Startup Failure when trying to use system sshd

hello, I’m having a bit of a problem with the repo-ssh-access

I am running v1.6.2 from the archlinux community repo, so gitea is set to run under the gitea user:

/etc/gitea/app.ini:

RUN_USER = gitea

/usr/lib/systemd/system/gitea.service:

[Service]
User=gitea
Group=gitea

Now, since I want to use the system’s OpenSSH server I set ssh-root-path in /etc/gitea/app.ini

SSH_ROOT_PATH = /home/gitea/.ssh

and prepared folder in /home

total 0
drwxr-xr-x 1 root      root       42 Dec 23 15:50 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 root      root      166 Aug 26 18:02 ../
drwxrwx--- 1 gitea     gitea       0 Dec 23 15:50 gitea/

however, when I try to start the service it fails with the following error:

Dec 23 16:01:02 host.domain.example gitea[22225]: 2018/12/23 16:01:02 [...s/setting/setting.go:849 NewContext()] [E] Failed to create '/home/gitea/.ssh': mkdir /home/gitea: permission denied

maybe I’m just not seeing something, but how can there be a permission problem? The gitea user and group have rwx on the directory…