One thought on “The Sky Is Falling… But So Are Rents”

  1. Martin you are doing a great job. Keep it up.

    But, the shortage is in affordable housing.

    A person on $716 per week (national minimum wage) should spend no more than 2.5 times his annual income on housing. ie $93,080 because that is an affordable proportion of ones income to devote to that purpose. One needs to finance the clothing, food, transport, communications, education, health etc as well.

    That sort of housing doesn’t exist and can’t exist when the cost of the land portion plus the structure is a minimum of $300K….how much more on the outskirts of Sydney?

    Solution is to enable farmers to farm people by renting their land to people siting a transportable house on their land.

    Get the house size down to 60 square meters that is the size of the average house in the UK.

    Trans portability enables the land to be readily re-purposed as the population grows and a city spreads. It also enables people to move their structures to more desirable locations or perhaps where employment is available.

    I can construct a two bedroom 60 square meter house using as a frame, a 40 foot open top shipping container that can be slipped on and off a tilt tray truck, sits on four bricks on site, can be equipped with a composting toilet, fully insulated and clad with timber externally for less than 100K, in a factory situation perhaps less than $70K. I am a 76 year old grandfather. I have built seven such houses in my spare time in the last four years.

    At the moment, in order to afford a house the partner needs to get a job, people sign their lives away in servicing a mortgage that only enables them to live in an instant urban ghetto, and the kids come home to an empty house after school.

    The problem lies in town planning provisions relating to zoning and the rigid control of land use. Look to Tokyo and Houston.

    Hence the tiny house movement. But where can you put them?

    A related problem is the building laws that insist that an owner builder can indulge only once in every five years……that makes building a closed shop. It’s time to break down that government facilitated protectionism and put the initiative back into the hands of the young and needy.

    Harry Dent suggests that its during the recession that people are forced to innovate. That can’t happen in the housing industry in Australia without the sort of pressure that people like you can put on politicians.

    By the way: Climate change and the Global warming movement is a con. See my blog at: https://reality348.wordpress.com/ There is no Carbon Pollution Effect: The Proof

    The waste of resources devoted to sorting out a problem that doesn’t exist is potentially ruinous. Civilization as we know it is built on despatchable, reliable and above all, cheap energy. That means coal. We have more than enough for ourselves, India and China all combined.

    It’s going to take some courage to put the greens back into their box.

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