Let me qualify that. Long train rides by yourself are awesome.

But these settlements I am seeing – these neatly mapped out communities with houses all side by side, the same house over and over and over…looks like a goddamn horror film to me. Who wants to live in those? To ask the question is obviously, grossly privileged, I know. And people, especially in this financial climate, might not have much of a choice. And sure, buying a house might make much greater financial sense than years and years of renting, so who am I to judge? But it genuinely looks like the set up of a horror film to me. 

You can’t just build community. You can’t map it out on a computer and build it like lego and create a community. I feel like you can smell the staleness of it. You can sense the dead-ness. It’s so empty. Devoid. Soulless. That’s the word I am looking for. Fox Studios is the same. Or the Docklands in Melbourne. You can’t fake a vibe in an area. It has be to built over years by people who live in the area. 

The pattern starts with social housing. Cheap rent in shitty apartments that pull in the artists and the musicians and the immigrants and the students. The students bring the youthful energy. The immigrants bring the mix of cultures and food and wine and the artists bring the music and the colour. (I don’t mean that racially by the way, I mean that literally, as in the paintings and artworks.) These are the people who make the vibe. Then comes the real estate market cos the rentals are cheap and shitty but the vibe is good so the money starts to pay attention. They buy up and build up and suddenly the face of the neighbourhood is different. Then comes the bourgeoisie cos they want the vibe, but they also want their nice things, so the place gets more and more gentrified, prices go through the roof and the vibe that started it all starts to die. It gets stifled by the money. The originals get squeezed out and head elsewhere to start all over again. Collingwood did it. Fitzroy did it. Brunswick did it. St Kilda sort of did it, but they didn’t entirely get rid of its grungy, dodgy (prossy) parts. (Good for you St.Kilda…sort of?) Surry Hills (Sydney) did it. Kings Cross did it. Marrickville is in the thick of it.

Anyway the settlement I just passed was in its very early stages and it was so clearly a plan on a computer. Like some kind of ‘build a community’ video game someone was playing. The roads were paved and snaking around the neighbourhood with freshly painted lines, bet they got bonus points in the game for that, but the houses hadn’t been built yet. You could see just the rectangle of roads that actually go nowhere. The neatly square plots of land had been marked out, but without the houses they are just big, square-ish sections of brown dirt. The driveways and curbs had been paved and it looked kinda like it is all just waiting for the cardboard houses to be plonked into their plots out of thin air. The same house, the same exact distance between each driveway, the same letterboxes. I can understand the drawcard of small community living; the notion of safety, kids riding bikes in the street, knowing your neighbours, mowing each others nature strip and all that. But is that actually the reality? It just looks so sinister to me. Or have I watched too many horror films? Or is it just the most utterly glorious thing to be sitting on a train thinking about dumb stuff like this, because the only time you can think thoughts like this are when you have a bit of time and space to do so. Heaven. Thank you train ride.