Other People's Houses
on gentrification, displacement and longing
I stand across from an estate agent in a little kit house ringed with barbed wire, thrown up on a pasture of yellow grass on the isle of Hoy in Orkney. The house has been done up in a hurry, with plywood cabinets and grout-spattered tiles, whitewashed, tarted up to flip quick, in the rush to gentrify Orkney.
“Houses are selling in seven minutes,” the estate agent warns as she stands in the bare kitchen, dressed in a trench coat and heels, her faux Gucci bag thrown onto the countertop with studied insouciance. Seven minutes—the same time it takes one of the Orcadian fairy-people, the Finnfolk, to row from Orkney to Norway.
Others who’ve faced the exodus of gentrification know this loss. It’s that moment you see cliched in films, where someone is hanging from the Eiffel Tower or the Washington Monument. One finger goes, and another, and another. The letting go happens all at once, and the rupture leaves a scar.
“Are you interested?” The urgency is part of the sales tactic, the delirium inherent in gentrification. Am I interested?
