It was the beginning of the end when all the doors on the street turned pastel shades from the Farrow & Ball paint charts. But once the tasteful autumn-themed wreaths of flowers started turning up on the doors, I knew I was well and truly fecked.
The inner Dublin neighbourhood where I live has become too posh for me to afford. The signs that I was getting priced out were there. The council started fixing the streets. The stables would soon be knocked down to make way for another hotel. Another coffee shop opened.
First, buy all the hip pubs and get rid of the craft-beer tap. There is only one tap now, for Foster's, which Australia sends back to the UK as a revenge for colonisation
Letters asking to buy my house started appearing in the letter box. Then a new yoga studio opened. Once grown men felt safe enough to wear Birkenstocks on the main street without apparent fear of public mockery, our fate was really sealed.
It seemed every second house came up for sale. During lockdown my housemate and I would sit outside on our outdoor furniture (wooden pallets with cushions nailed on) watching prospective buyers turn up for inspections. “Is that a bloody Tesla?” we asked each other.
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The buyers stared back at us too. This was because we were two women on pilfered packing crates drinking Aldi cans reading the races form guide while listening to AC/DC. For full effect I was also wearing a 1986 Parramatta Eels Rugby League jersey. If I was going to drop a cool €400,000 on a house I wouldn’t want us as neighbours either.
Despite my efforts to single-handedly reduce property prices in the area by harnessing my natural redneck tendencies for the benefit of Ireland, the house sold. But if there are factors that drive up an area’s house prices, can you wage an opposite campaign to lower them? Could you make an area less desirable? Rationally this wouldn’t work, but the market is not rational.
This is how my ill-thought-out plan would go.
The first step would be to buy up all the hip pubs in the location. Rip out the interiors. Get rid of the craft-beer tap. There is only one beer tap now. It is for Foster's, which Australia sends back to the United Kingdom as a revenge for colonisation.
Enlist your neighbours to form a strictly-beginner bagpipe marching band that practises twice a day around the neighbourhood. At 4.30am and 11pm
Beer will be spilled on the carpet every day, to give it a pungent odour. There will be no wood-fired pizza. The only menu offering will be frozen mini quiches that aren’t thawed properly in the middle. There is only one choice for dessert, and it’s a lucky dip from a Cadbury Heroes box leftover from Christmas. The only flavours left are those crap Eclair ones that no one likes. The sticky toffee ones that always pull out a filling. If you’re really lucky you just pull out an empty wrapper that someone has just stuck back there instead.
At each end of the bar are specially hired old lads whose job it is to melt the ear off you with aimless chat. He will do this either by telling you he could have played county back in the day (and will walk you through every point he’s scored from 1978 until the present) or he’ll ask where you’re from (Australia) and then list everyone he knows from there and insist you know at least someone in common (it’s a country of 25 million people) and won’t leave you alone until you’ve found them.
There is no music. Just televisions with the sound turned down playing reruns of Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas speech. Good luck to estate agents trying to justify high prices because of the “buzzy local nightlife”.
Then enlist your neighbours to form a strictly-beginner bagpipe marching band that practises twice a day around the neighbourhood. At 4.30am and 11pm. Put up posters advertising fake dog-fighting rings on lamp posts. Get some police crime tape and wack that up around a few houses. Get into a pyramid scheme selling vitamin shakes and plague everyone in the neighbourhood to buy them. Bribe local cafes to only serve Nescafé out of the jar.
It is a shame my family in Australia are stuck behind closed borders. This is really their moment to do what we do best, which is get all our grievances out in loud arguments in the front garden
It is a shame my family in Australia are stuck there behind closed borders. This is really their moment to do what we do best, which is get all our grievances out in loud arguments in the front garden. We also excel at parking loads of cars in various working conditions on the lawn. All things that help to lower the value of property. Or I could just ask them to move. My family has a talent of swapping eventual high-value suburbs for low ones.
Before they emigrated to Australia they lived where I live now, in a part of Dublin 8 “where you couldn’t give away houses in the 1970s”, which is a shame, because I could use one now. The first place they settled in inner Sydney now has an average house value of €1.63 million. They left it because “there was too much concrete” and went out to western Sydney, where I grew up. Where suburbs actually became poorer as more people were pushed to fringe areas with fewer jobs and no real infrastructure.
Now I am complaining about gentrification while being part of the problem. I understand if some of the locals want to start a bagpipe group to try to get me out. I would too.