Why in America parents should not provide housing for children
'07.09.2019'
Source: Obozrevatel
Hopeless gloom. When an American guy or girl graduates from school, they go to college and leave for the hostel. Unlearned, they go to work and rent their housing. Parents can pay tuition, very expensive, the price is comparable to the price of a good home. But providing housing for an adult healthy working person is unheard of. You must be raised and taught, and then yourself, no one owes anything. And everyone understands this.
It happens that grown up working children live with their parents. But at the same time they pay for the room as for rental housing at the market price. And public opinion believes that once living with parents means a loser, a failure, is not able to earn a separate apartment of its own, writes Irina Zorkina for Obozrevatel.
The golden rule: my roof is my laws, if you live in my house, observe it. Whether you are at least a son, at least someone. Don't go there, don't turn on the music in the living room, don't bring guests, don't open the garage in the middle of the night. Young people try to find their own apartment at the first opportunity and live as they want, to be independent. Even in poor immigrant families, children, having studied, move out and rent their own housing.
To bring a husband or wife to the parental home is simply impossible, unheard of. If you are not able to earn your own rent, then you have no right to marry, you are not yet an adult, not independent. Can't provide for yourself completely, and if necessary, your husband and child? - it's too early for you to get married, your personal life is your own business. Why on earth should parents provide you with this at the expense of their comfort? Parents owe you only your health and education, but got on your feet, is able to earn - that's it, you are on your own. Parents will help, of course, in the event of a crisis, but they are not obliged to do this, and you have no right to expect or demand this from them.
And in Russia, it is believed that parents should provide children with apartments. And the children think that they are supposed to.
One friend read the story of an old nomenklatura that he inherited a huge apartment in the center from the Soviet government, where he lived with his wife, daughter, son, husband, daughter, and son's wife, and grandchildren. After the death of his wife, he agreed to be traded with the children, stayed in a two-bedroom apartment, then the son divorced, you need a separate dwelling, again the pope agreed to be traded — he stayed in odnushku on the outskirts.
And now sometimes I hear from my acquaintances who stayed in Moscow: they registered a son-in-law, well, he is not a Muscovite, well, my daughter needs to arrange a personal life, and I look after my grandson, but this is nothing, daddy has already died, and Mom’s not long left, and that's the apartment will be free, then I will live separately. Or older parents leave for the country, live there all the year round, and leave the Moscow apartment to the children. They also need to arrange a personal life! And what about, and our parents also did, we bought apartments, or left our own, and themselves in odnushku.
In my youth, this problem did not take me, it seemed - well, everyone lives like that. My friends, Muscovites, who were not supposed to have a dormitory at the university, found jobs as janitors and stokers at the housing office, lived in the back rooms, in the boiler rooms, or the closets in the dirty drunken communal apartments were rented. But apart from the parents, independently and independently.
For the first time, I realized the horror of Moscow generation apartments when I started working as a lawyer in 1988. Especially one woman remembered because she was the first such client. Modest, calm, came to the consultation, it is clear that the money is very small, and she will pay them by saving on food or clothing. She did not complain, did not cry, did not blame anyone. She came in the hope that a lawyer could help her with something.
She lived in a one-child or two-wife with a son, a son grew up, married a non-Muscovite, a child was born, a daughter-in-law turned the life of her mother-in-law into a real hell, in fact, squeezed her from the world, and where should she go?
I couldn’t do anything for her, the law between the ancient community and the new capitalism did not protect her in any way, she didn’t have any money for the exchange, and she calmly rejected the option to accuse her daughter-in-law or son of beating. I still remember this disgusting feeling of anger and complete impotence from injustice. She wanted the best way for her son to be happy, prescribed a daughter-in-law - and signed the verdict to herself. After making sure that I can’t do anything for her, she calmly put money on the table for the consultation, politely said goodbye and left. I sat stunned. Only five minutes later she caught herself, ran, caught up with her and returned the money. That's all I could do for her. And then she finally cried. Silently took the money, nodded and quickly left.
And then I heard such stories almost every day. Being a family lawyer in Moscow meant (and probably means now) being an expert in housing law. And this right in the Russian Federation is completely ugly, perekorezhennoe, hybrid, unviable, unfair and brings very, very many troubles to almost every family, destroys the relationship between spouses, between parents and children.
What is there destroys! He creates a relationship !!! Here is my one-sided impression, professional deformation as they say.
That there are no other relationships in families, except for relations in relation to the apartment. Apartment, living space, square meters - this is the most important focus of the average Moscow family. Its basis and reason. Yes Yes. That's it.
Not love and mutual care creates a family, but square meters and who owns them. Or love and care are expressed in square meters, voluntarily transferred, purchased, donated in exchange for what? Hopefully that they will love and appreciate, they will be grateful. Or from such an old-fashioned communal feudal sense of duty: our parents provided us with housing, worked all their lives for an apartment, and we also have to do everything we can for our children at the expense of our peace. comfort, well-being.
And grown children - fell in love, met, it's time to get married - and where to live? Ah, at my mother's, oh, at my grandmother's, oh, here's my mother’s aunt, single, she’s going to die soon, and then we’ll live as our home.
And mom, tired of being an involuntary participant in relationships in a young family, agrees to exchange. Although she herself grew up in this apartment and does not want to leave this area anywhere. For her, this is a tragedy of life, but it is simply impossible to leave everything as it is, young people need to live! And my mother expects that the young will be grateful to her, at least to visit on holidays, to come for birthdays! And they have no time, they have their own life, work-children, they no longer need their mother, now the main thing is not to interfere with life and not endure the brain. They are already at the next stage of relations with their mother: wait until they die and leave the apartment for the child. There will be only one child in the family, there are no more apartments for the second. Dad? And, dad left the family a long time ago, acted very nobly, did not waste time. His new woman's grandmother died near VDNKh, we were all lucky. No, you don't have to count on my father's apartment, there is also a child, and, of course, it would be possible to give birth to a second.
Sound familiar, huh? Take any Moscow family, and in order to understand the relationship in it, the connections and the reasons why these two are, why there are so many children, to see the whole alignment - just look, who owns what, who got what from whom, and who shines what in the sense of the death of grandfather-uncle-aunt.
Under Soviet rule, apartments were “given” for faithful service and sober behavior. As in the times of serfdom, the tsar granted dachas, villages, and the master distributed it to the peasants. For faithful service and obedience. And the peasant had to build a hut for his son and separate it. Or live with sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. This submissive communal communal mentality survived Russian capitalism and flopped back after the revolution, calling itself socialism. Then came Perestroika, but a free market is impossible in a country where a stubborn, hard-working and talented man without a penny cannot compete with a lazy person who inherited three Moscow apartments from grandmothers and aunts.
A girl with a Moscow apartment is a bride with a rich dowry, it is much easier for her to find a husband. But how to be sure that he chose her and not his grandmother's apartment in a good area - two stops from the metro?
Grandma is already under eighty, she is not eternal, and you can wait. How do you protect a Muscovite guy from a predator from the province who came to conquer Moscow, in the piggy bank which has a given program since childhood: to find an apartment in a good place, and the fool that is registered in it can be patient for a couple of years?
I have no answers, I know everything about low Moscow salaries and expensive housing. I just have so many years never cease to be amazed and indignant at human psychology. People remained mentally to live in a peasant community, in a serfdom state, in which there is no real right to private property. Your housing can never be yours, because you did not earn it in an honest market for yourself and your family, and you were given it. Dali. If lucky. Little depends on you, on your ability to earn.
And they didn't give it to you personally, but to your parents. They gave, they gave, they gave ... You didn't buy, your parents didn't buy, they were given. They gave you extra meters too, extra room, and you think that it belongs to you. And your parents - they think so too, that's why they will exchange.
Or you do not marry, do not marry. Or you will wait until your grandmother dies, aunt, mom, dad ... And only then will you be really happy, and your wife and children too ... Although mom is sorry, of course.
God, how awful!
I see no way out. How can people be free and happy if they live from childhood in the understanding that love is a bargaining chip, it is sold and bought for square meters, the love of a husband, wife, parents and children, and to create your own family, you have to wait, until someone close to die ???
