A Home of Your Own

We love to label ourselves. The language of jobs, taught at an early age as a way to understand the adult world, provides the most common means for self-definition (I am a doctor, I am a garbage man). But there are other labels we apply to ourselves, and whether they are framed as trophies or burdens, they usually indicate an advancement towards self-fulfillment that is supposed to come with normalized adulthood, as judged by the expectations of the society in which an individual lives. 

Many of the various labels we adopt are connected by economics. The example I am thinking of at the moment is the holy duality of the taxpayer/homeowner. 

I recently, as they say, purchased a home. It’s a funny thing, to think that before this, all the places I lived were just homes I paid for the privilege of occupying temporarily, making them not really homes at all, but waystations on the path to a genuine home, which, by the “homeowner” definition, necessarily involves owning property. You will regularly hear people speak about buying a house, but we do not use the word “houseowner.” That would perhaps be too impersonal for the market, which needs us to believe that only once we buy a house does it become a home, even if it was just as much a home for the people we bought it from as we hope it will be for ourselves. This is echoed in the language of retail business rooted in, as the phrase goes, home improvement: it is not “House Depot” or “House Hardware,” even though I had what I thought was a home for years without having to patronize these places much, but have had to make several trips a week ever since I bought a house. 

Taxpayer is a word that we would seem to earn once we own property, the way an author earns the modifier “bestselling” or an athlete “all star.” Which is to say, it is usually framed in terms of having reached a certain level, which allows us to claim certain rights. Renting, we might look at a thing that will affect our ability to move from place to place in a city, like public transit or the construction of roads, and shrug; what right do we have to weigh in on these things? Our lives are uncertain, lacking permanence in the public record. But once we own houses and find ourselves paying annual lump sums to the municipal government, we jump at the chance to proclaim, “I’m a taxpayer! My opinion counts!” Politicians know this, and use it to their advantage whenever they can. It's no coincidence that Rob Ford became the mayor of Toronto by proclaiming his respect for taxpayers; if his slogan had been “Respect for People Who Pay Tax,” which, by the rules of common understanding, would likely include everyone who pays provincial sales tax on their morning coffee rather than using the word “Taxpayer” to single out those who own property in the city and therefore pay property tax, chances are it wouldn’t have been so effective. 

(I have no clear answer for why so many low-income residents who rent appear to have voted for Rob Ford.)

There are other examples of this, some of which are also connected. Around elections, we tend to become Voters. In news stories about traffic, people who drive to work are called Commuters. In an amusing and revealing link, both the lingo of drugs and computing refer to us as Users. 

Labels in themselves are useful; categorization is one of the tools science uses to effectively help explain the world, and many of us have had fun with genre tags applied to music, film, literature and so on. But I like to be careful when choosing when and how to adopt certain popular definitions. I own a house, and that’s nice; I’m lucky enough to be able to afford it. But Wikipedia says that a home “is a place of residence or refuge.” (In keeping with the standards of consumer society, it then goes on to specify that, “When it refers to a building, it is usually a place in which an individual or a family can rest and store personal property.”)

I like to think that if disaster struck and I had to sell my house – or even if I lost my ability to afford permanent shelter – I’d still have a home, be it a certain neighbourhood, the city in which I live, or the country I was born in: what Wikipedia calls “the geographical area (whether it be a suburb, town, city or country) in which a person grew up or feels they belong,” or, even better, “a mental or emotional state of refuge or comfort.” In equating house with home, we further marginalize those who have trouble finding places to sleep, but are still members of our community, however hard their lot may be.

Besides, I know that, regardless of whether I own a house or sleep in a shelter, I’m still required to pay taxes on my morning coffee. 

One of my favourite songs about what we mean when we talk about home: