Going Broke to Live in a Third World Country
Thirteen years ago, I purchased my first home in California, on a mountain called Bonny Doon. We’d relocated from Chicago to try our hands at the Silicon Valley dream. While we’ve grown to love this place and the people we’ve met, I haven’t always loved the mountain, nor the land I lived on. Perhaps that’s because our relationship began with a mortgage two times as much we paid to live in Illinois, combined with the apocalyptic winter that greeted us in January of 2008.
The rains in Bonny Doon are creatures in their own right, with raindrops the size of eyeballs and winds that tear six foot tree limbs and toss them on the roads with ease, like dogs playing with sticks. My first winter in Bonny Doon was particularly prolific when it came to weather and I found myself hating California winters as much as the negative 20 degree weather I’d just left behind in Chicago. Sure, your lungs burn when you breathe in Chicago in January, but at least the house was a nice warm 68 degrees. In my new house, I wore coats and gloves inside, stocking caps to bed, and saw my breath when I sat at the dining room table. Worse were the power outages, we went thirteen days straight that first winter. I began making new friends at the kid’s school with the pickup line, “Hey, can I shower at your place?”
A constant thought that’s haunted me since moving here has been, “I’m going broke to live in a third world country? WTF?”
That first winter, both sets of our parents came to visit to see our new house. Because the cabin still had a renter, we had to give both of our bedrooms over to our parents and our family of four slept together in a big blowup bed in the family room, which at the time was only heated by woodstove. Each night we fell asleep to cozy warmth, but by the morning, our teeth were chattering, our breath visible like a dragon’s, even through our noses. I bought sleepcaps for my young sons. I’ll admit that the first few days into the grandparent’s first visit, the weather was lovely, and all of us were forced to agree that being in sunny California was way better than Omaha or Chicago at that time of year. The weather turned however, and a huge storm blew in off the Pacific the day before my parents were supposed to fly home. The winds whipped across the yard as we huddled in our makeshift bed and the Big Trees swirled and swayed above us. For the first time, I was afraid. What if a branch fell on our house? What if it fell on the room we were sleeping in and all four of us died? The trees that were once stairways to heaven now felt malicious, like specters in a haunted woods.
The next morning, there was debris all over our yard and Walt and the grandfathers cleared a path so he could take my family to the airport. They never made it. Every route off the mountain was blocked by a tree the length of a skyscraper and my parents would spend another night with us, this time without power. That winter taught us that life on the mountain could be hard, and that it was best to travel with a spare chainsaw in the back of the car.
If it weren’t for the cost of living, it might not have stung like it did. I was unable to get dental care my sons needed that first year because we couldn’t afford it. In order to absorb the doubling of our mortgage, I started a new job as the movement education teacher at the Waldorf school two days after moving my family 3000 miles. At first I was just exhausted by the move, being a working mom, and attending the needs of my students, but by February, as I shivered outside in the rain during recess duty (Waldorf kids go out in all weather) and tried to teach the kids tumbling and dance inside their tiny classrooms (no gymnasium to keep us dry), I began to crumble. Why in the world did I live here, in this place where you would spend $750,000 on a shack house in the middle of a wet, dangerous forest?
While my husband and I have improved our financial situation since then, a new type of apocalyptic storm has affected us. Instead of rain and wind, it was a fire roaring up the hillside. Rather than trees crashing down on our house, now everything is gone. We were close to paying off the damn mortgage, but due to the level of damage across the whole state, our architect is assuming it will cost a million dollars to rebuild a 2000 sq ft home with detached garage. A million dollars! For a shack. Of course, it won’t be an actual shack, current building codes don’t allow that sort of house to be built where the fire can swoop up and consume 30,000 acres in the blink of an eye. The costs are driven both by those code upgrades, but also the insanity of the California market. Disaster capitalism plus homeowners willing to spend that amount of money has turned a lovely land into a desperate wasteland. In the aftermath of the fire, the humans have only made it worse. Contractors are raising their rates. Wood is hard to get due to the fires. Prefab homes, once a cheaper alternative, are cranking up their prices. Worse, rents in Santa Cruz have skyrocketed since over 900 of us lost our homes in the CZU fires. We can only stay in our current rental six to eight months at most. We’ll need another place before our new home is built. I asked my friend to keep an eye out for things in Santa Cruz around five to six thousand dollars a month. She grimaced and told me that average rents for a house the size I live in was now ten thousand dollars! Why? Because landlords allowed themselves to take insurance money, destroying both the insurance industry in California as well as the ability for anyone else to move here.
I hated my home for years because it cost so much. As I began to court my land and learn from it, the trees and the beings of the forest have taught me that the land itself cannot be to blame. Not even my house is to blame for the assessor’s judgment that it was worth $825,000 at the time it burned. I might be going broke to pay a bank for the right to live here, but neither the bank nor myself actually owns Big Trees. The entire concept of land ownership is abhorrent. Nature belongs to herself, to the time and place, not to man. We can destroy her, rape her for her minerals, oil, and gas. We can agree to pay $1000 a square foot to build a house so we can gaze at her beauty while we drink our lattes on the porch. We can agree that $10,000 a month is a fair rental rate, even though most humans will not be able to afford that on their own. We destroy our own livelihoods with our very desire to live in California, but the land is still free. No one can own the land and as the ups and downs of the real estate market have shown us, the very concept of owning land is a weakness in our economy. Some get richer, but most are ruined by it.
The Austrian philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, believed there couldn’t be a just economy as long as humans placed monetary value on land. The cost of materials to build a house is one thing, those who construct our shelter and work-spaces must be paid a fair wage for their efforts. But the land itself shouldn’t have a monetary value, and in a modern economy the mortgage industry will only stifle economic progress. In the early 20th century he predicted great wealth inequality if we allowed private ownership of too much land. Rather, he suggested the land was the commons, and that any economic activity upon that land should go to the people that lived there as well as the management of the land. Private residences would each have a stewardship agreement with one another; I take care of this three acres, you take care of that three acres, etc. for ninety-nine years, or until all current stewards died, whichever happened first, after which it returned to the commons and a new steward would live there. Money would be exchanged only for the buildings that were on the land at the time of the transfer.
Imagine if we considered the land something we cared for as a common group. It’s not my property, or my Big Trees, but rather our mountain. I’m taking care of Doug and the Guardians (the names of the tree people I live with), and you’re taking care of their brothers and sisters. We steward the land for our lifetimes and then it goes to the next generation. Apartments and such types of living arrangements are also common, built and maintained by the communities that live there. Making money off shelter is insane. One only has to move to California to see where this is going—a complete serfdom may potentially arise from the ashes of our wildfires. Is that the world we want?
For this love story between myself and the land to continue, I’m stuck with the games we play, for I can’t leave the property at this vulnerable time. I feel I must clean and restore it. I must love it and bring back the music. I’d rather not spend a million dollars to do it, but that’s what it will cost. At the moment, I must endure waiting for insurance to let me know if they’re going to pay for the insanity, the way they’re paying those inflated rents in town. Yet I’m torn, why should I participate in disaster capitalism? We have a rider on our policy that forces our insurer to make up the gap created by the greed caused by tragedy. If we don’t rebuild, we get the value of the house at the time of the fire. If we do rebuild, we get that plus the increased costs of building at today’s value. To me, that shouldn’t be allowed. If we were stewards of the land, we wouldn’t place a value on the land itself, and we also wouldn’t allow contractors and builders to price gouge. There’s no reason they should charge $1000 square foot while I could build something in the suburbs of Chicago for $300 a square foot. The labor is the same. The materials are the same. But here, we had a disaster, so why not bleed everyone dry?
Disaster capitalism is a sin and it only exists because we allow it. We should admit this. The fact that the only way I can remain in California after losing my home, pets, and possessions, is to rebuild at today’s bloated rates because that’s how the system works, is a sin. There is blood on our hands and as the land has taught me, all of our actions are written in the book of life. We are no better than yesterday’s robber barons, or the kings of old, or the slave owners that forced Africans to build this nation. The natives we killed in order to harvest this land’s riches knew it best—that it is impossible to truly own the sky, the mountains, the rivers, the planets, or the stars. We can go bankrupt, we can hurt one another and force each other into slavery in the form of a mortgage or inflated rents. We can line our pockets with bad investments so long as we sell at just the right time. Yet the land doesn’t play our games. It rages with fire, and storms, and floods. It emits lava and splits apart. It even changes its magnetic fields as it sees fit. The planet destroys the very structures we bow down to in our evil religion of endless growth. The land cares not for our financial agreements, mere numbers on a screen moving from one account to another, not a bit “real” in any sense of the material world. We don’t even use gold anymore, just algorithms, to define the ever etherial concept of wealth.
Unlike our monetary system, the land is real. It is timeless and passes through the ages, while we live here for but the blink of an eye. That we create so much destruction and heartache for one another in the name of land ownership is tragic. Yet it is the way of humanity to miss that which the eyes cannot see. What then should a woman who can see with the heart do in this situation? Should I live in sin and rebuild, or should I go elsewhere? Steiner claimed that any land ownership, regardless if it’s affordable for me or not, destroys the ability for both humanity and the planet to flourish together. Just like land, sin can’t be valued with a price tag. Sin just is.
At this moment in time, it’s the system that is broken, not the land even though it is covered in ash and burn scars. The land calls me home, so that I might steward it with my heart and my hands. I will obey, even though it terrifies me to endure the financial madness that lies ahead. I’m lucky I can play this game, many were under-insured and can’t. The land weeps for the stewards who will never return to the mountain because humanity was too greedy to give them that chance.