verging_on_random

The ‘housing crisis’

September 3, 2007 on 9:20 am | In Uncategorized |

These are pictures of a place called Casuarina.

Casuarina didn’t exist when I moved up here 13 years ago. Now it’s a massive housing estate, growing in all directions like a malignant tumour.

I don’t know much about architecture but it seems to me that Casuarina has an eclectic mix of styles.

There’s the ‘industrial estate’ school:

The ‘Pentridge’ or ‘Stalag XIII’ school (and WTF is that all about anyway? Are they terrorist watchtowers or what?):

The ‘Stalinist dachau’ school:

The ever-popular ‘faux motel’ school:

And finally, the cute ‘Brighton Beach changing shed’ school:

Now you might think, looking at these different styles, that the place must look like a god-awful mess.

And you’d be correct.

But it doesn’t matter. You see, most of these houses, even though they’re less than five years old, are

It’s not so much a housing estate as a ginormous futures exchange: heaps of tradeable commodities sprawling in the sun so people can engage in speculative buying and selling to make capital gains.

Monday to Friday, after the builders have departed, the place is deserted. It would be an ideal set for making a movie about the after-effects of a neutron bomb or the bird flu or something. Sure a few of them are ‘houses’ in the sense that people use them to live in but quite a lot are only used as weekenders pending exchange of contracts, and a large proportion just sit there as the builders left them, blinds drawn, power disconnected, not a stick of furniture in sight. They’re like rare bottles of old wine - nobody buys them to use them for their intended purpose. They buy them so they can sell them again.

There are plenty more places like this within 50 km of where I live. They’ve kept every builder and tradesman in South East Queensland busy for years, which is why home prices around here have roughly tripled since 2000.

Any politician who wants to understand why houses are unaffordable could do a lot worse than visit Casuarina. Likewise anyone who doesn’t grasp the ramifications of a collapse in real estate prices.

Howard keeps blaming the states for housing unaffordability. I tell you what, if a state government managed to do something that actually did cause house prices to come down significantly, the screams of outrage would echo around the globe.

Because when people talk about housing affordability they don’t really want prices to come down … they just want access to cheap finance. That’s the dilemma that the Howard Government’s ridiculous tax policies have created. Governments are now locked into a system where people measure prosperity by their assets, not their incomes. And when the assets start to depreciate, it’s gunna get reeeaallly ugly for whoever happens to be in power.