Former Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was known for his quick wit. I once read a, possibly anecdotal, account of Whitlam being heckled by a member of the public, who shouted in an Australian drawl,
“Whadda ya gonna do about ‘ousing?”
Sharp as a tack, Whitlam replied, “Well, I’d add an ‘h’ for a start.”
It’s difficult to know where to start with housing in Greenland. Like other remote parts of the world, there is extremely limited housing, with particular pressure on the bigger centres, such as Nuuk and Sisimiut on the west coast and Tasiilaq on the east, as Greenlanders increasingly migrate into the ‘cities’. Few Greenlanders own their own homes. The vast majority of housing is government owned. And the open housing market is tiny and far beyond the financial reach of most Greenlanders.
So where does this leave your average person? There is, more-or-less, one option. If you are offered a job with the government, or with most companies, you will usually be offered an apartment. There is a government-run system of public housing for employees, which assigns accommodation based on the number of people in your family. For this you will pay a fair rent. But there are a whole swath of problems.
- You have no choice. When you are assigned an apartment, you can take it or leave it. If the apartment is old, small, and dark, with terrible neighbours – too bad. If it is a large, new apartment, and the rent is relatively high, but your spouse doesn’t work and your salary isn’t high enough to easily cover the rent – too bad. In these situations, most people try to swap apartments with others, but generally there aren’t many people wanting to move out of good apartments. The best chance is to swap with someone who is leaving their job, and Greenland. But this means that people legitimately waiting for a new apartment within the system, will never get one.
- If you split up with your spouse and one has to move out, it is extremely difficult to find somewhere to go. And if both manage to find an apartment through the government system (through different jobs), the system only allows for an apartment big enough to accommodate their children in one of those apartments, not both. One parent misses out.
- If you lose your job, you have to move out of your apartment, usually within a short period. And there is nowhere to go unless you find a new job.
There is also a separate government housing system. As a Greenlander, you can sign up to have a house assigned to you, regardless of employment. But in this system, reaching the top of the waiting list can take twenty years. So most students or young people live with their parents, with only the distant hope that they might one day live in their own home.
Because of the housing crisis, there are emergency shelters, where homeless people stay for, not days or weeks, as intended, but years: when there is no other choice, you would not choose to live on the street in the Arctic.
In a recent coalition agreement, the government specifically identified housing for teachers as a major issue to be addressed in improving the dire state of Greenland’s education system. As an example, a couple of years ago, a school in Qaqortoq, South Greenland, was extremely fortunate in securing two highly regarded senior teachers, who would undoubtedly raise the standard of education in their school. About a year later, both had left their positions, and Qaqortoq, because they could not find reasonable accommodation.
And even for those who have government housing, it’s not smooth sailing. A friend with permanent housing through the government system was sent one-week’s notice to vacate to another address. She received the letter a day before leaving for work travel, so ignored it, leaving Nuuk terrified at the prospect of being forcibly removed in her absence. Another friend received a letter notifying her that no maintenance requests on any apartments in Nuuk would be dealt with this year. This year!
There are plenty of reasons why things are the way they are, most of them related to money, or lack thereof. But it’s a bad system; one that will take a whole lot more than an ‘h’ to fix.
