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House Prices
Okay... I think we all agree, it's gotten a bit silly. When a house in Noble Park, almost 20km from Melbourne, is worth a quarter-million, where 9 years ago it was worth fifty-seven thousand, something is seriously wrong with the system.
Now this price rise may be good for Shaz and I, the house is worth approximately five times what we paid for it, but we both care less about that than we do about other people wanting to buy homes. We know how we would have struggled if Sharon hadn't bought her place when she did, and we can't help but feel for other people. Plus, if nothing else, we'd like it if in future, our kids could afford to buy their own homes.
The government wants couples to have kids, John Howard wants everyone to have a quarter-acre block. How are people supposed to manage this, exactly? If both parents need to work full-time to even have a hope of paying off their mortgage, how are they going to afford kids? Child care and the like costs a bloody fortune! And not everyone has parents that are capable or desirable as an option to looking after the grandkids.
Oh, people will find a way, but something needs to happen to reduce housing costs if you really want all this to happen in a way that allows for a decent quality of life.
Personally I think one of the big problems is that people and businesses are too tied to the capital cities. People have to head into town to work, rather than having other hubs. There are lots of people in Dandenong who work in the city, because that's where the work is. It was cheaper to buy a house at Dandenong than closer in, so the public transport has had to deal with more commuters, the public have to deal with longer travel times, more time away from home, their partners, their kids... Though of course now people are buying out at Pakenham and beyond, because that's all they can hope to afford, and spending even longer on PT or on the road.
I remember growing up, one of the reasons we moved fairly often was because dad would sell up and buy a new house closer to his job, which would change from time to time. The rule of thumb was that a half hour trip was the maximum. More than that just took too much of your day. In Melbourne, there are many people who have 90 minute journeys because they can't afford to be closer. If both parents have to work, have to spend more than a hour a day traveling, one of them is effectively working to cover day care costs, they are both getting home tired and having to deal with the needs of their children and their own needs in the few short hours left.
This is not a way for the majority of our working population to live.
I remember growing up around the lower class families that were a part of our socio-economic group, and we all had a dream. The dream when I was growing up was to have what the middle class families had - a holiday home. To all but the lowest levels of society (and remember, my family had times we paid gas bills over light bills because it meant we could cook and have warmth, and we still didn't consider ourselves too badly off) the idea of owning your own home was do-able. The real dream was the holiday home. This was usually all done on a single wage.
Now your middle classes can only hope to be able to pay off their $400,000+ bank loans before retirement. That's the extent of their goals in this regard. And in all likelihood, in their retired years, they will have to look after the grandkids, because it's only by both working that their own children can afford a home.
What's scariest, compared to a lot of places, we're still 'The Lucky Country'. And in a land that continues to slavishly and foolishly ape the United States, a country that has already shown itself to be on the downward slide socially, morally, and politically, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen.
Mitch
I've know Mitch for quite a while now. He's a massive bloke, 6'3", arms as think as my legs... I always forget how big he is until I see him in a photo next to me. He has the same problem.
I got to know Mitch while working at Alternate Worlds, he was one of my regular customers. As time went on he started coming out the back to talk to me in my office for hours at a time about girl problems. I used to give him the most helpful advice imaginable, "Get over it," but he kept coming back. The day I knew that Mitch was a kindred spirit was the day during a conversation when Sons of Steel got mentioned. We were both blown away, not only that the other person knew the film, but that we both loved it so much.
Mitch is a hard person to write about here, because though I love the guy, it's harder to find specifics to point to about why. He's just an all-round great bloke.
Oh we don't always get on. We've butted heads on occasion, as most friends do. Having traveled with him, I'd be shy to do something like the Nullarbor trip with him, given how the last time we were in a car together for several days it got to the point where he started baiting me in full knowledge that I was genuinely ready to kick him out of the car and leave him at the side of the road. It's one of the reasons why I'm very careful who I travel with - if Mitch and I were ready to kill each other, there are many other people where I'd end up coming back and saying, "No, they decided to take the bus here, instead... They were fine when I last saw them, honest. Golly, what do you mean they never arrived?"
One of the things to admire about Mitch is that when he wants something, he just goes for it. Having seen booklaunches at cons, he decided he'd like one - they looked like fun. That meant he needed a book. Well, he wasn't going to write one, so he got all his friends to write stories, do art, and edit the bloody thing, but still had his name and face on the cover.
It was a good book, and it was a good launch, too!
He co-ran Continuum 4 with Mondy and did a fine job. His design work for the cons (and for the Mitch? t-shirts that compliment his books) has also been marvelous. His attitude, and he's right, is that most con t-shirts look crappy. People want something stylish, with a cool logo. He only designs things he'd be happy to be seen wearing down the street. I remember artist Nick Stathopoulos commenting that when he's wearing one of the t-shirts Mitch put together, he feels like he's in designer-wear - he feels cool.
And that's the thing about Mitch. He's one of the biggest, most lovable dags I know, but he's also very cool.
I often say having Mitch in my life keeps me young. We're free to talk crap and when we're around each other, the crap comes easy. Together we've launched more short-lived, badly thought-out ideas than most people have had in a lifetime - it doesn't matter that they went nowhere, we had fun. In the times when we've done wrestling stuff together, I've always been worried about hurting him, he's never worried about hurting me, which in a strange way I appreciate. I still recall the SwanCon video where we did multiple takes of Mitch hitting me in the head with a frying pan... he never held back and every take features him giggling as I hit the floor.
How can I not love a man like that?
Okay... I think we all agree, it's gotten a bit silly. When a house in Noble Park, almost 20km from Melbourne, is worth a quarter-million, where 9 years ago it was worth fifty-seven thousand, something is seriously wrong with the system.
Now this price rise may be good for Shaz and I, the house is worth approximately five times what we paid for it, but we both care less about that than we do about other people wanting to buy homes. We know how we would have struggled if Sharon hadn't bought her place when she did, and we can't help but feel for other people. Plus, if nothing else, we'd like it if in future, our kids could afford to buy their own homes.
The government wants couples to have kids, John Howard wants everyone to have a quarter-acre block. How are people supposed to manage this, exactly? If both parents need to work full-time to even have a hope of paying off their mortgage, how are they going to afford kids? Child care and the like costs a bloody fortune! And not everyone has parents that are capable or desirable as an option to looking after the grandkids.
Oh, people will find a way, but something needs to happen to reduce housing costs if you really want all this to happen in a way that allows for a decent quality of life.
Personally I think one of the big problems is that people and businesses are too tied to the capital cities. People have to head into town to work, rather than having other hubs. There are lots of people in Dandenong who work in the city, because that's where the work is. It was cheaper to buy a house at Dandenong than closer in, so the public transport has had to deal with more commuters, the public have to deal with longer travel times, more time away from home, their partners, their kids... Though of course now people are buying out at Pakenham and beyond, because that's all they can hope to afford, and spending even longer on PT or on the road.
I remember growing up, one of the reasons we moved fairly often was because dad would sell up and buy a new house closer to his job, which would change from time to time. The rule of thumb was that a half hour trip was the maximum. More than that just took too much of your day. In Melbourne, there are many people who have 90 minute journeys because they can't afford to be closer. If both parents have to work, have to spend more than a hour a day traveling, one of them is effectively working to cover day care costs, they are both getting home tired and having to deal with the needs of their children and their own needs in the few short hours left.
This is not a way for the majority of our working population to live.
I remember growing up around the lower class families that were a part of our socio-economic group, and we all had a dream. The dream when I was growing up was to have what the middle class families had - a holiday home. To all but the lowest levels of society (and remember, my family had times we paid gas bills over light bills because it meant we could cook and have warmth, and we still didn't consider ourselves too badly off) the idea of owning your own home was do-able. The real dream was the holiday home. This was usually all done on a single wage.
Now your middle classes can only hope to be able to pay off their $400,000+ bank loans before retirement. That's the extent of their goals in this regard. And in all likelihood, in their retired years, they will have to look after the grandkids, because it's only by both working that their own children can afford a home.
What's scariest, compared to a lot of places, we're still 'The Lucky Country'. And in a land that continues to slavishly and foolishly ape the United States, a country that has already shown itself to be on the downward slide socially, morally, and politically, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen.
Mitch
I've know Mitch for quite a while now. He's a massive bloke, 6'3", arms as think as my legs... I always forget how big he is until I see him in a photo next to me. He has the same problem.
I got to know Mitch while working at Alternate Worlds, he was one of my regular customers. As time went on he started coming out the back to talk to me in my office for hours at a time about girl problems. I used to give him the most helpful advice imaginable, "Get over it," but he kept coming back. The day I knew that Mitch was a kindred spirit was the day during a conversation when Sons of Steel got mentioned. We were both blown away, not only that the other person knew the film, but that we both loved it so much.
Mitch is a hard person to write about here, because though I love the guy, it's harder to find specifics to point to about why. He's just an all-round great bloke.
Oh we don't always get on. We've butted heads on occasion, as most friends do. Having traveled with him, I'd be shy to do something like the Nullarbor trip with him, given how the last time we were in a car together for several days it got to the point where he started baiting me in full knowledge that I was genuinely ready to kick him out of the car and leave him at the side of the road. It's one of the reasons why I'm very careful who I travel with - if Mitch and I were ready to kill each other, there are many other people where I'd end up coming back and saying, "No, they decided to take the bus here, instead... They were fine when I last saw them, honest. Golly, what do you mean they never arrived?"
One of the things to admire about Mitch is that when he wants something, he just goes for it. Having seen booklaunches at cons, he decided he'd like one - they looked like fun. That meant he needed a book. Well, he wasn't going to write one, so he got all his friends to write stories, do art, and edit the bloody thing, but still had his name and face on the cover.
It was a good book, and it was a good launch, too!
He co-ran Continuum 4 with Mondy and did a fine job. His design work for the cons (and for the Mitch? t-shirts that compliment his books) has also been marvelous. His attitude, and he's right, is that most con t-shirts look crappy. People want something stylish, with a cool logo. He only designs things he'd be happy to be seen wearing down the street. I remember artist Nick Stathopoulos commenting that when he's wearing one of the t-shirts Mitch put together, he feels like he's in designer-wear - he feels cool.
And that's the thing about Mitch. He's one of the biggest, most lovable dags I know, but he's also very cool.
I often say having Mitch in my life keeps me young. We're free to talk crap and when we're around each other, the crap comes easy. Together we've launched more short-lived, badly thought-out ideas than most people have had in a lifetime - it doesn't matter that they went nowhere, we had fun. In the times when we've done wrestling stuff together, I've always been worried about hurting him, he's never worried about hurting me, which in a strange way I appreciate. I still recall the SwanCon video where we did multiple takes of Mitch hitting me in the head with a frying pan... he never held back and every take features him giggling as I hit the floor.
How can I not love a man like that?
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Only thing is, our pay rates were 20% less, largely on the back of the cost of living supposedly being 20% less. With housing prices suddenly shooting up the major cost differential over here is gone. I bet pay rates haven't caught up yet.
I see one of the problems with housing here in Perth is because of the "Everybody wants a quater acre block" mindset, there is little to no medium to high density housing, and what there is, tends to be "slum" housing. (there are rare exceptions). People expect to get a quarter acre block, so they don't look at the alternatives.
Perth covers the same physical area as Sydney. Perth has 1.4M people. Sydney has 4.1M people. See a problem yet?
Public transport gets described as a "joke" here, yet has to cover stupidly large distances for stupidly small numbers of people. They'd be better running mini busses on many of the routes.
No Cable TV here. It's not economic to lay it. (And yes, the tried. There are a handful of suburbs wired up, but the rollout just stopped)
Fibre optic rollout is just not going to happen for home users for the above reasons.
...and yet you Eastern Staters still make jokes about us Perthites being dense...
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Even if you do already own a place (or have a mortgage on one), it just makes the next move more expensive. Yet the papers over here regularly crow about increasing property values like it's a good thing.
Still, I suspect we haven't yet reached London levels, where the median house price is more than six times the median household income. (try comparing that to the 3x multiplier most banks would rightly balk at).
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Its a way to make it look like there is economic growth when there is little - a way of wasting good economic conditions on something that isn't actually productive.
Its a driver of economic inequality. The Gen Yers are screwed, and so is the poor half of my generation. Suddenly, owning your own home has become something well off people do, not everyone. The rich are getting much richer, the poor much worse off in real terms.
And its a way to set the economy up for disaster. If a recession comes along, heavily leveraged property investments are one of the things that most quickly becomes unsustainable as rental income disappears.
All of which adds up to a good explanation of why its typical Howard government policy.
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When I bought, I made a number of choices that limited where I bought:
I ended up getting a small unit in Mitcham. It cost me $245,000, plus stamp duty and so on. Big enough for me on my own, but not anybody's dream home - it's too small to hold much (I'd be very surprised if it was even ten squares overall). This to me is an advantage; I'm too liable to accumulate cruft if I have space to store it in.
A quarter acre block is not sustainable in the long term; there simply isn't enough land (unless we build our cities in the middle of the desert, with all the problems that entails). There's no question in my mind that our society as a whole needs to re-evaluate the things we consider to be "self evident", and the result of that re-evaluation needs to reflect the need for our society to be sustainable.
I'm actually starting to debate whether I'd be better off renting than owning, but that's a whole other kettle of fish; I'm not about to make that move unless I need to move away from the area I'm currently in, or my finances blow up spectacularly.
(sorry for the double comment; I stuffed the HTML the first time. Gah.)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2007-01-08 10:08 am (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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1. People's aspirations. My first house had just four rooms including the bathroom, yet most display homes aimed at the new home buyers have four bedrooms. They want to buy better houses than the ones their parents owned and want to do it straight away.
2. Easy Credit. Banks (and the credit factories that they lend to) will lend a lot more than they used to and with little or no deposit in most cases. The more people can borrow, the more they will spend. In Perth the mining boom is pushing up prices becasue there is more money available, not because the houses all of a sudden became 20% better.
3. Negative Gearing. This particular piece of middle class welfare makes owning rental properties very attractive, particularly when the market is booming. There is nothing wrong with the principle of deducting operating costs from income, but our tax laws allow you to offset the losses against income that is totally unrelated. Ironically the more the tax rates are reduced (to the benefit of the middle class) the less attractive this becomes.
The first home buyers will always lose when pitted against the rental property types with spare cash and home equity to borrow against. Unfortunately if you make owning rental properties less attractive then the cost of rent goes up as the supply of rental properties dries up.
Currently a rental property in Melbourne gives a rough return of 5% on your money by way of rent. There are plenty of better investments out there, it is only the capital growth and tax concessions that make it worthwhile. So if you cut the tax concessions or artificially limited the growth in prices in some way then the investors will want a better return by way of rents. Even a 1% increase in the rate of return (from 5% to 6%) would require a 20% increase in rent. Maybe some of those renters could take advantage of stagnant prices to buy into the market, but those remaining would be hurt.
It would take some very careful reforms to both credit provision and tax laws to keep a lid on prices and I don't think this is likely under the Libs. As much as they want to be about families the fact is that money comes first. H
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I was in my mid-40s before I got a house and it was because my partner had the deposit. But it is nice having one and the backyard (smallish) is great, too. Owning is more hassle in some ways but moving every couple of years when you have so much stuff is worse
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****
I've had Eastern States take the piss out of me for WA things (our shopping hours mainly).
And if you want to hear the mother of all 'the Eastern Staters are against us' theory nuts, talk to my Dad. He gets pissed that WA supposedly brings in a lot of money, but doesn't get much back from the government.
When ever there was a competition on TV, for example, he'd get himself worked up over the lack of WA winners, as most of them would always come from NSW and Vic. Never mind that those two states have most of the population in the country and statistically there should be more winners from there.
There has been a bit of a kerfulal with the reality TV show now - with the first Big Brother there were a lot of people over hear that reckon that Sarah 'bunny ears' woman was robbed because her fan base was in Perth and missed out on voting time because the voting line hours were created with the east coast in mind and therefore shut 3 hours early in WA. And I kept getting Australian Idol spoilers on ninemsn.com.au because they wouldn't take the time difference in when posting results...
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Housing
I do agree that the banks even then were willing to lend a lot more than I was interested in, and I had been lucky in previous years that I'd managed to save a significant deposit.
My place isn't tiny, but it isn't huge either, it's a good size for me (2 bedroom 1 bath) and possibly could fit another person in it theoretically. It's also got low energy requirements which I am glad of from both an environmental and financial viewpoint.
I have no interest in getting a bigger place. But then I do acknowledge that I'm not exactly mainstream in a lot of my views.
As to the East/West divide, I can't really complain about the Eastern fans not coming over as the only Eastern con I've gone to is Worldcon in Melbourne.
And yes, I've liked what I've seen of Mitch, and I'd say that even if I didn't share a birthday with him (26th yes?)
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:D
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In a matter of paragraphs, you've summed up everything that Kerry and I have had to painstakingly explain to both sets of parents plus may other friends. Tehy say "are you considering buying?" as if it's something achievable, like they haven't thought about what they're fucking saying!
really, fucking nags me!
young couple = buy a house...not these days fellas! look at what's happening around you, and think about whether that is actually possible.
and yeah, all that stuff about kids vs income vs house all rings troue with me. It's rediculous the amount of stuff Howard expects one family to do. It's idiotic.
thank you for getting my blood pressure going :)
oh and re the whole WA vs ES stuff, it bugs me too, because like you say, all this jibing that WA people say happesn from ES doesn't actually happen, in fact they're quite fascinated by the idea of Perth. WA people need to get their heads out of their arses to a certain extent and realise that there really is a rest of the world, and that maybe those people in the rest of the world aren't so bad.
but you have to have had close contact with someone from the other side in order to get your head out of your arse. YOu realise that they're all human as well and get over yourself.
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