We're adding almost another Sydney or Melbourne over the next decade, 3.7 million people.
For the 160,000 new houses per year, we'll need 400 square-km each year, or 4,000 sq-km over the decade. At least one third the total size of Greater Sydney.
How do we even fit that in?
Australia has been settled mostly on the coast, a thin band at most 50km wide, between the sea and mountains. Where all the good water and best agricultural land once was.
We might have 7+ million km2 of total land, but only a fraction is arable and we need to carefully preserve and curate our best land.
The Greens new Housing Policy is "Business as Usual", but with a stated goal of "stopping" price growth.
The Greens new Housing Policy is "Business as Usual", but with a stated goal of "stopping" price growth.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding by the Greens:
the System is working Perfectly, as it was Designed to. [ see Berwick's Central Law ]
There's very good reason that Real Estate Agents have wall posters proclaiming:
Real Estate, The Source of All Wealth.
They've never seen the market collapse, despite millions of home owners being highly leveraged, making a huge, life-defining bet on a single asset in a single asset class. This is insanely risky.
Steadily increasing house prices is a design feature of our Residential Property Market, it can't be "fixed", unless the System itself is changed.
We've got three related and simultaneous problems:
- creating mass affordable housing, ensuring anyone on the average adult wage can afford a mortgage, back to 1950's and 70's affordability with a 2x - 3x ratio of median price to avg wages.
We've got to service the backlog of unsatisfied demand plus all new arrivals. - Create this new "city", larger than any but Sydney & Melbourne, of housing somewhere people will want to live and stay, while being able to access work in major cities easily and affordably.
- We can't wreck the existing housing market, valued at over $10 Trillion-with-a-T, around 5 times our GDP or Stock Market or three times our total Superannuation savings.
Whitlam in the early 1970's understood the problem of the housing market and attempted to create a regional development pipeline, starting with Albury-Wodonga. The attempt stalled.
It doesn't take 3-6 months to build a house.
The record at Levittown was 18 houses completed in 4 hrs.
The Empire State building, over 100 floors, went up in 410 days. They installed a railway on each floor and had on-site production lines.
With today's new tools, machines, methods and machinery, it should be possible to dramatically lower build times and costs.
One critical factor is 'lowering expectations', or demands, of new home buyers.
It's a housing ladder, it's many steps to your "dream home" & lifestyle, but the most important is starting, getting onto the ladder with an entry level property you can pay off quickly and consider what next.
Residential Properties are assets, they have to also be treated as financial investments.
It makes no sense to put a $1M house on a $50k block of land, or a caravan on a $1M block.
Neither will ever sell for close to costs.
It makes no sense to put a $1M house on a $50k block of land, or a caravan on a $1M block.
Neither will ever sell for close to costs.
Properties can't be over- or under-capitalised, the value of the building has to be proportionate to the cost of the block it sits upon.
Which creates demand for large, expensive "Dream Homes" with all the inclusions, with developers pricing blocks accordingly, via what they pay for the original land, then the high cost will bleed first owners dry over time. They're not buying for their needs, but hopes & desires.
Until and unless there's total land + house packages, in attractive communities, available for $300k (3x avg earnings), there's no solution to the system that's designed to constantly push house prices skywards.
$150k doesn't buy much if built by others, but with factory assembled parts and modest DIY skills, a liveable, comfortable, efficient and individualised small house for singles and couples is entirely possible.
We just have to want to do it.
02 Aug 2024
... we know Australia will grow by around 3.7 million people in the coming decade,
[ 365,000 / yr = 1,000/day ]
400 sq-km for 160,000 houses / year= 400k ppl @ 2.5pp/house= 1k ppl/sq-km[ At same density as Eastern Suburbs of Sydney ]2.7pp / household = 365k / 2.7 = 100k houses / year1,000 pp/sq-km = 365k/1k = 365 sq-km / year= 4,000 sq-km in a decade
https://soe.dcceew.gov.au/coasts/pressures/population
Australia is an urban coastal nation.
In 2001, 85% of Australia’s population lived within 50 kilometres (km) of the coast, but by 2019, that proportion had risen to 87%.
This equates to over 22 million Australians now calling the coast home.
https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/australias-size-compared
Australia covers 7 688 287km2
Greens 2023 Housing Policy
https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2024/07/23/housing-negative-gearing-cgt
A long-held truism across the federal Parliament is that Australian voters like rising property prices so much that any-self interested politician would be silly to propose plans to curb it.
But as average income earners in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are increasingly priced out of the suburbs they grew up in, there's a growing push to shift the debate towards affordability.
Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather echoed the plight of first-home buyers in The Australian on Tuesday, calling for house price growth to be brought back in line with income.
"Our goal, our stated goal, is to stop house price growth," he said.
"So zero per cent growth to give wages a chance to catch up.
"The net effect would be a stabilisation of house prices."
Berwick, in 1996, defined the "Central Law of Improvement":
Systems deliver exactly what they're designed to deliver
Berwick, BMJ 1996
A primer on leading the improvement of systems
http://app.ihi.org/Events/Attachments/Event-2680/Document-4562/Berwick_1996_A_primer_on_leading_the_improvement.pdf
Central Law of Improvement:
Not all Change is Improvement, All Improvement is Change.
Systems deliver exactly what they're designed to deliver.
Therefore, Change The system, not actors & rules.
https://www.amazon.com/You-Want-into-Real-Estate/dp/B002KZQEU8
So, You Want to Go into Real Estate?:
The Source of All Wealth
Quarterly Essary: QE92 - November 2023
Alan Kohler
The Great Divide: Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It
https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2023/11/the-great-divide
Kohler's graphs provide definitive evidence the long-term ratio of Median House price and Average Earnings broke out in 2000.
Fuelled by Howard's changes to Capital Gains Tax, Negative Gearing and low interest rates.
A deliberate strategy of John Howard, alongside the windfall $180+B tax from the Mining building boom,
tax cuts creating a structural deficit.
He notes that unwinding the situtation back to the previous long-term ratio of 3.5 is difficult.
The closest he comes to a solution is (someone) holding house prices steady
and, assuming wage growth of 4%/year, then waiting for 20 years.
Only that's not supported by the recent decade-long stagnation of wages & ignores external shocks,
to which Australia is extremely vulnerable as a commodities
exporter:
After the party: how Australia spent its mining boom windfall
28 MAY 2012
https://apo.org.au/node/29573
"Temporary Boom, Permanent Tax cuts/Promises", Chris Richardson, 2014
19/09/2003, John Howard, on constantly increasing house prices.
https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-20920
Notes on Housing.
1. The current housing model of Everyone in One Big City is broken, the system is a major part of the problem.
2. Australia has lots of suitable land to build housing on, just very little inside existing Capitals.
- collapse in demand for our commodities
- supply chain issues
- sudden & prolonged shift in foreign exchange rates
After the party: how Australia spent its mining boom windfall
28 MAY 2012
https://apo.org.au/node/29573
The result was a windfall to our public coffers of at least $180 billion over the six years from 2002 to 2008.
"Temporary Boom, Permanent Tax cuts/Promises", Chris Richardson, 2014
19/09/2003, John Howard, on constantly increasing house prices.
https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-20920
Q: I wonder if I could ask you to respond to how you see the over heated housing market in Australia?
A: Anybody who owns a house is very happy that the value of that house has gone up, let's be quite straight about that.
I haven't found anybody in seven and a half years shake their fist at me and say
Howard I'm angry with you for letting the value of my house increase."
Q: I think house prices have doubled nationally since 1996, haven't they?
A: My point is that we have, in a sense, become the victims of our own prosperity and success.
Notes on Housing.
1. The current housing model of Everyone in One Big City is broken, the system is a major part of the problem.
2. Australia has lots of suitable land to build housing on, just very little inside existing Capitals.
We know Whitlam understood this, but a 'build it & they will come' solution didn't work.Cause is the gambling mindset, wanting to 'win big' without effort or risk.
3. We have modern industrial machines, methods and materials that can be combined to create 7-star rated houses, in a mass-customised way. [ mass produced, but individually customised ]
These can be prepackaged so they need zero or few on-site qualified tradespeople, and be modular, extensible over time, when needs must.
Upshot:
We could quickly & cheaply create large estates with low eco-footprint on desirable locations,
if we designed-in remote working, fast transport, all local services and community facilities,
with home owners able to choose between many options and customise their homes.
But, home owners have to trade in the One Big Expensive Asset mindset for 'Simple Living', start small with 'just enough'.
They have to be happy with a low-cost, mostly self-built home that's not huge & overfilled with expensive 'stuff'.
Giving up "Keeping up with 'The Jones'" and blind consumption have to be abandoned as well - the drivers of consumerism & economic growth,
in favour of a much more deliberate, thoughtful and 'conscious' approach to needs, earning and spending.
Fulfilling status & competitive needs has to be built into the fabric and design of 'intentional communities'
in a way that natural, non-judgemental, non-preachy and allows infinite expression.
We used to have weekly community dances and yearly 'Shows', where people could compete & shine - why did they even end?
How is anyone worth being paid 1,000x more than an "essential" worker, it's unjustifiable.
why are wages of $250,000/year, along with 60-80hr weeks 'A Good Thing'?
when all this money is doing is paying for excessive mortgages, expensive personal transport and "status signifiers".
Why do people need to accumulate more wealth than they can possibly spend in a lifetime?
We don't have enough volunteers providing community support, child minding, aged care & other necessary work & care.
While we pay billions victimising people receiving social support and force huge work hours on those in high-paying jobs, while 30%-50% of people are desperately seeking 'more hours'.
In the 1930's, there were predictions / projections of 10 hour weeks in the 2000's.
What happened on the way to the future, when The Select Few scored The Big Brass Ring and everyone else scrabbles around the edges?
Technology has progressed beyond the wildest dreams, into wholly new dimensions, past the 1930's imagination.
Our survival and security needs are provided by under 1% of the population, yet nobody has enough Leisure Time, unless they're on below poverty level social benefits...
How did any of this happen? Who drove it there? What values and attitudes allowed it to happen?
We have more than enough for everyone to access healthcare, be educated, housed, clothed, well nourished, to have enough work hours at good pay to feel valued and contributing, and for most / all people to do jobs they love...
It's a choice to swap "A good life for all" for "Fantastic Wealth & Income for a Few" - with downsides of stress, bad health and constant pressure.
The UBI - Universal Basic Income - as currently envisioned isn't a workable model as it asymmetrical:
- benefits only flow one way, dollars from Govt to Individuals.
A workable system has to require, enable and reward return "societal" contributions, such as:
the often overlooked, unpaid "women's work" of caring, washing/cleaning, cooking, organising and "emotional labour" needed to make houses into homes, developments into communities and the enrichment of lives & creation of meaning and purpose.
To make a sustainable future requires protecting our Democracy with Equity, Inclusion and Social Cohesion.
It's not optional.
A system based on the accumulation of wealth and privilege can only concentrate wealth, power and influence.
The limit of which / end-game is a Feudal society with slaves, plebes and a very few 'Citizens'.
No such system / society is stable under resource pressure or external challenge: the 'peasants' always revolt.
We know the lies that Libertarianism is built upon and where they must inevitably lead:
- Individual 'Freedom' without collective collaboration, trust and cooperation, the creation and curation of Public Goods,
- leads inevitably to "Failed States", where it's every man for himself and "Strong Men" (Feudal Lords) rule,
- and Justice is delivered by the sword.
There are only a few parts to this system, but all must be known & practised by everyone, all the time,
or the system can implode, as we're seeing in the USA in real time.
The Magna Carta of 1215 was just one step along this parth.
A prefab building revolution can help resolve both the climate and housing crises
January 12, 2024
https://theconversation.com/a-prefab-building-revolution-can-help-resolve-both-the-climate-and-housing-crises-220290
January 12, 2024
https://theconversation.com/a-prefab-building-revolution-can-help-resolve-both-the-climate-and-housing-crises-220290
- Ehsan Noroozinejad,
Senior Researcher, Urban Transformations Research Centre, Western Sydney University - Parisa Ziaesaeidi,
Associate Lecturer in Architecture, Western Sydney University
1. We've $3 Trillion-with-a-T in super, looking for long-term, low-risk 'good' returns.
We can afford a major building program.
Getting dwelling unit prices down to $100K should be easy, not just possible.
That $1T buys 10 million new dwellings, enough for another 15-20 million people :)
And would give stable employment to a huge workforce for 10-25 years.
2. Australia has enough land to build on, just no in SYD/MEL or the other Capitals.
3. The suggestion of "string of pearls" developments of 10,000-25,000 dwellings each is exactly right.
It also requires building the underlying transport infrastructure to move people into/out of cities at peak hour.
Plus with proper broadband and local shared work centres, solves many problems.
4. We know the most efficient and fastest way to build.
It was done here after WW-II, throwing up large immigration facilities.
5. We need to return to small houses & apartments, coupled with large open spaces and shared facilities nearby.
Housing without 'Communities' doesn't work.
We've seen this in Adelaide: our parents & their generation created communities, not dormitories.
6. With modern technology, we aren't locked into one single design.
We can do mass customisation for the same price with CAD and direct digital cutting & fabrication.
7. We've mentioned modern materials - specifically SIP.
Designing around those & modern industrial techniques would increase productivity 10x at least.
And reduce lead times and delays
8. Shipping containers are great for many things, but 8'x8' is not a suitable or sustainable living space for more than a week.
9. With increasing numbers and scale of natural disasters, we need two new things:
rapid response 'instant' housing to create on-site temporary accommodation
flood and fire-proof housing solutions, preferably as whole 'villiages'
Empire State Building
https://www.esbnyc.com/about
From the start of construction to modern day fame, the story of the Empire State Building is one you'll never forget.
Intended to be the world's first 100+ story building, construction of the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930.
Construction was completed in a record-breaking 1 year and 45 days.
Levittown
https://dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE-84.html#53233
This was 50 years or more ago, should cause people now to reflect on why we can't do better now...
The story of Levittown on Long Island is our favorite example of how people acting in their own interests can effect a positive redesign of a community that has suffered from extreme master planning.
The first Levittown--once called Island Trees --was a postwar innovation in low-cost housing in which a potato patch on Long Island was turned into the first mass-produced housing tract.
After the foundations were laid, specialized crews descended on each lot, one after another, so fast that 18 houses were completed in the 8 AM to noon shift--we could say they used an especially brutal and efficient master plan.
Many lamented the approach. Peter Bacon Hales, art historian from the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote of the criticism:
The accusations against Levittown from the first focused on its relentless homogeneity, the cramped quarters of its interiors, and the raw, unfinished quality of its landscape.
Architects, artists, and even some computer scientists have used Levittown as an example of how modernism--the belief in reductionism and the ultimate value of the machine--can lead to what some call the deathlike morphology of late-20th- and early-21st-century life, the unimaginably dulling effect of sameness and inhumanity on ordinary lives.
Postwar Americans needed affordable housing near their jobs to raise the first wave of baby-boomers, not unaffordable aesthetics.
The houses were snapped up while trucks hauling tools and pulling trailers carrying bulldozers drove away toward their next project.
The architects, designers, builders, and developers did not care to learn from their projects, and the United States experienced an unending string of housing projects since then that imposed a planned living experience on people bent more on living than on planning.
Levittown relied on wood framing, but many other projects cast their designs literally in concrete.
The Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis won architectural awards in the mid-1950s for low-cost housing design.
But the two complexes were simply steel and concrete high-rise warrens in the mold of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who said,
a house is a machine to live in
And also:
the design of cities is too important to be left to the citizens
Seventeen years after being completed, the Pruitt-Igoe complex was demolished, creating a vacant lot still mostly vacant, signaling the beginning of the postmodern era.
So in 1951, the designers of Levittown watched as families poured in to begin life in the carefully planned and constructed warrens relentlessly devised according to modernist principles of machine love.
Nature and the Levittown community did not care about the master plan:
The bulldozed landscape began to sprout trees and shrubs, and over a period of years, as economic realities changed,
the community developed a sense of innovation and its inhabitants a control of their own destinies.
Not being trained as architects or builders did not faze them.
They thought locally and acted locally.
The community, through small acts of repair, transformed a homogenized and orderly Levittown into a place deserving the name Island Trees.
Through customization, additions, remodels, landscaping, disorder, the community, acting as a multitude or aggregation of individuals regarded as not individually important--as a mob--made Levittown over.
Peter Bacon Hales wrote the following about the transformation of Levittown:
The raw, new quality of the landscape, too, didn't seem so awful to new renters and (a little later) owners, who knew that the trees and grass would quickly grow,and who understood the Levitt salesman's pitch promising opportunities to personalize the interior and exterior of your Levittown house.Life [magazine] ran a contest, seeking the best-decorated Levittown house, and the winner was a rather startling red-themed Mandarin-Revival Sino-Asian extravaganza.Over time, Levittown houses changed character, as their occupants rose in status and in economic wealth,and as families expanded and community standards of innovation and growth trickled from the home-improvement seminars at the Community Center and later the High School,out into the Saturday projects and summer vacation plans of Levittown residents.Today's heterogeneous Levittown is a testimony to the resilience of the community ...
Levittown is not much different from many towns:
The people who live there have inherited its earlier form from people who are gone and whose cares and requirements are perhaps passe.The specifications, needs, and criteria for the evolving town are being invented community wide on-the-fly.
https://dbr.abs.gov.au/compare.html?lyr=gccsa&rgn0=1GSYD&rgn1=3GBRI
Estimated resident population - year ended 30 June 2023
Data available for years: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 Description 2023 (Greater Sydney) 2023 (Greater Brisbane) 2023 (Australian Capital Territory) Estimated resident population (no.) 5 450 496 2 706 966 466 566 Population density (persons/km2) 440.7 170.9 197.9 Imputed Area 12 367 km2 15 839 km2 2 357 km2
Greater Sydney, data
https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/guides/city-at-a-glance
Greater Sydney, data
https://profile.id.com.au/australia/about?WebID=260
https://dbr.abs.gov.au/region.html?lyr=gccsa&rgn=1GSYD
Estimated resident population - year ended 30 June Description 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 Estimated resident population (no.) 5 190 353 5 256 836 5 295 529 5 261 801 5 303 794 5 450 496 Population density (persons/km2) 419.6 425 428.1 425.4 428.8 440.7 Estimated resident population - males (no.) 2 580 829 2 615 130 2 633 132 2 615 806 2 636 618 ---- Estimated resident population - females (no.) 2 609 524 2 641 706 2 662 397 2 645 995 2 666 118 ---- Median age - males (years) 35.3 35.5 35.8 36.3 36.3 ---- Median age - females (years) 36.8 37 37.4 37.9 38 ---- Median age - persons (years) 36 36.2 36.6 37.1 37.1 ---- Working age population (aged 15-64 years) (no.) 3 502 491 3 539 337 3 549 127 3 503 529 3 530 763 ---- Working age population (aged 15-64 years) (%) 67.5 67.3 67 66.6 66.6 ----
https://dbr.abs.gov.au/compare.html?lyr=lga&rgn0=11450&rgn1=17200
Estimated resident population - year ended 30 June Description 2023 (Sydney) 2023 (North Sydney) Estimated resident population (no.) 231 086 72 014 Population density (persons/km2) 8 662.6 6 864.4 Description 2023 (Sydney - Parramatta) 2023 (Sydney - Inner West) Estimated resident population (no.) 514 925 314 776 Population density (persons/km2) 3 162.3 4 876.5 https://dbr.abs.gov.au/compare.html?lyr=sa4&rgn0=118&rgn1=122 Estimated resident population - year ended 30 June Description 2023 (Sydney - Eastern Suburbs) 2023 (Sydney - Northern Beaches) Estimated resident population (no.) 273 139 267 921 Population density (persons/km2) 4 731 1 053.9 Household composition - Occupied private dwellings - Census Data available for years: 2011, 2016, 2021 Description 2021 (Sydney - Eastern Suburbs) 2021 (Sydney - Northern Beaches) Lone person households (no.) 30 608 21 056 Group households (no.) 8 049 2 990 Family households (no.) 64 362 70 330 Total households (no.) 103 014 94 377 Average household size (no. of persons) 2.3 2.7
https://www.parliament.wa.gov.au/WebCMS/webcms.nsf/content/facts-and-figures-1939
Total population was 6,907,078, on 30 September 1938.
1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2001
https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/0b82c2f2654c3694ca2569de002139d9
In 1901 Australia's population numbered 3,788,123
Seven million 1939 Menzies 'forgotten ppl' Nine million 1954 Boomers, mid-pint Fourteen million 1976 Gough Nineteen million 1999 Millenium, Howard CGT
current 2024, 27M
1301.0 - Year Book Australia, 2012
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Main+Features802012
