The politics of housing

[think positive]

how big are the blocks? big enough for a couple of units or 4 townhouses? thats cheap!!

[pietillidie]

[What'sinaname]

Getting rid of CGT adds a massive burden on the property owner to maintain records of all capital improvements to adjust the cost base. Can you imagine someone who has lives in a house for 30 - 40 years having those records?

[stui magpie]

[think positive]

[Magpietothemax]

[think positive]

and thats why we have a self managed super fund!!

[pietillidie]

No, M2M, just no. That's not a sober analysis. You can't use episodic market failures to hide long-term market gains.

The market has done very well over the long run, while housing is a fake market which has skyrocketed disproportionately due to planning and supply barriers. Sane investing isn't the problem, insane housing prices favouring older generations is the problem. The sooner housing is priced according to its extraordinarily low risk, and not by human-created supply constraints, the better.

I'm not saying people should be investing in rubbish, high-fee, high-risk schemes. They should be investing long-term blue-chips, which accurately reflect national performance at low risk. But they also need decent housing, just not as an investment strategy. Housing is a national dividend and should be indexed accordingly.

You absolutely want people investing in blue chips, not turning fake planning and housing supply constraints into an investment business. The objective should be to remove housing as anything but a personal investment indexed to the whole economy, not as a money spinner driven by the fake NIMBY and politicking BS of a growing, greying generation.

They made their money buying cheap housing made widely available by goverment housing schemes, benefitting from the nation and increasingly irrational price rises at a time of space, low environmental care, and expanding populations. Those goldilocks conditions will never ever be repeated again, even though they fantasise they worked harder. They didn't, they were just lucky to be born when there was little international competition, peasants built things in poor countries for them for peanuts, resources were plentiful, social support was far more generous, goverment had a mission to provide housing, etc.

It was a one off sequence of decades during and beyond the post-war boom. Never to be repeated again. So, That leaves us to invest in other safe assets such as blue chips. Super was very sensible, even if Glib cowboy policy weakened it. The same sort of financial policy failures that caused the GFC, and left nations ill-prepared for Covid by cutting risk management budgets to the bone.

But none of that changes a single thing about the returns and stability of sane investing and savings allocation over time, and conversely the social distortion caused by the artificial housing market.

[pietillidie]

^TP, I want to emphasise I'm not questioning your work and specialisation in housing, which I greatly admire. It's much the same as I said to Skids about his speciality, mining; your expertise is absolutely crucial and businesses and investment in those areas is absolutely crucial, even if a shift is needed.

The fix with housing has to somehow even out the supply/returns to something more reasonable for such a very safe asset class, which probably involves government supply, trumping NIMBY self-entitlement, incentivising the right kind of private investment, etc.

Land is limited and in one sense no one really 'owns' it; it's not sovereign and not disconnected from national infrastructure, law, inflation and cost. We allow ownership for practical reasons of betterment, so if current laws are not promoting betterment because times have changes, those laws need to be adjusted. In fact, the practical reasons of betterment that are driven by ownership are one of the main reasons, we can't allow young people to lose access to that incentive system, as argued above.

Basic geography and infrastructure cost means space is constrained. So, people should be rewarded for their work maximising space (I think you mentioned units/apartments somewhere above, which is a perfect use of space), and penalised for doing the opposite. If people have big blocks, pressure them, and at the very worst don't allow them to pass on that huge piece of the nation without use intensification.

I don't know enough about infrastructure and the margins to be prescriptive yet as that's a big research project, so these are just ideas. But however it's done, we absolutely must bring housing prices down and increase affordability and accessibility. The population will have to keep growing for a while yet or government revenue and FDI will collapse, so environmentalists and faux enviro-entitlers who really just want special treatment until they die will have to pull their heads in.

Every cost can be offset, and offset fairly over economic time. The problem is you get BS arguments from investors on one side, environmentalists on the other, fake heritage 'concerns' and all sorts of protective BS. But my view! My light! My silence! Sorry, young people's right to affordable housing trumps all of those things, and by miles. Affordable housing underwrote the prosperity of virtually every single high-income country today, and stabilised society so that people could focus on work, remain happy and healthy, and create national wealth.

Every single impoverished, chaotic country lacks that anchor.

In the end people put forward any old BS to favour themselves; but buying into that isn't the job of governments, and certainly isn't leadership. There are always solutions if we stop thinking in self-serving, simpleton ways. Imagine if we'd done this with global warming? Desertification? Fish stocks? Urban sprawl? Water management? All of these are now very real and hugely burdensome costs, and we all have to pay the bill.

Fighting the economics is like shaking one's fist at gravity.

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

^

TP, same thing is happening everywhere, the new estates have small blocks with huge houses and basically no backyards.

Mernda, Doreen, up to Kalkallo, even the new estates they're building here in Toc. I took my daughter for a drive around town when she was up here for Xmas and when we went through the new estate she just said, Geezus, it's just like Kalkallo.

A new house in Kalkallo starts from $500k for the record.

[Culprit]

I have houses on large blocks being sold near me and the houses bulldozed and 10 units go in. Cars pack the streets as they use the garages as storage areas. The Units are small in size.

[Skids]

With 3 people per square kilometer, you'd think we'd have plenty of room for 'big blocks'.

The failure to utilize our land has been a big driver in the cost of housing, along with the influx of international buyers. Cashed up Chinese are buying up in my suburb.

Why we have never harnessed the 125 cubic meters a second (average) of water that flows from the Ord River will baffle me until the day I die.

[stui magpie]

[think positive]

What exactly is a McMansion! A cookie cutter 2 story spec home? Or any suburban big home?