Estate Agent Paintings Gallery (aka Expensive Nice Houses I Can't Afford.)

RND// To consider conceptual paintings of expensive, nice looking houses you can’t afford because you're not rich, express adequate social capital / whiteness, or are upper middle class. From images seen on parasitical UK Estate Agent websites. (£2.5M is average price for such houses in my area.)

"[..] he struggle to continually assemble, de-assemble and re-assemble a sense of home [/which] drastically reduces private tenants’ wellbeing through stress, anxiety, depression and alienation."
- (One good possible definition of what I term Rentalism.) From: Assembling a ‘kind of’ home in the UK private renting sector, Adriana Mihaela Soaita, Kim McKeec

Today the underpaid workmen are still hammering away on the apartment below me, owned by the asshole who rents it out as an Air B&B to well off foreign students. So far they've totally replaced the carpets and the radiators, which by the look of them were fitted in the middle 60's. Judging by the general quality of the fittings being ripped out, they've existed in a sorry state for a while. This makes perfect sense, since early last year I overheard the landlord in question almost bawling his existential fucking eyes out one day to a neighbor, casually spittin' that loose white jive about "Renters just don't understand the difficulties we face" and about 'extreme financial pressures'. GFY mate - and while you're at it, have a peek down this false color scanning electron microscope - see if you can spot the world's smallest fucking violin.

I bet the tight, money grubbing bastard makes absolutely zero commitment toward keeping the place looking (at the very least) presentable. Peeling paint, fittings with bits hanging off, filthy carpets, damp - the lot. Only when the place was literally falling apart did he finally bother 'investing' in an upgrade (probably the cheapest replacements possible.) And yet I also once heard the asshole loudly berating some Chinese students one day in the middle of the street, reminding them that they could not have guests over and if they did they now had to pay him X amounts of pounds on the spot, "Otherwise he'd loose his license." What a succulent crock.

I discovered he was renting the apartment out as an AirBnB, because along with the front fire door being repeatedly slammed, I keep on hearing large airport luggage cases with those tiny, hard wheels being continually rolled over the rough pavement outside at 7AM. If only there was a publicly issued license you could loose, called Simply Being A Good Human Being (And Not A Total Jerkwad.) I was hoping the student was going to tell him to go piss up a rope, but he simply handed over the money.

As I look over such images, I gently sigh and quietly say unto myself: "Oh to be rich white upper middle class and hopelessly bourgeois, and not have to think in terms of common morality - only about #aesthetics and surface 'finishings'." To bask in those infinite little interior design details which mean so much. Brass handles and cupboard opening mechanisms. Solid stone sinks. Nice taps. To walk out one early midsummer morning into my heated conservatory, dressed like Arthur Dent, with a delicious cup of organic fair trade coffee and a copy of the Reactionary Centrist Guardian under my tanned arm. That is, to be around any fucking (/White People) Design whatsoever; the overpriced hole I used to rent before this petrified shoebox had black mold running up the continually damp, freezing walls. It too was 'designed' - but only to provide instant hard cash for the rich exploitative bitch who owned it. (I don't want to get started on talking about my old rented place, because it not only makes me too angry, I'm saving up all my bile for a proper dissection of that particular shitshow.)

After three hours of concrete drilling this morning, I'd just about lost my tiny marbles in anger. I went down there to ask the builders how long they'd be on these upgrades. "By Friday," they say. I ask if they knew if this was going to be an AirBnB? They didn't know (how would they? Sorry, stupid question.) Men from Poland. Tough; they look you right in the eye without fear when they talk to you. I like that. Hard working, they know they're trade - not that being forced to wage slave away for assholes is a virtue - and above all friendly. (Despite all the mountains of UK themed shite they're no-doubt forced to shovel on a daily basis. My Dad was a lorry driver, and told me he much preferred the friendly company of Poles in the yard to the usual, professionally miserable fatgut xenophobe English drivers.)

"The sense of Home." I think that's what I'm looking for. Some space to call my own. Where I can bang and scrape on the walls all day and not bother anyone else. Renting is utterly fucked. Political working class side note: All inherently evil, money grubbing landlord parasites can go fuck themselves off back to the Hell for Landlords, in which hopefully they're forced to pay more and more rent on an infinite series of every-shittier, ever more depressing rented hovels owned by smug white callous motherfuckers, chucking to themselves in their nice, well designed and warm homes, filthy lucre trickling through their greasy fingers.

• Book: Evicted by Matthew Desmond
• Dazed Digital: How renting is making people physically and mentally ill
• BMP Public Health - Housing as a social determinant of health and wellbeing: developing an empirically-informed realist theoretical framework
• Science Direct: Assembling a ‘kind of’ home in the UK private renting sector
• Rupture Eco-Socialist Quaterly: Colonialism, Landlordism and the Rift of Ireland
• r/TrueOffMyChest: Fuck airBnb

// how to play big science