Landlords, Dandelions, and Class

(In Which I Rant A Bit)

When we moved into the house where we live now, three years ago, it was very nearly spring, but not quite. We didn’t move far from where we had been—just a mile or so east and slightly north—and the biggest change I was anticipating in the move had to do with light.

The house we were moving away from had faced west, and it got a lot of afternoon sun from that direction. The landlord of that house was an absentee who didn’t have much connection to Colorado; she lived in Louisiana, where trees and water were plentiful. She was also a bit chaotic and spiteful, and not open to hearing any input from anyone. So when a branch broke off the big tree in the backyard and was hanging over the kids’ play set, and we asked her to have the branch removed, she cut the whole tree down. Doing so cost her far more than having the branch removed would have done, and it cost her perhaps 20% of the value of the property when she sold the house a few years later, since a lot without a tree is worth less than a lot with a tree in Colorado, but cutting the tree down had been her impulsive idea, and she wouldn’t hear any other alternatives. She had it cut down, a large fifty year old elm, along with an apple tree that grew beside it, so that the back yard was fully exposed to the sun. The grass never really grew again, as it was baked constantly in the summer, and there was no irrigation. It didn’t make any difference to her whether the trees shaded the house and the yard; she lived in Louisiana, and had no sense of how precious a tree can be in the high desert, and no real investment in the quality of life of us or our neighbors. She just saw the tree as a current and potential future expense.

The one thing that really grew well at that house after that was dandelions. They were hardier than the grass, and they grew through the drought and the searing sun. The neighbors hated our dandelions, or at least that’s the sense we got. There’s a powerful class consciousness associated with having dandelions in your yard, and in lawn maintenance generally. It’s one of those mostly-hidden codes that signal to some people that other people don’t really belong, or aren’t really proper. Of course there is copious literature suggesting that lawns are bad anyway, awful for the lives of all kinds of plants and animals, and that dandelions might be one of the least bad parts of them. That’s especially true in Colorado, where nothing remotely like a lawn would ever grow naturally, and where having a lawn means dumping truly shameful amounts of precious water into the ground. But the lawn is a powerful American symbol, and to the people who worship lawns, allowing dandelions in your lawn is a sign of moral failure. So we (mostly Jessa, and her mom) would be outside pulling dandelions, and we would haul a hose around the yard every spring and summer in a vain attempt to make grass grow in the dirt patches where the dandelions had been pulled up.

When we decided to move to the new house, one of the things that sold us on it was the difference in the light. When we toured it, we counted the trees. There were about sixty of them on the small city lot, ranging from small saplings to a stand of aspens to a few large and towering that sheltered most of the house and yard. And the house faced east instead of west, which meant that the light it received would be different too—mostly softer morning light, instead of the baking heat of summer afternoons. The rent was almost double what we had been paying, but so was the square footage, and the sixty trees put us over the top. We moved in not a moment too soon, about a week or two before the pandemic really set in, and just in time to make great use of all the extra space and all the extra trees. We would have struggled to do virtual school and virtual work in the small space of the old house.

But when spring arrived that year, we discovered that the dandelions had followed us. The whole front yard turned yellow, and then white with puffballs. If anything, it was worse than the old house. We were right across the street from a small city park, and it too was full of dandelions, and when the wind blew you could see the seeds coming across and sticking in our grass, like little drifts of snow. It seemed like a losing battle. We weren’t willing to spray chemicals on the lawn to kill them, because that would be expensive, destructive, and dangerous to us and anyone who lived nearby. So we (first Jessa, then both of us) sat in the grass for three straight days, digging each dandelion out by hand. Neighbors stopped by to congratulate us; apparently our house was the identified patient in the neighborhood, the problem house that always looked bad. This landlord was an absentee too, living in London, and putting nothing more than the bare minimum into the property, so the landscaping had always been ragged, at least according to the neighbors—an “eyesore.” We plucked all the dandelions up, and they sprang right back. That first year we fought a running battle. The second year they came back stronger, and we could feel the scorn from neighbors when they walked by. We pulled them, topped them, mowed it short, but nothing made much difference. Meanwhile a few mornings a week the house’s sprinkler system did its best to keep the grass alive. The grass didn’t really want to live in the desert, and it kept trying to die. The dandelions did want to live, and we kept trying to kill them.

This spring the dandelions are running rampant. We don’t have as much time to care anymore; with the pandemic at bay, there just isn’t the time to sit in the yard for days on end with a screwdriver and a small shovel and pry them out one by one. We also, still, don’t really believe in removing them, even though the social pressure to do so is strong. We know that, on balance, dandelions are adding to the lives of the birds and rabbits and foxes and bugs and worms that live around our house. But it’s hard to face the scorn (both explicit and implicit) of neighbors, who joke about the yard and assume that, because there are dandelions in it, we must be bad people or lazy people or people who just don’t care. (I am lazy, and I don’t really care, but that’s beside the point).

It all has me thinking a lot about class, in a way that goes back to the separate but related experiences of renting houses and having dandelions in the yard. We are some of the only renters in our neighborhood, much less on our street. Most everyone else there owns their homes, or will own them soon. There’s a thing that happens, when we tell someone that we are renters—a shift in tone, a need for the person to comfort us. “Well that’s ok,” they literally say, as much to themselves as to us, reassuring us both that we might still be decent folks. You can tell that they don’t really think it’s ok to rent, or at least that they have never once considered it to be an option. But if anything, renting is the only option. We make decent money—more than I thought we ever would make, if I’m honest—and there is still zero chance of us buying a house in Denver. It just won’t happen.

We pay more rent in a year than the entire amount my parents paid to buy the house I grew up in. If I adjust for inflation, the problem doesn’t get much better; we still pay more in rent every three years than they paid for the whole house in today’s dollars. To put it in a different perspective, the average house in Denver would require about 1.5 times our total annual income, just as a down payment. If we saved 20% of our income every year for ten years (impossible), we still wouldn’t really have enough for a down payment, even if home prices didn’t rise, and we would be nearing retirement age by the time we were ready to qualify for a loan for the other 80%. We’re two working professionals, and buying a home in Denver is impossible.

Our current landlord, the one in London, seems to get cheaper and more hostile as time goes on. Recently one of our bathrooms developed black mold in the ceiling, after the dishwasher overflowed (due to a bad repair by the management company) and flooded the ceiling below. They tore out the ceiling of that bathroom and the shower, and left it. 9 months later, we inquired when they planned to add back our shower and sheet rock. Never, was the answer we got back, and your rent is going up another 10%, even though your three-bathroom house is now a two-and-a-half-bathroom house, with a hole in the wall through which you can see the toilet from the laundry room. They plan to leave it torn up, with no shower, in perpetuity.

Stuff like that makes my blood boil. If folks wonder why young people (a category I still might qualify for, barely) are captivated by leftist policies and so-called “socialist” economics, this is why. None of us can afford to own anything, even with well-paying jobs and advanced degrees, and there is not much end in sight. The boundaries of class divisions are policed twice—once by the hoarding of capital by an elite upper class, and then again by recourse to the same old class markers that have held sway for decades.

The dandelions are a perfect example of that. We cannot afford to buy a house, so we rent a house, for rent payments that would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago. (The cheapest four-bedroom houses anywhere within about five miles of us go for over $4,000 a month). The houses we can rent are usually owned by someone who lives far away, managed by cost-cutting companies, and operated with the goal of extracting as much “investment” income as possible from the tenants. These houses aren’t cared for by anyone, and no one involved has any incentive to improve or maintain them in any way, so things like landscaping fall to the tenants to do on their own (as an in-kind donation to the management company and owner), or to neglect. One way you subsidize the people squeezing you as an “investment,” and the other way you become the subject of everyone else’s class biases. The dandelions become a signal that you aren’t invested in your home, when in fact they are a signal that you have been systematically barred from investing in anything.

I write this as someone with a lot of advantages that other people don’t have. Many, many people have it worse than we do. We at least have the ability to absorb the $400 a month the rent has risen in the three years we have lived here; many people can’t do that. We have the flexibility in our lives to pull the dandelions again, if we want to, and to buy the chemicals to kill them, if we wanted to take those risks and inflict that harm on the world. When someone like me feels the way I do about our economic system—that it would be better if we scrapped the whole thing and started over—we have a problem as a society.

This spring Colorado was considering a couple of changes to rental law, but it seems like they’re going nowhere. One would have let local municipalities institute rent control laws. That seems like the bare minimum to me; I am feeling much more radical about things lately. But even that failed (in a legislature controlled by Democrats). It’s hard to see how we will ever be able to afford a house in Denver, and it’s becoming harder to see how we would ever be able to afford one anywhere. The deck is just stacked against people who don’t already have a lot of wealth, either in cash or in the the form of a home they already own.

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out at the front yard. (We long since gave up on the back yard). It was mowed a few days ago, so the dandelions are only sticking up a little bit. And at least they’re covering the patch of bare dirt where the sprinkler system is broken, that the landlord won’t fix. That patch will die this summer, but for now the dandelions are helping it pass the glance test, like a bad-but-barely-adequate combover. There isn’t a patch of grass where the dandelions haven’t taken hold, and the rabbits love it (and the hawks love the rabbits), but a lot of the people who walk by take a long and accusing look at the scraggly stems and white puffs. They’re the ones who own the houses up the hill, who bought them a few decades ago for less than what we pay in rent every two or three years. They think the dandelions are our fault. I wonder if they know that I think that they’re the problem.