It's also about the vision of life associated with buying a house: Without children, I need less space.
Will and can I trust that I will always earn enough that I can not only afford the house but also to live in it?
Do I want to forego traveling because repairs are due again?
Am I sure that I can be happier in my own four walls than in an apartment?
The supposed inevitability of these middle-class life questions that need to be answered gives me anxiety.
Where are the alternatives to a life plan that is only geared towards being able to keep up, to make the "right" decisions early on, and that in a world in which nothing is certain?
How does that work?
afraid of the future
The scare tactics that my generation is exposed to bothers me.
Take care here and now, quickly find your place in the real estate bubble, otherwise everything will be too late.
Even on Instagram, once the last resort of thoughtless hedonism, influencers tell me every day about their real estate plans, the fear of not finding a suitable home, and, if they do manage to do so, about the incredible relief of having reached this milestone in life, whether Out of fear of the future, ambition or honest conviction, nobody asks about that anymore.
Not even after what about the people who are not so lucky.
A few months later my friend calls me, the one I was jokingly walking around the residential area with.
So,
big news
, you and your boyfriend have now decided that it would simply be more sensible not to rent anymore, both of them would get a bit of money from their parents for buying the row house.
“They think the plan is good,” and well, with the equity they would be able to do it with the repayment of the loan.
The house that they have chosen is not the Oberhammer, but in terms of energy efficiency it is really great, and the connection to the public is actually really okay.
The two look forward to the house.
I can't see it on the phone, but I know: she too now has that glitter in her eyes, the pride of the homeowner.
I've lost another friend to the idyllic home of my own, but I still make it up to myself to be happy for her.
And I admit that in the evening I let myself be lit up a little by blue cell phone light in bed because I scroll around for a long time on a website that presents new building projects.
I look at animations of white, square houses with small front gardens, some place names seem so unknown to me that I have to google where exactly it is in Brandenburg, I'm looking for S-Bahn stations nearby and I'm about to register for online viewings.
And then I close all browser windows.
Nah, I'm really not ready for that yet.
More posts on the topic of home ownership on WELT:
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