Those objecting to the densification of Australia’s cities needn’t worry because there aren’t enough tradies to build the apartments anyway.
I love Kohler’s writing, he’s got this gentle satirisation style that punctuates the sometimes dry topics he covers.
Anyway supply and demand, how about the electorate start realising demand is the problem as well, and maybe we’ll get there. I suppose the problem there is it comes back to the Upton Sinclair quote,
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it
Too few home owners are willing to sacrifice their personal slice of wealth for a more stable national settlement. So the ivory tower grows, so the space on each floor narrows. Such is a downside of Australia’s strong ownership rights largely only enforceable by the already wealthy.
I don’t agree its complicated, demand is never the problem, it’s always and only supply and that’s a reflection of poor governance…So fuck voters for electing and reelecting neoliberal shit bags making sure its only ever made worse, particularly hypocritical Labor . At least the LNP wear their greed and disdain on thier sleeves, similarly with Climate Change.
It’s like suggesting a lack of food is a demand problem
Orwell wrote this about British Labour 80 yeaea ago and it applies today to them as well as the ALP .
All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue.
Okay interesting, thats a broad point to claim. If supply is always the problem, and demand never the problem, then, running with the food theme, why is sugar so popular?
Humans went to extraodinray lengths, and committed many crimes against others to produce and secure supplies of sugar cane in particular. Whole nations now exist that are a result of that trade hundreds of years ago. Supply of sugar was hard, and while its quite abundant now, i think its hard to argue that people don’t still exert a massive demand pull for the product in a multitude of forms.
The demand for sugar was so high in France during Napoleon’s reign that when the British essentially cut off the French from the sugar fields of the Carribean, the French were under pressure to develop a substitute for the citizenry in the form of beet sugar, apparently a poor and expensive substitute. So where supply was cut off, the pressure of the demand side created an alternative product.
Time to out myself here, i’m not impartial in this discussion. I may have asked my partner to stop in at the shops to grab biscuits for a sweet snack. My brain demanded sweetness, and I delivered… well, my partner delivered…
Bullshit article that tries to sneak in the usual anti immigrant, anti densification bullshit
Gonna need some examples from the text where he’s being sneaky and not just trying to represent reality in a highly politicised (cheers murdoch cunts) conversation. Alan Kohlers not known for being rich in those sentiments.
He clearly thinks that being the 859th-least-dense city in the world is bad, or at least an opportunity to be denser, but a lot of people would say it’s just fine. One of the world’s densest cities is Giza, in Egypt, where 4.4 million people squeeze into 98 square kilometres, not much larger than the size of Sydney’s Parramatta, where fewer than 300,000 people live.
Maybe not so much sneaky as blatant. Going from the density of Australia to Giza is a bullshit comparison.
So you’re in agreement with Kohler. Least dense city is a metric the NSW Planning and Public Spaces Minister used, Kohler is demonstrating why its a silly metric to use by highlighting complexities and diversity of housing across the world being boiled down to a single metric like the NSW Minister is trying to do with this ‘Least Dense Housing’ yardstick.
So you’re in agreement with Kohler
I am not. He’s clearly implying that current density is just fine, when the reality is that there is plenty of reason to densify and cherry picking a single extreme example at the other end of the range is disingenuous at best.
There is no implication, you’ve misunderstood why he’s made that comparison.
Think about it this way, if the housing stock of the world is to be considered, what set of that stock is likely to be acceptable to the Australian public? This is why Kohler picked the Egyptian example, do you think Australians are going to want to live in the same kind of housing that Egyptians live in? Its a non-starter.
By creating such a broad and arbitrary yardstick, the NSW Minister has just invited a political and media circus. All because he failed to account for the set of the world’s housing stock that Australians would find acceptable. There are plenty of acceptable denser housing examples to create a set of realistic options out of.
The Minister should be comparing like for like in terms of quality of housing and quality of life that brings, the measure he has chosen won’t do that, and is ridiculous for the exercise. That is Kohler’s not so subtle point.
More 4-5 story blocks with commercial on the ground floor and real family sized flats, with storage.
Apartments here tend to all be built like they’re ready for AirBNB - no storage, lots of wasted space for pretty bathrooms and foyers.
You’re right. Lots of apartments being built here confound me. Are we building communities, or investments? It looks like the latter to me.
There are examples of good denser living developments, one would be the Claise Brook Cove area of East Perth, very wealthy area though. I cant think of an apartment example though, off the top of my head. But theres surely a couple examples in one of the cities about the place.
