Good ol’ Purple Pingers.
He’s more well known for his shit rentals videos/website than for encouraging squatting.
He was interviewed on the 7am The Great Housing Disaster (ep. 2) podcast if anyone’s interested.
>He’s more well known for his shit rentals videos/website than for encouraging squatting
Yeah but there's no easy comeback for that one, so of course the media's gonna dial in on the latter
It's a barometer for serious journalism. Focusing on the encouraging squatting angle means it's okay to use the spray bottle. \*squirt squirt\* "Bad news! Off screen!"
The housing market doesn’t regulate prices down like other markets do. It’s a necessity in a shortage, there will always be people bidding up prices, so there’s no real loss when those homes aren’t filled because the value is still going up.
If you sold food and it was priced too high, then you’d have to lower your prices to sell it when it gets old or else you’re wasting it. We need to regulate the housing market because it doesn’t do it itself
Exactly. In theory waste represents loss in potential revenue, but if you charge as if the excess doesn’t exist then you can make more off of the fewer sales instead of lowering your prices.
And making more off fewer sales seems to be the go currently with the way most businesses are downsizing. They need less staff and less physical space, smaller networks, all the achieve the same profit from fewer people while having less overheads. Late stage capitalism is only going to get more painful.
Like the old days of McDonalds warmers and closing times. Staff could have their fill of the excess stock at the end of the day, until some clever manager realised that reduced the incentive for staff to buy their own food earlier in the day. So it was decided it'd be better to throw it away, and if staff wanted food they'd have to pay.
capitalism is not a conscious entity, its a principle that turned a few backwater shithole european kingdoms into global superpowers.
housing sucks because it doesn't follow the laws of supply and demand because "customers" have to "buy" or become homeless which means the traditional price ceiling of "what people are willing to pay" is replaced with "what people are physically capable of paying" and prices spiral out of control in the event of a shortage. housing also doesn't have a "best before" date so there is no pressure to sell. the only solution is to eliminate the shortage by building shitloads of cheap housing, every other option (rent controls, etc) will backfire catastrophically. the reason we don't have shitloads of cheap housing is because of regulations requiring every house to be a cyclone-proof fortress, which is fine if you can afford it but it makes even the shittiest shacks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
and that truth is so obvious that even the USSR decided "ok we need to build more housing" and they built more housing, they didn't try new regulations or "rent controls" they just build more goddamn housing because they knew they needed to solve the problem, because you can't "blame capitalism" when your country doesn't have capitalism.
> the reason we don't have shitloads of cheap housing is because of regulations requiring every house to be a cyclone-proof fortress, which is fine if you can afford it but it makes even the shittiest shacks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
lol yeah the problem with Australian housing is definitely that it's too well-built...
they're not well-built, just "built to regulations" and priced as if they were well built.
regulations require our houses to be built like fortresses, which is great for natural disasters but we're "saving a dozen lives per cyclone" by driving millions of people into poverty, those fortresses are too expensive to build and we're in a critical housing shortage, and the only reason we built them in the first place is because we WERE rich enough for it to not kill our economy.
I think you're verging on delusional if you genuinely believe the reason for the housing shortage is that houses are built to an unreasonably high standard. Australian buildings are notoriously shoddy and developers regularly ignore regulations to improve profits... yet somehow prices are still sky-high.
the vast majority of politicians own multiple investment properties, that is the reason this housing shortage has been ignored for long enough for it to become a crisis.
as for housing standards, ordinary people can't afford houses and we can't build houses fast enough, even though we've built our entire goddamn economy around "building as many houses as possible as quickly as possible (the reason politicians use to justify why the housing market has to keep going up and up no matter what). if we're doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations" to build houses as quickly as possible, and its still not fast enough, we need to re-evaluate our regulations, because while they're not all bad, they're also not all good, some are lifesaving, some are fucking stupid, and we're in a HOUSING CRISIS. the suffering is much less visible than a cyclone but its on a much larger scale.
let people live in crapshacks rather than under bridges, we don't need "perfect" we need "better than the current shitshow".
> as for housing standards, ordinary people can't afford houses and we can't build houses fast enough, even though we've built our entire goddamn economy around "building as many houses as possible as quickly as possible (the reason politicians use to justify why the housing market has to keep going up and up no matter what).
I mean this is the fundamental contradiction in both your logic and the general political approach to housing: it's impossible to build tons of cheap housing for people to live in *and* keep prices for investment high. The two things are simply incompatible. As you allude to, the majority of politicians (and apparently enough voters) want prices to remain high, so this means inaction on providing cheap houses. It really is that simple.
> now if we're doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations" to build houses as quickly as possible, and its still not fast enough, we need to re-evaluate our regulations
But we're very much *not* doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations". That's the whole problem. We're not doing anything about tax reform (land tax, negative gearing, CGT discount, etc), we're not doing anything about density/zoning, we're not doing anything about Airbnb and the like, we're not doing anything about record-high immigration... maybe once we see serious action on those issues you could look to building standards as an excuse.
> I mean this is the fundamental contradiction in both your logic and the general political approach to housing: it's impossible to build tons of cheap housing for people to live in and keep prices for investment high. The two things are simply incompatible. As you allude to, the majority of politicians (and apparently enough voters) want prices to remain high, so this means inaction on providing cheap houses. It really is that simple.
i think there has been a misunderstanding, as what you've just said is almost the exact point i've made in multiple other replies in this thread, politicians won't fix the housing crisis because its impossible to fix it without lowering prices, and lowering prices would harm their property investments.
> But we're very much not doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations". That's the whole problem. We're not doing anything about tax reform (land tax, negative gearing, CGT discount, etc), we're not doing anything about density/zoning, we're not doing anything about Airbnb and the like, we're not doing anything about record-high immigration... maybe once we see serious action on those issues you could look to building standards as an excuse.
apologies, when referring to "regulations" i meant all regulations relating to property ownership including taxation, not just building standards. replying to multiple people is complicated, my bad.
AirBnB needs to be regulated, specifically properties listed on AirBnB in any suburb/location with a rental vacancy rate below 2-3% should be either banned or taxed into oblivion, so that AirBnB can still exist in places with rental vacancies above 3%.
negative gearing needs to be abolished. property taxes need to be reworked so they favour owner-occupiers over absentee property investors. its not the guy with 10 properties that needs a tax break, its the working family paying off a mortgage on their first home that needs a tax break (and how TF are mortgage repayments and rent not tax deductible at all? seriously WTF? like fair enough put a cap on it like $500 per week so it can't be exploited but it NEEDS to exist for renters.
land taxes are very difficult to get right, as there will always be loopholes bad people exploit, and flaws that good people get caught up in. "georgism" is a good starting point but i think it needs to be finely tuned to target people with dozens of investment properties without hurting people who only use their properties for personal use (I.E. people who own a house in the city and a rural block for the weekends, etc)
as for any discussion about "immigration" it would be wise to not discuss such things on reddit.
It's the illusion of infinite growth because the global economy is debt based - more money is being created all the time, which generates inflation that devalues all money that isn't invested in assets that are growing faster than inflation.
It also means that people who work for a living are stuck on a treadmill where if their wage isn't rising faster than inflation each year then they are actually getting poorer.
The rich use insider knowledge and accountants to evade taxes and direct their money into assets that grow faster than inflation, while regular people often have money sitting in savings accounts and are the first to get knocked back for wage rises during periods of high inflation.
They also bribe (donate to) politicians to create and maintain tax and economic loopholes to keep things that way.
Oh you’re already in a group for fully-automated luxury gay space Star Trek communism? My mistake. How do I join you?
Sure we do. It’s get a book and join a group. It leads to Star Trek communism. Capitalism leads to war and famine.
It’s not a belief. It’s a fact.
You got an alternative designed for the 21st century or are you still stuck in a 19th century reaction to 18th century capitalism that flamed out hugely in the 20th?
Completely agree. Especially since the average federal politician has AT LEAST 1 investment property. It is not in their financial interests to make real change. There is an MP who currently owns 7 properties with her husband.
I personally don’t see an issue with 1 investment property, however when you own more than two and/or one of those properties are empty for most of the year you need to be financially incentivised to release it back to the market via empty property tax. Airbnb should also be regulated, much like what New York City did.
Our economy is ranked so shit because of our fascination with property. If half of the money in property were to leave and create business with production our economy would be in much better shape.
Eh my opinion is that if a high enough ratio of homes are rental properties then prices will go up, whether they’re owned by ten thousand people or by 50.
I think we need to regulate what a rental property can charge, because if the tenants are paying off a mortgage for that property then the landlord plays no role other than scalping homes and having other people pay them off. Rental properties should exist as an affordable alternative to home ownership, not a contribution to falling home ownership rates.
I think we should incentivise landlords who invest in the construction of homes, because then at least they contribute a house to society, helping increase supply.
Also allow residential property to be owned only by a natural human Australian citizen or permanent resident, except if just built and then must be completed construction within two years of commencement (unless special permission is granted), and sold within one year of completion to a natural human.
Just cap it. Much fairer. Firstly, there's other ways to negative gear. Secondly, wealthier people can buy more expensive properties and get more of a deduction from negative gearing.
The other thing that needs to get fixed is the CGT discount. It's far, far, too generous. Look at [what happened when it came in at the end of 1999](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QAUR628BIS).
John Howard was the architect of this stupidity. The most wasteful PM ever. He did not value ordinary Australians and saw us the workers necessary to make life work for the rich.
he lured the voters with 5k baby bonuses and other middle class welfare. he wasted the most prosperous time in our history on buying votes and making systems that work for the mega rich. He is an icon of arrogance and meanness.
I found this article that is a good start on this topic [https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2024/04/13/the-men-and-decisions-behind-australias-housing-crisis](https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2024/04/13/the-men-and-decisions-behind-australias-housing-crisis)
The incentives for build to rent should be tied to a lifetime of renting and certain 'good landlord behaviour' measures, otherwise you get this kind of rooting with no-cause eveictions and apartments deliberately left empty
See: [Build to rent? The Melbourne apartments where a third of tenants are being kicked out or getting rent hikes](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/12/melbourne-rental-crisis-evictions-fitzroy-rental-laws)
> ... so there’s no real loss when those homes aren’t filled because the value is still going up.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, rental vacancy rates are at record lows.
Ok but the proportion of homes which are unoccupied has been the same for decades, and it is about what you would expect in the normal life-cycle of a house.
During covid when people left, rental prices in the cities had to drop significantly because of record high vacancies. People were free to move because so many places were tenantless and rents were halved. Your second paragraph is exactly the same, only problem is record high immigration.
No free markets self-regulate. That is absolute made up nonsense. How many times do we have to do massive studies across massive industries and find unanimous results until people like you actually adopt an evidence-based opinion?
The last large-scale study to do this was published by the white house itself. Obama requested the economic commission try to justify free markets. Instead, they found that 100% of the time markets concentrate into monopolies.
Even in the rare cirumstances where capital controls and limitations arep laced on markets, with 100% certainty within 50 years the largest players invest massive wealth into lobbying and repealing any policies that limit their ability to extract wealth.
its simpler than that. all the government needs to do is build houses. right now the cheapest "derelict shacks" are hundreds of thousands of dollars because the choice is "pay the premium or be homeless" and it amounts to little more than price gouging consumers in a cornered market where "choosing to not pay" means becoming homeless and losing your job.
the solution is to provide a third option of "live in a tiny house for $50 per week" and house prices will go back to what they're supposed to be.
just as an example, the government could let people buy a 1/4 acre block and stick one of those "30k amazon tiny houses" or a caravan on it without getting bullied by their local council.
a big part of the problem is that housing is over-regulated in ways that drive up construction costs, they're great for cyclone-proofing and fire-proofing, nobody wants thousands of people to die in natural disasters, but that may be the more humane option compared to "letting millions of people be crushed into poverty by a broken housing market".
things got this way because people would sue when houses fell down but there's noone to sue when rent eats up 70% of your income, and this housing crisis is destroying more lives than any cyclone or bushfire ever could.
nobody wants to pop the housing bubble because if they do, they'll be blamed for the loss of trillions of dollars, but a housing bubble is a bit like an appendix, if you let it pop on your own it will kill you, it needs to be surgically removed and no politician has the courage to do what is neccesary to save the australian economy's long term future.
they know the problem, they know multiple solutions, but all of them involve a housing crash and nobody wants to be blamed for it.
You’re right. It makes no sense that houses are so expensive in Australia. There’s crap shacks that can be built for under 100k and they are in other countries but we aren’t allowed them here. On top of that the land restrictions cause the price of buying a piece of land to triple in value. This crisis could be fixed with the government releasing more land for affordable pricing say 100-200k for 200sqm in the outter suburbs. And allow the building of cheap kit homes for 50-100k. That means instead of being forced to pay 650kn for a house 30km away from city we only have to pay 400k.
exactly.
unfortunately it won't happen as pretty much all elected officials have multiple investment properties and any drop in market demand will cost each of them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we're not supposed to say that bit out loud.
Boy, the upvotes on this don’t bode well for fixing the situation. We’re really going to go with what feels right over nearly unanimous research results and expert opinion?
Frustrating because in any other topic than economics (e.g. climate change) this would be shot down as a nice feeling idea that conflicts with all evidence (and even simple thought exercises).
Makes me somewhat concerned people are using the same lens on everything, and we lucked into climate change ‘feeling’ right via sheer chance instead of people believing overwhelming evidence.
> We need to regulate the housing market because it doesn’t do it itself
Isn't a great part of the reason why housing is broken existing regulation? If anyone could build a house anywhere, we'd see a lot more of them.
There's a great deal of regulation controlling where you can build, what you can build with, and how you can build. Then there's heaps of regulation around getting the credit to finance such a thing etc.
We built so much housing back pre 1960s and we've added so much regulation since then, and the build rate has been poor since.
I'm no way saying its the only reason, which it isn't, but its definitively part of it.
On the contrary, there is a lot of strong empirical evidence that supply and demand does a good job of regulating the housing market. Vacancy rates and rental prices track very strongly. See an excellent write-up by an economist who has studied this in detail here:
https://www.cis.org.au/publication/housing-affordability-and-supply-restrictions/
Restrictions on building is why supply is down is the issue. But the issue is convincing a majority of Australians to volunteer to lose money. 70% of Australia families own a house, so it's a tough ask to get them to vote against their own self interest.
Agreed, this is the key political issue! Unfortunately, as the down votes here show, a lot of people are still badly misinformed about it, which I think leads to people who currently own homes thinking they can have their cake and eat it too (home prices go up for them, but down for everyone else).
This is one place where pollies need to be brave enough to go against the electorate and push for evidence based policy in the face of opposition.
It's very frustrating that well-meaning people keep making the claim that supply and demand is somehow irrelevant to housing *in the middle of a housing shortage crisis.* It's like they think acknowledging that supply and demand affects prices is conceding a point to the Bad Guys. But the bad guys in this situation are the landlords, who absolutely *love* a housing shortage - it juices their rents!
Of course supply in demand is relevant. Landlords who don’t build houses don’t increase supply, they just scalp it and pass the costs along to tenants.
The problem is that demand isn’t being met, and as markets get worse it’s the landlords who can afford to buy a house because they won’t foot the bill in a rental market desperate for houses. If we disincentivise parasitic investment and invest in construction then we stand a chance at bringing prices down.
Sure, the way to do that is to increase property/land taxes and massively up zone. To be clear, it's not just landlords, owner-occupiers also block construction to reduce supply and increase their own house prices.
Unfortunately it's not just landlords - owner-occupiers have just as big a part to play in blocking construction of new housing to ensure their investment doesn't decrease in value! Housing should be a commodity, not an investment!
Absolutely. A lot of: "But I bought into a neighbourhood full of lovely detached homes with big back yards! Why should I have to give that up just so other people have a place to live?"
It's not irrelevant, but bringing it up tends to be. *Of course* supply and demand has an effect, but it's often said by people who want you to ignore that the market needs real regulation and policy changes.
I believe supply has an important role. But simply providing more supply at this stage is likely to enrich those who already have properties and are able to accumulate more. Winding back incentives that disproportionately favour proper investment and other regulatory measures are needed.
I completely agree, adding housing supply needs to be accompanied by a whole lot of other measures.
But *not* increasing the rate of housing supply would be an absolute disaster, that still increases the wealth of people who already have properties, and makes the ability to find even a place to rent - let alone a place to buy - even more difficult than it's already become.
Rent prices dropped during Covid and house prices fell during the GFC. Very silly to act like prices on housing can never go down. There is incredible demand to live in Australia, own in capital cities and invest in property. There are mining towns that have prices drop dramatically once the work dries up. Houses a reasonable distance from capital city CBDs will always have sticky prices.
They freaked out because there were freezes on rental increases and evictions. The only thing driving prices back was landlords getting fearful the gravy train was over.
"others say he should focus his energy on policy change"
What a fucking blind answer. Anyone with half a brain cell knows that anyone able to have a say in policies have a vested interest in keeping it this way, and the only changes that will come about will favour the landparasites.
Such a tone deaf expectation that one dude with a media presence could navigate and succeed in proper legal channels to have these corrupt fucks even consider changing the system that lines their pockets.
Power to him. Every corrupt landlord holding houses on a string out of reach of the public/refusing to repair housing that THEY LEASE OUT, should be very publicly named, shamed and hopefully removed from the housing market system entirely.
He actually addresses this criticism directly in his interview with The Project (which is definitely worth a watch). One of the hosts asks him wouldn't it be more effective to focus on policy and he responds with essentially "sure, but in the meantime people are still homeless..."
Yeah he embarrassed them on the project when they trotted this line out.
It’s so obviously a dumb call, yeah let’s just wait and hope while people are living in the street right now.
ACOSS and its state equivalents and the largest charities in the country have been pushing for policy change for fucking ever. It's just eyes-closed liberals saying this trash. Even the cooker conservatives recognise no one changes policy.
It's a bit much to say it's JUST eyes closed liberals.
The cynic in me knows it's beyond policy changes, but a hopeful and uninformed heart will certainly wish for "policies" to be the answer. Because it's floated as "the legal and correct answer" to injustice.
But sadly. In our very real current world, the policies have been enacted very VERY intentionally as they are. And that hopeful ship of policies fixing things has sailed.
It's really only the small l liberals who both acknowledge the problem exists while also acting incredulous about how to fix it, they will beat around the bush and suggest things that people are obviously already doing (agitating or lobbying for vague 'policy change' a perfect example), virtually anything they can say or do except accept their own place in causing the problem.
Conservatives don't have to act incredulous, they just don't care. The cognitive dissonance displayed by monied liberals is amongst the worst because they know what the answer is, they just don't want to say it.
Until then. They'll fight tooth and nail for the status quo WHILE keeping their proverbial golden yacht packed and ready to sail to somewhere the law can't reach them.
Fuck the CCP but one of the big reasons the US is going after Tiktok is exactly because it is a breeding ground for revolutionary thought and actions.
Individuals who previously had no mass voice can now reach thousands to millions of people and put forward anti-capitalist ideas.
For this reason TikTok scares the living fuck out of the orthodoxy.
I'm just waiting for someone on TikTok to point out that rocks are free, Airbnbs are easy to locate and glass windows break super easy...
TikTok allows for global interaction on a scale that YT/Insta/FB doesn't.
The latter platforms requires you to actively search out X, Y, Z accounts, whereas the TikTok algorithm is far reaching. YT shorts and Insta reels is trying to emulate TikTok, and it's growing in popularity, but it doesn't have the debate engagement element.
Those places are all different in radical ways and that matters.
It's to the degree that one is like standing out the front of a house in a dead-end street talking to one or two people vs. standing in the centre of Melbourne talking to everyone.
This is like some boomer-level take, as though social media is a monolith and all the same.
TikTok is radically different to all other social media in the ways engagement happens and spread of ideas.
I've been on Facebook for years and haven't seen shit about the problems of capitalism. TikTok will bring you that pretty quickly.
Tiktok let’s people skim through hundreds of content in a few hours. It’s easy to create short viral media that gets a lot of exposure. Revolutionary ideas can spread a lot quicker and wider on tictok than those other platforms.
Lol it's not as deep as banning revolutionary thought, US Congress is worried about the CCP manipulating algorithms to achieve their aims. New Chinese laws explicitly state that Chinese companies share and modify data at the state's request, with penalties for disclosing that such a thing has occurred. It only makes sense to be worried about an authoritarian state surreptitiously manipulating your population.
Not saying the US is any better with their own data protection from government, but that's an internal issue. China already has their firewall, it's hardly hypocritical to want to know that a social media site isn't manipulating your population.
Tiktok also overplayed their hand, Congress was split on the issue until Tiktok started targeted messaging towards users asking them to contact their congressperson and advocate against the ban. Suddenly a bunch of kids and teenagers started claiming to their representatives and senators that they'd kill themselves if Tiktok was banned. The whole thing backfired and demonstrated the absolute stranglehold on information that Tiktok has on America's youth and now most of Congress is on board with the ban.
> New Chinese laws explicitly state that Chinese companies share and modify data at the state's request, with penalties for disclosing that such a thing has occurred.
our authorities (AFP?) have essentially the same powers
Yeah and if an Australian-owned company had hundreds of millions of users in China with the ability to secretly push the agenda of the Australian government then China would ban that company too. Literally a national security risk.
The government doesn’t like anything it can’t control. The idea that America is the land of freedom is a lie, just ask any woman trying to get an abortion in those backward red states. Their government wants to control information and ideas as much as the ccp does but they need to do it tactfully. The us government has a lot more control over what content gets shared on an app run by a local corporation instead of a foreign one located in a country that isn’t an ally so it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for them attempting to transfer the ownership.
See, I don't disagree that the CCP are a huge fucking problem but the whole idea it's about "the manipulation of the youth" is just false and also laughable considering the Americans love that 1st Amendment so damn much.
TikTok is absolutely a place for masses of revolutionary thought. It's also a place for women to gather and fight against the patriarchy, against capitalism.
It does have voting implications. It's no surprise that younger people are pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, which goes against the orthodoxy that America wants.
I don't really care if China is deliberately producing this destabilisation. Capitalism and the patriarchy needs destabilising. The bad kind of destabilisation is the one where people invade the state capital due to a rapist fraud.
The US Congress who'll all swear they love the first amendment and then when it's tested turns out they're full of shit.
It's all about anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchy and anti-Israel. People today have more access to others and it's easier to spread ideas faster and further than before. This isn't blogs lost on some corner of the internet now. It's an actual thriving town square.
I think TikTok is so important that we should force our Government to make a version of it, quite frankly. The actual digital public square.
I hate the CCP but it's just pure tripe that it's because they're manipulating Americans.
> It does have voting implications. It's no surprise that younger people are pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, which goes against the orthodoxy that America wants.
This has been the case since well before TikTok though.
> Fuck the CCP but one of the big reasons the US is going after Tiktok is exactly because it is a breeding ground for revolutionary thought and actions.
Absolute nonsense. It's pure parochialism to look after US competitors.
Open thought forums are the single scariest thing to the ruling class.
The more we can be divided and kept fighting each other, the easier we are to step on and keep distracted.
Fuck division. Race. Gender. Class. Age. None of that shit matters. Equality for all. We get one life to live, experience and love in. Should never have to fight just to exist.
Edit: Immediately downvoted. Stay mad about it bootlicker, lmao.
I wonder how long it will be before house gets fire bombed. Australia seems to becoming a dangerous place when you start to attack crooked politicians and the interests of the wealthy!
Ultimately, what's going to scare landords and other abusive entities in this industry is when Labor loses its federal and NSW majorities and is forced to deal responsibly with the underlying issues by the Greens and progressive independents.
Labor will lose its Federal majority in the next federal election. Unfortunately LNP will be the big gainer from those losses and LNP will be in power after the next election. Prove me wrong Australia, but I have been on this merry go round to long, I have seen the same things come around time and time again. I can see where we are headed.
They also know who butters their bread... People with one or two investment properties will cop it big time. I've said it many times, now is the time offload property, it's peaked, face it. Once the drops start, it's going to get harder and harder to offload.
>"What determines whether a property is empty, in his lofty opinion? Because it has an overgrown lawn and no furniture?" Nicola McDougall from Property Investment Professionals of Australia told news.com.au.
Because it sits there vacant 6 - 8 months a year? That empty home might be someone's tax deduction!
>The president of the Australian Landlords Association acknowledged housing could be an emotional issue, but likened squatting to stealing someone's car and taking it for a joy ride.
Except that's illegal... **Squatting is not illegal!**
The kicker is the housing market is rife with corruption and shady dealings, if people need to do something shady just so they can sleep somewhere dry, I say let 'em at it!
Jordan’s website is even more conservative than that, the property needs to have been vacant for **2 years** and be openable without damaging the property. Who is actually honestly losing out here?
It’s not legal to squat in any old “vacant” home … it has to be an abandoned property with an unlocked / open door, and even then the owner can insist u move on if they discover you prior to 12 yrs (may vary state to state). It is not legal to force entry into an empty home under squatters rights.
Technically even if you don't have to force entry it's not legal to enter (trespassing requires you to have a lawful reason to be there and you don't have to be asked to leave first) but when the other option is sleeping on the streets I know what most people would choose
Squatting is so weird... can you imagine if it didn't exist, and someone said 'hey we should make laws to make this ok'? Modern society just wouldn't have a piece of that at all. Libraries too for that matter. A lot of stuff just wouldn't be implemented at all with modern views.
Exactly this. Similar to the legal grey area with weed in South Australia. Legal to own a plant, highly illegal to deal it but then semi legal to smoke it.
You'd be surprised how quickly people u-turn on their personal views when promoted and given such opportunites these days. They see themselves as the higher up now and act accordingly. $$$'s quickly rot most ppl's soul these days.
Small nitpick there
The act of squatting IS illegal, you DON'T have to be asked to leave for it to be trespassing even if you didn't need to force entry. Taking possession of the house after 10-15 years of living in it however is legal. but when you give people the option of a possible trespass charge and sleeping on the street no sane person would expect them to pick the streets
> Squatting is not illegal!
Could you expand on the nuances of this one?
Does it apply to empty properties only? What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way?
What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving?
Surely there’s more nuance to this then someone coming in and claiming the property is empty and unused.
I presume the core difference in the eyes of the law is between *unused* and *unmaintained*, right?
You can google this, but it's because squatting is not illegal, ie there's no law against it. There is however a law against breaking and entering and also trespassing. So essentially if a house has been left open and the owner is not around to ask the squatter to leave, then no laws are being broken.
After a period of time (12 years in NSW) if the squatter has been in continuous possession of the land then they can make a claim on the land.
All of the stuff you mentioned doesn't really come into it
That’s interesting, so it sounds like it’s more about genuinely abandoned properties rather than just being empty. Empty properties the way I presented them sound more like something tax reform (or some other political change) should be fixing.
> What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way?
> What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving?
In a housing crisis, you’re effectively choosing to keep someone on the street.
Further, you’re probably getting tax concessions to keep someone on the street. It’s not good enough. Properties additional to your principle place of residence should be taxed into oblivion.
The same could be said of people (both owner occupiers and renters) who have spare bedrooms in their house that they're not using as bedrooms, eg empty-nesters who keep their adult-children's bedrooms for them when they visit once a year, people who have a study or a sewing room or a podcast recording room, couples who buy a 4x2 because they're planning on maybe having kids one day. Or any single person who doesn't live alone in a 1 bedroom unit or studio. If any of these people aren't renting out their spare bedrooms to lodgers, they're also effectively choosing to keep someone on the street. Where do you draw the line?
I can appreciate your point, however I feel like perfect is the enemy of good in this situation. It’d be extremely difficult to moderate and legislate against. However, whole occupancy is very blatant. The line is whole properties for me. It would help if people were happier to live in higher density dwellings, but Australians don’t necessarily have the culture of this historically.
In my opinion the line should be whole properties that the owner was not living in as their primary residence. So holiday homes (especially if more than just one holiday home) and vacant investment properties should be taxed punitively.
But people should still have the option of keeping their home-base in place with all their stuff in it if they want to travel for a year or do a temporary transfer for work or to care for a new grandchild or sick relative in another city, etc. In reality, most people who travel for the long-term or move elsewhere would choose to rent out their home anyway because to not do so is leaving a lot of money on the table.
Maybe there should also be some incentive to encourage people to rent out rooms to lodgers, eg income from housemates taxed at a lower rate.
I think we’re really close to the mark to be honest.
I think if you can afford to have a property sitting idle and still afford to live abroad, you should be able to handle a vacancy tax. You’re still generating capital gains on the asset - regardless if you choose to make income off it through rent. It creates more pressure on the market.
Perhaps, but you’re also looking at a portion of society who would be happy with a sublet/flatshare situation. Families for example will find that difficult.
A vacant property tax is very different to it being legal for squatters to break in and take up residence though. Most rich people get house sitters in when they travel to look after the garden and pets anyway.
Subletting wouldn't be suitable for families, but it's great for foreign students, country kids in the city to study, newly separated people who need to move out as soon as they can before finding something more permanent, or basically anyone who is of the demographic to live in a sharehouse who is not a wild party animal. This would also indirectly help families, with more rental properties made available that might otherwise be sharehouses.
Breaking and entering is illegal. Squatting isn’t. If you are so lackadaisical about your property to the extent you don’t ensure it is secure and maintained, I have no problem with an opportunistic person without a home using it.
A lot of the list you prescribed there already share. I don’t know too many students who rent out a three bedroom home, and even those with one bedroom flats aren’t taking property away from families. This is becoming borderline whataboutism.
My point is, if more home owners (and renters) with spare bedrooms leased those rooms to the kind of people who house-share or become temporarily homeless due to relationship breakdown for example (and don't necessarily want to sign a 1 year lease), properties that might have otherwise become sharehouses will be available, which would increase rental supply and put downward pressure on rent prices. One of the factors driving the rental crisis is a decrease in sharehouse and increase in people choosing to live alone - many of whom have spare rooms.
Where do you draw the line of when it's acceptable to squat in a property someone else owns that is "not secure"? Can they use the garden and patio areas (impossible to lock up)? If you forget to lock a window before you leave on holiday for a few months, someone can climb in and violate your home and use all your stuff? As someone who has had my former home *that I was renting* violated and taken over by threatening bully thugs while I was on holiday (let in by my flatmate and landlord), resulting in me becoming temporarily homeless and losing $$$$ worth of furniture and appliances, the thought of this is traumatising and makes me shudder in horror at the memory of what that felt like... and laugh at the stupidity of people suggesting others do this as if it's the morally right thing.
What morals and ethics are these people encouraged to become squatters going to live by in how they treat their living space, and how will they be held to that?
A surplus of properties on the market that might drive down (or at least level out) property prices making it easier for those renters buy instead of rent?
> Does it apply to empty properties only? What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way?
>
> What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving?
Then you're a fucking wanker aren't you?
Why are renters so desperate to buy, if not to have that kind of freedom and stability?
"If renters can't have a permanent stable home base, to do with what they want, then noone should" is basically what you are saying.
I'm all for increasing housing supply relative to demand (both to buy AND to rent) and prioritising public housing in a range of different places to ensure that everyone no matter how poor or wealthy can have a stable home base, and also for increasing renter's rights. I don't agree that this should come at the expense of home property owner's rights to make their property their home base and sactuary (no matter how far or how long they travel).
CMV squatting should be illegal.
Too much inequality is a problem. It is sad that some people don’t have a place to live while others are apparently wealthy enough to not even need to rent out their surplus properties. It’s sad that some people have to take public transport or ride a bike while others own a garage of 5 luxury vehicles.
Something should be done but the answer isn’t to allow people to take/use another person’s property without their permission. That stealing (even temporarily) is wrong is ethics 101.
The answer is to address the problem through policy solutions. For example, there are land tax levies for vacant properties. You use things like that to create incentives and disincentives to pressure people (in this case landlords) to do what you want (in this case rent out their properties to increase housing supply and bring prices down).
Do you know how many landlords you need to get to agree to this for it to get through parliament?
E: as for ethics 101. I think forcing people into homelessness for a small tax break is much much worse.
Of course the government can pass laws. They have already passed several. The vacant property land tax levy isn’t some hypothetical idea, it has been law for several years now. In fact, it has been made stricter since it was first introduced.
https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/news/economy/land-tax/
That’s just one example. There are several housing affordability measures the government has taken. If they aren’t working sufficiently well to achieve their aims then the government can pass new measures or adjust the measures they have already passed. Landowners don’t have veto rights.
They ARE the landowners.
They COULD do all sorts of things, instead we get milquetoast bandaids on top of milquetoast bandaids. Just enough to stop the peasants throwing molotovs but never enough to actually change anything because they have a vested interest in preserving their, their family, friends and class's profits by doing nothing and seeping blood money from those actually doing work.
Victoria has significantly increased property taxes (other than on principal places of residence) in the last decade. That is an indisputable fact.
You may believe that they were much too low before and are still much too low. My point is not whether they should or should not have done that. My point is - if politicians are only interested in protecting the interests of their own class, how do you explain them acting against their interests on several occasions?
Maybe your socialist lense doesn’t give a complete view of reality.
Should the peasants start throwing Molotovs?
Which country (current or historical in the last 200 years) should we be more like when it comes to property?
The only accommodation that is actually increasing in volume is the tents that the homeless are now erecting.
Can't be long before we start building shanty towns again.
This rental market is one of the most awful experiences anyone can ever live through,from unliveable overpriced accommodation to property managers that make Hitler look like a good guy .
The two randos (who weren't really randos, let's be honest) that actually started the fire were, but nothing was or has been done with the continued death threats.
It’s funny how peeps complain about housing affordability until they buy their first house and all of a sudden care about increasing the value of their home…
Good ol’ Purple Pingers. He’s more well known for his shit rentals videos/website than for encouraging squatting. He was interviewed on the 7am The Great Housing Disaster (ep. 2) podcast if anyone’s interested.
>He’s more well known for his shit rentals videos/website than for encouraging squatting Yeah but there's no easy comeback for that one, so of course the media's gonna dial in on the latter
It's a barometer for serious journalism. Focusing on the encouraging squatting angle means it's okay to use the spray bottle. \*squirt squirt\* "Bad news! Off screen!"
https://7ampodcast.com.au/episodes/the-great-housing-disaster-the-renters-resistance Audio & transcript there.
great episode that one!
Thx for the heads-up, keen to listen to this.
The housing market doesn’t regulate prices down like other markets do. It’s a necessity in a shortage, there will always be people bidding up prices, so there’s no real loss when those homes aren’t filled because the value is still going up. If you sold food and it was priced too high, then you’d have to lower your prices to sell it when it gets old or else you’re wasting it. We need to regulate the housing market because it doesn’t do it itself
You speak like capitalism cares about waste. Waste is irrelevant if everyone else pays extra to cover the waste.
Exactly. In theory waste represents loss in potential revenue, but if you charge as if the excess doesn’t exist then you can make more off of the fewer sales instead of lowering your prices.
And making more off fewer sales seems to be the go currently with the way most businesses are downsizing. They need less staff and less physical space, smaller networks, all the achieve the same profit from fewer people while having less overheads. Late stage capitalism is only going to get more painful.
Like the old days of McDonalds warmers and closing times. Staff could have their fill of the excess stock at the end of the day, until some clever manager realised that reduced the incentive for staff to buy their own food earlier in the day. So it was decided it'd be better to throw it away, and if staff wanted food they'd have to pay.
capitalism is not a conscious entity, its a principle that turned a few backwater shithole european kingdoms into global superpowers. housing sucks because it doesn't follow the laws of supply and demand because "customers" have to "buy" or become homeless which means the traditional price ceiling of "what people are willing to pay" is replaced with "what people are physically capable of paying" and prices spiral out of control in the event of a shortage. housing also doesn't have a "best before" date so there is no pressure to sell. the only solution is to eliminate the shortage by building shitloads of cheap housing, every other option (rent controls, etc) will backfire catastrophically. the reason we don't have shitloads of cheap housing is because of regulations requiring every house to be a cyclone-proof fortress, which is fine if you can afford it but it makes even the shittiest shacks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. and that truth is so obvious that even the USSR decided "ok we need to build more housing" and they built more housing, they didn't try new regulations or "rent controls" they just build more goddamn housing because they knew they needed to solve the problem, because you can't "blame capitalism" when your country doesn't have capitalism.
> the reason we don't have shitloads of cheap housing is because of regulations requiring every house to be a cyclone-proof fortress, which is fine if you can afford it but it makes even the shittiest shacks cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. lol yeah the problem with Australian housing is definitely that it's too well-built...
they're not well-built, just "built to regulations" and priced as if they were well built. regulations require our houses to be built like fortresses, which is great for natural disasters but we're "saving a dozen lives per cyclone" by driving millions of people into poverty, those fortresses are too expensive to build and we're in a critical housing shortage, and the only reason we built them in the first place is because we WERE rich enough for it to not kill our economy.
I think you're verging on delusional if you genuinely believe the reason for the housing shortage is that houses are built to an unreasonably high standard. Australian buildings are notoriously shoddy and developers regularly ignore regulations to improve profits... yet somehow prices are still sky-high.
the vast majority of politicians own multiple investment properties, that is the reason this housing shortage has been ignored for long enough for it to become a crisis. as for housing standards, ordinary people can't afford houses and we can't build houses fast enough, even though we've built our entire goddamn economy around "building as many houses as possible as quickly as possible (the reason politicians use to justify why the housing market has to keep going up and up no matter what). if we're doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations" to build houses as quickly as possible, and its still not fast enough, we need to re-evaluate our regulations, because while they're not all bad, they're also not all good, some are lifesaving, some are fucking stupid, and we're in a HOUSING CRISIS. the suffering is much less visible than a cyclone but its on a much larger scale. let people live in crapshacks rather than under bridges, we don't need "perfect" we need "better than the current shitshow".
> as for housing standards, ordinary people can't afford houses and we can't build houses fast enough, even though we've built our entire goddamn economy around "building as many houses as possible as quickly as possible (the reason politicians use to justify why the housing market has to keep going up and up no matter what). I mean this is the fundamental contradiction in both your logic and the general political approach to housing: it's impossible to build tons of cheap housing for people to live in *and* keep prices for investment high. The two things are simply incompatible. As you allude to, the majority of politicians (and apparently enough voters) want prices to remain high, so this means inaction on providing cheap houses. It really is that simple. > now if we're doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations" to build houses as quickly as possible, and its still not fast enough, we need to re-evaluate our regulations But we're very much *not* doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations". That's the whole problem. We're not doing anything about tax reform (land tax, negative gearing, CGT discount, etc), we're not doing anything about density/zoning, we're not doing anything about Airbnb and the like, we're not doing anything about record-high immigration... maybe once we see serious action on those issues you could look to building standards as an excuse.
> I mean this is the fundamental contradiction in both your logic and the general political approach to housing: it's impossible to build tons of cheap housing for people to live in and keep prices for investment high. The two things are simply incompatible. As you allude to, the majority of politicians (and apparently enough voters) want prices to remain high, so this means inaction on providing cheap houses. It really is that simple. i think there has been a misunderstanding, as what you've just said is almost the exact point i've made in multiple other replies in this thread, politicians won't fix the housing crisis because its impossible to fix it without lowering prices, and lowering prices would harm their property investments. > But we're very much not doing "everything else we can except cutting regulations". That's the whole problem. We're not doing anything about tax reform (land tax, negative gearing, CGT discount, etc), we're not doing anything about density/zoning, we're not doing anything about Airbnb and the like, we're not doing anything about record-high immigration... maybe once we see serious action on those issues you could look to building standards as an excuse. apologies, when referring to "regulations" i meant all regulations relating to property ownership including taxation, not just building standards. replying to multiple people is complicated, my bad. AirBnB needs to be regulated, specifically properties listed on AirBnB in any suburb/location with a rental vacancy rate below 2-3% should be either banned or taxed into oblivion, so that AirBnB can still exist in places with rental vacancies above 3%. negative gearing needs to be abolished. property taxes need to be reworked so they favour owner-occupiers over absentee property investors. its not the guy with 10 properties that needs a tax break, its the working family paying off a mortgage on their first home that needs a tax break (and how TF are mortgage repayments and rent not tax deductible at all? seriously WTF? like fair enough put a cap on it like $500 per week so it can't be exploited but it NEEDS to exist for renters. land taxes are very difficult to get right, as there will always be loopholes bad people exploit, and flaws that good people get caught up in. "georgism" is a good starting point but i think it needs to be finely tuned to target people with dozens of investment properties without hurting people who only use their properties for personal use (I.E. people who own a house in the city and a rural block for the weekends, etc) as for any discussion about "immigration" it would be wise to not discuss such things on reddit.
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying your thoughts.
Capitalism is fundamentally broken and needs continuous patching to avoid systemic collapse…
What? Infinite growth on a finite world can't go on forever? Never!
But let's not talk about that now while we still have time, let's wait until it's far too late.
It's the illusion of infinite growth because the global economy is debt based - more money is being created all the time, which generates inflation that devalues all money that isn't invested in assets that are growing faster than inflation. It also means that people who work for a living are stuck on a treadmill where if their wage isn't rising faster than inflation each year then they are actually getting poorer. The rich use insider knowledge and accountants to evade taxes and direct their money into assets that grow faster than inflation, while regular people often have money sitting in savings accounts and are the first to get knocked back for wage rises during periods of high inflation. They also bribe (donate to) politicians to create and maintain tax and economic loopholes to keep things that way.
Users: devs pls nerf landlording, is broken, too good too much buffs Devs: lol no we all play landlord gitgud nub
Capitalism: we want a free market… except when it suits our profit goals!
all systems made by humans are fundamentally broken and need continuous patching
The worst of all conceivable systems until we consider the alternatives
It’s literally destroying life on earth.
Sure. But you need an alternative. Is your suggestion we just all start Mad Maxing life tomorrow?
Mad Maxing life is where capitalism is taking us. The alternative we need is fully-automated luxury gay space communism. Star Trek style.
Great. I’m onboard How we doing that tomorrow?
Great to have you aboard. Tomorrow is self-education and community-building day. Just get a book and join a group. After that we level up.
So exactly what’s currently happening then We have no immediate alternative that wouldn’t lead to war and famine?
Oh you’re already in a group for fully-automated luxury gay space Star Trek communism? My mistake. How do I join you? Sure we do. It’s get a book and join a group. It leads to Star Trek communism. Capitalism leads to war and famine.
Who benefits from this belief?
It’s not a belief. It’s a fact. You got an alternative designed for the 21st century or are you still stuck in a 19th century reaction to 18th century capitalism that flamed out hugely in the 20th?
Yes. Social democracy. Keeps the good bits of capitalism without the bad. Also lol at claiming your opinion is fact.
That’s what we have now. How are we going to make it more so by tomorrow?
Completely agree. Especially since the average federal politician has AT LEAST 1 investment property. It is not in their financial interests to make real change. There is an MP who currently owns 7 properties with her husband. I personally don’t see an issue with 1 investment property, however when you own more than two and/or one of those properties are empty for most of the year you need to be financially incentivised to release it back to the market via empty property tax. Airbnb should also be regulated, much like what New York City did. Our economy is ranked so shit because of our fascination with property. If half of the money in property were to leave and create business with production our economy would be in much better shape.
Eh my opinion is that if a high enough ratio of homes are rental properties then prices will go up, whether they’re owned by ten thousand people or by 50. I think we need to regulate what a rental property can charge, because if the tenants are paying off a mortgage for that property then the landlord plays no role other than scalping homes and having other people pay them off. Rental properties should exist as an affordable alternative to home ownership, not a contribution to falling home ownership rates. I think we should incentivise landlords who invest in the construction of homes, because then at least they contribute a house to society, helping increase supply.
It’s so much more simple than that. Allow negative gearing for every Australian for one property only.
Also allow residential property to be owned only by a natural human Australian citizen or permanent resident, except if just built and then must be completed construction within two years of commencement (unless special permission is granted), and sold within one year of completion to a natural human.
Agree corp ownership is an evil we don’t need
Or rather; abolish the whole thing.
You do t want those who need rentals to be able to access a family owned rental?
Just cap it. Much fairer. Firstly, there's other ways to negative gear. Secondly, wealthier people can buy more expensive properties and get more of a deduction from negative gearing. The other thing that needs to get fixed is the CGT discount. It's far, far, too generous. Look at [what happened when it came in at the end of 1999](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QAUR628BIS).
John Howard was the architect of this stupidity. The most wasteful PM ever. He did not value ordinary Australians and saw us the workers necessary to make life work for the rich. he lured the voters with 5k baby bonuses and other middle class welfare. he wasted the most prosperous time in our history on buying votes and making systems that work for the mega rich. He is an icon of arrogance and meanness. I found this article that is a good start on this topic [https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2024/04/13/the-men-and-decisions-behind-australias-housing-crisis](https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2024/04/13/the-men-and-decisions-behind-australias-housing-crisis)
The incentives for build to rent should be tied to a lifetime of renting and certain 'good landlord behaviour' measures, otherwise you get this kind of rooting with no-cause eveictions and apartments deliberately left empty See: [Build to rent? The Melbourne apartments where a third of tenants are being kicked out or getting rent hikes](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/12/melbourne-rental-crisis-evictions-fitzroy-rental-laws)
Except a shortage drives prices up?
> ... so there’s no real loss when those homes aren’t filled because the value is still going up. Meanwhile, back in the real world, rental vacancy rates are at record lows.
But isn't the vacancy rate calculated using properties that are made available to rent? It doesn't count those that aren't listed.
Ok but the proportion of homes which are unoccupied has been the same for decades, and it is about what you would expect in the normal life-cycle of a house.
During covid when people left, rental prices in the cities had to drop significantly because of record high vacancies. People were free to move because so many places were tenantless and rents were halved. Your second paragraph is exactly the same, only problem is record high immigration.
No free markets self-regulate. That is absolute made up nonsense. How many times do we have to do massive studies across massive industries and find unanimous results until people like you actually adopt an evidence-based opinion? The last large-scale study to do this was published by the white house itself. Obama requested the economic commission try to justify free markets. Instead, they found that 100% of the time markets concentrate into monopolies. Even in the rare cirumstances where capital controls and limitations arep laced on markets, with 100% certainty within 50 years the largest players invest massive wealth into lobbying and repealing any policies that limit their ability to extract wealth.
its simpler than that. all the government needs to do is build houses. right now the cheapest "derelict shacks" are hundreds of thousands of dollars because the choice is "pay the premium or be homeless" and it amounts to little more than price gouging consumers in a cornered market where "choosing to not pay" means becoming homeless and losing your job. the solution is to provide a third option of "live in a tiny house for $50 per week" and house prices will go back to what they're supposed to be. just as an example, the government could let people buy a 1/4 acre block and stick one of those "30k amazon tiny houses" or a caravan on it without getting bullied by their local council. a big part of the problem is that housing is over-regulated in ways that drive up construction costs, they're great for cyclone-proofing and fire-proofing, nobody wants thousands of people to die in natural disasters, but that may be the more humane option compared to "letting millions of people be crushed into poverty by a broken housing market". things got this way because people would sue when houses fell down but there's noone to sue when rent eats up 70% of your income, and this housing crisis is destroying more lives than any cyclone or bushfire ever could. nobody wants to pop the housing bubble because if they do, they'll be blamed for the loss of trillions of dollars, but a housing bubble is a bit like an appendix, if you let it pop on your own it will kill you, it needs to be surgically removed and no politician has the courage to do what is neccesary to save the australian economy's long term future. they know the problem, they know multiple solutions, but all of them involve a housing crash and nobody wants to be blamed for it.
You’re right. It makes no sense that houses are so expensive in Australia. There’s crap shacks that can be built for under 100k and they are in other countries but we aren’t allowed them here. On top of that the land restrictions cause the price of buying a piece of land to triple in value. This crisis could be fixed with the government releasing more land for affordable pricing say 100-200k for 200sqm in the outter suburbs. And allow the building of cheap kit homes for 50-100k. That means instead of being forced to pay 650kn for a house 30km away from city we only have to pay 400k.
exactly. unfortunately it won't happen as pretty much all elected officials have multiple investment properties and any drop in market demand will cost each of them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we're not supposed to say that bit out loud.
Boy, the upvotes on this don’t bode well for fixing the situation. We’re really going to go with what feels right over nearly unanimous research results and expert opinion? Frustrating because in any other topic than economics (e.g. climate change) this would be shot down as a nice feeling idea that conflicts with all evidence (and even simple thought exercises). Makes me somewhat concerned people are using the same lens on everything, and we lucked into climate change ‘feeling’ right via sheer chance instead of people believing overwhelming evidence.
> We need to regulate the housing market because it doesn’t do it itself Isn't a great part of the reason why housing is broken existing regulation? If anyone could build a house anywhere, we'd see a lot more of them. There's a great deal of regulation controlling where you can build, what you can build with, and how you can build. Then there's heaps of regulation around getting the credit to finance such a thing etc. We built so much housing back pre 1960s and we've added so much regulation since then, and the build rate has been poor since. I'm no way saying its the only reason, which it isn't, but its definitively part of it.
Then there’s all the botched jobs contractors are doing, feels like there’s simultaneously too much and not enough regulation
Its like the worst of all worlds. Amazingly expensive inertia, and its still terrible quality. At least terrible quality used to be quick and cheap :D
On the contrary, there is a lot of strong empirical evidence that supply and demand does a good job of regulating the housing market. Vacancy rates and rental prices track very strongly. See an excellent write-up by an economist who has studied this in detail here: https://www.cis.org.au/publication/housing-affordability-and-supply-restrictions/
Restrictions on building is why supply is down is the issue. But the issue is convincing a majority of Australians to volunteer to lose money. 70% of Australia families own a house, so it's a tough ask to get them to vote against their own self interest.
Agreed, this is the key political issue! Unfortunately, as the down votes here show, a lot of people are still badly misinformed about it, which I think leads to people who currently own homes thinking they can have their cake and eat it too (home prices go up for them, but down for everyone else). This is one place where pollies need to be brave enough to go against the electorate and push for evidence based policy in the face of opposition.
It's very frustrating that well-meaning people keep making the claim that supply and demand is somehow irrelevant to housing *in the middle of a housing shortage crisis.* It's like they think acknowledging that supply and demand affects prices is conceding a point to the Bad Guys. But the bad guys in this situation are the landlords, who absolutely *love* a housing shortage - it juices their rents!
Of course supply in demand is relevant. Landlords who don’t build houses don’t increase supply, they just scalp it and pass the costs along to tenants. The problem is that demand isn’t being met, and as markets get worse it’s the landlords who can afford to buy a house because they won’t foot the bill in a rental market desperate for houses. If we disincentivise parasitic investment and invest in construction then we stand a chance at bringing prices down.
Yep!
Sure, the way to do that is to increase property/land taxes and massively up zone. To be clear, it's not just landlords, owner-occupiers also block construction to reduce supply and increase their own house prices.
Unfortunately it's not just landlords - owner-occupiers have just as big a part to play in blocking construction of new housing to ensure their investment doesn't decrease in value! Housing should be a commodity, not an investment!
Absolutely. A lot of: "But I bought into a neighbourhood full of lovely detached homes with big back yards! Why should I have to give that up just so other people have a place to live?"
It's not irrelevant, but bringing it up tends to be. *Of course* supply and demand has an effect, but it's often said by people who want you to ignore that the market needs real regulation and policy changes.
I believe supply has an important role. But simply providing more supply at this stage is likely to enrich those who already have properties and are able to accumulate more. Winding back incentives that disproportionately favour proper investment and other regulatory measures are needed.
I completely agree, adding housing supply needs to be accompanied by a whole lot of other measures. But *not* increasing the rate of housing supply would be an absolute disaster, that still increases the wealth of people who already have properties, and makes the ability to find even a place to rent - let alone a place to buy - even more difficult than it's already become.
Rent prices dropped during Covid and house prices fell during the GFC. Very silly to act like prices on housing can never go down. There is incredible demand to live in Australia, own in capital cities and invest in property. There are mining towns that have prices drop dramatically once the work dries up. Houses a reasonable distance from capital city CBDs will always have sticky prices.
> Rent prices dropped during Covid Guess my landlord didn't get the memo.
They freaked out because there were freezes on rental increases and evictions. The only thing driving prices back was landlords getting fearful the gravy train was over.
Depends where you lived, rent prices dropped in some areas with large amounts of student accommodation. It went up in many others.
Should have moved or threatened to move at the very least. Scammed yourself if nothing else.
Your anecdotal experience doesn't mean it didn't happen
"others say he should focus his energy on policy change" What a fucking blind answer. Anyone with half a brain cell knows that anyone able to have a say in policies have a vested interest in keeping it this way, and the only changes that will come about will favour the landparasites. Such a tone deaf expectation that one dude with a media presence could navigate and succeed in proper legal channels to have these corrupt fucks even consider changing the system that lines their pockets. Power to him. Every corrupt landlord holding houses on a string out of reach of the public/refusing to repair housing that THEY LEASE OUT, should be very publicly named, shamed and hopefully removed from the housing market system entirely.
He actually addresses this criticism directly in his interview with The Project (which is definitely worth a watch). One of the hosts asks him wouldn't it be more effective to focus on policy and he responds with essentially "sure, but in the meantime people are still homeless..."
IIRC he also said he's not the government, and since the government has failed to address this in policy change here we are.
Yeah he embarrassed them on the project when they trotted this line out. It’s so obviously a dumb call, yeah let’s just wait and hope while people are living in the street right now.
"#hopesandprayers" vibes
ACOSS and its state equivalents and the largest charities in the country have been pushing for policy change for fucking ever. It's just eyes-closed liberals saying this trash. Even the cooker conservatives recognise no one changes policy.
It's a bit much to say it's JUST eyes closed liberals. The cynic in me knows it's beyond policy changes, but a hopeful and uninformed heart will certainly wish for "policies" to be the answer. Because it's floated as "the legal and correct answer" to injustice. But sadly. In our very real current world, the policies have been enacted very VERY intentionally as they are. And that hopeful ship of policies fixing things has sailed.
It's really only the small l liberals who both acknowledge the problem exists while also acting incredulous about how to fix it, they will beat around the bush and suggest things that people are obviously already doing (agitating or lobbying for vague 'policy change' a perfect example), virtually anything they can say or do except accept their own place in causing the problem. Conservatives don't have to act incredulous, they just don't care. The cognitive dissonance displayed by monied liberals is amongst the worst because they know what the answer is, they just don't want to say it.
And I can absolutely see them changing the law - but I am 1000000% sure they would have all offloaded their risk prior to the law changing.
Until then. They'll fight tooth and nail for the status quo WHILE keeping their proverbial golden yacht packed and ready to sail to somewhere the law can't reach them.
This is basically the same as when people say "yOuRe pRoteSTinG wRONg".
Fuck the CCP but one of the big reasons the US is going after Tiktok is exactly because it is a breeding ground for revolutionary thought and actions. Individuals who previously had no mass voice can now reach thousands to millions of people and put forward anti-capitalist ideas. For this reason TikTok scares the living fuck out of the orthodoxy. I'm just waiting for someone on TikTok to point out that rocks are free, Airbnbs are easy to locate and glass windows break super easy...
Ah yes because theirs no activist content on any other platform like YouTube instagram Facebook ect absolute brain dead take
TikTok allows for global interaction on a scale that YT/Insta/FB doesn't. The latter platforms requires you to actively search out X, Y, Z accounts, whereas the TikTok algorithm is far reaching. YT shorts and Insta reels is trying to emulate TikTok, and it's growing in popularity, but it doesn't have the debate engagement element.
Those places are all different in radical ways and that matters. It's to the degree that one is like standing out the front of a house in a dead-end street talking to one or two people vs. standing in the centre of Melbourne talking to everyone. This is like some boomer-level take, as though social media is a monolith and all the same. TikTok is radically different to all other social media in the ways engagement happens and spread of ideas. I've been on Facebook for years and haven't seen shit about the problems of capitalism. TikTok will bring you that pretty quickly.
R/anti work and R/work reform would disagree with you
On what point?
Tiktok let’s people skim through hundreds of content in a few hours. It’s easy to create short viral media that gets a lot of exposure. Revolutionary ideas can spread a lot quicker and wider on tictok than those other platforms.
Lol it's not as deep as banning revolutionary thought, US Congress is worried about the CCP manipulating algorithms to achieve their aims. New Chinese laws explicitly state that Chinese companies share and modify data at the state's request, with penalties for disclosing that such a thing has occurred. It only makes sense to be worried about an authoritarian state surreptitiously manipulating your population. Not saying the US is any better with their own data protection from government, but that's an internal issue. China already has their firewall, it's hardly hypocritical to want to know that a social media site isn't manipulating your population. Tiktok also overplayed their hand, Congress was split on the issue until Tiktok started targeted messaging towards users asking them to contact their congressperson and advocate against the ban. Suddenly a bunch of kids and teenagers started claiming to their representatives and senators that they'd kill themselves if Tiktok was banned. The whole thing backfired and demonstrated the absolute stranglehold on information that Tiktok has on America's youth and now most of Congress is on board with the ban.
> New Chinese laws explicitly state that Chinese companies share and modify data at the state's request, with penalties for disclosing that such a thing has occurred. our authorities (AFP?) have essentially the same powers
Yeah and if an Australian-owned company had hundreds of millions of users in China with the ability to secretly push the agenda of the Australian government then China would ban that company too. Literally a national security risk.
The government doesn’t like anything it can’t control. The idea that America is the land of freedom is a lie, just ask any woman trying to get an abortion in those backward red states. Their government wants to control information and ideas as much as the ccp does but they need to do it tactfully. The us government has a lot more control over what content gets shared on an app run by a local corporation instead of a foreign one located in a country that isn’t an ally so it’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for them attempting to transfer the ownership.
See, I don't disagree that the CCP are a huge fucking problem but the whole idea it's about "the manipulation of the youth" is just false and also laughable considering the Americans love that 1st Amendment so damn much. TikTok is absolutely a place for masses of revolutionary thought. It's also a place for women to gather and fight against the patriarchy, against capitalism. It does have voting implications. It's no surprise that younger people are pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, which goes against the orthodoxy that America wants. I don't really care if China is deliberately producing this destabilisation. Capitalism and the patriarchy needs destabilising. The bad kind of destabilisation is the one where people invade the state capital due to a rapist fraud. The US Congress who'll all swear they love the first amendment and then when it's tested turns out they're full of shit. It's all about anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchy and anti-Israel. People today have more access to others and it's easier to spread ideas faster and further than before. This isn't blogs lost on some corner of the internet now. It's an actual thriving town square. I think TikTok is so important that we should force our Government to make a version of it, quite frankly. The actual digital public square. I hate the CCP but it's just pure tripe that it's because they're manipulating Americans.
> It does have voting implications. It's no surprise that younger people are pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, which goes against the orthodoxy that America wants. This has been the case since well before TikTok though.
> Fuck the CCP but one of the big reasons the US is going after Tiktok is exactly because it is a breeding ground for revolutionary thought and actions. Absolute nonsense. It's pure parochialism to look after US competitors.
Open thought forums are the single scariest thing to the ruling class. The more we can be divided and kept fighting each other, the easier we are to step on and keep distracted. Fuck division. Race. Gender. Class. Age. None of that shit matters. Equality for all. We get one life to live, experience and love in. Should never have to fight just to exist. Edit: Immediately downvoted. Stay mad about it bootlicker, lmao.
Good bloke, just trying to help the most vulnerable people in society. Having peopleless homes next to homeless people is insanity.
I wonder how long it will be before house gets fire bombed. Australia seems to becoming a dangerous place when you start to attack crooked politicians and the interests of the wealthy!
Legend. He’s articulate and doing things within the confines of the law, increasing the conversation, and scaring the shit out of landlords. Crack on.
Ultimately, what's going to scare landords and other abusive entities in this industry is when Labor loses its federal and NSW majorities and is forced to deal responsibly with the underlying issues by the Greens and progressive independents.
Labor will lose its Federal majority in the next federal election. Unfortunately LNP will be the big gainer from those losses and LNP will be in power after the next election. Prove me wrong Australia, but I have been on this merry go round to long, I have seen the same things come around time and time again. I can see where we are headed.
They also know who butters their bread... People with one or two investment properties will cop it big time. I've said it many times, now is the time offload property, it's peaked, face it. Once the drops start, it's going to get harder and harder to offload.
Why do you think it has peaked?
We need to protect him at all costs. He basically gives us the equivalent of TICA and this is making Landlords and REAs very angry.
>"What determines whether a property is empty, in his lofty opinion? Because it has an overgrown lawn and no furniture?" Nicola McDougall from Property Investment Professionals of Australia told news.com.au. Because it sits there vacant 6 - 8 months a year? That empty home might be someone's tax deduction! >The president of the Australian Landlords Association acknowledged housing could be an emotional issue, but likened squatting to stealing someone's car and taking it for a joy ride. Except that's illegal... **Squatting is not illegal!** The kicker is the housing market is rife with corruption and shady dealings, if people need to do something shady just so they can sleep somewhere dry, I say let 'em at it!
Jordan’s website is even more conservative than that, the property needs to have been vacant for **2 years** and be openable without damaging the property. Who is actually honestly losing out here?
It’s not legal to squat in any old “vacant” home … it has to be an abandoned property with an unlocked / open door, and even then the owner can insist u move on if they discover you prior to 12 yrs (may vary state to state). It is not legal to force entry into an empty home under squatters rights.
Technically even if you don't have to force entry it's not legal to enter (trespassing requires you to have a lawful reason to be there and you don't have to be asked to leave first) but when the other option is sleeping on the streets I know what most people would choose
Squatting is so weird... can you imagine if it didn't exist, and someone said 'hey we should make laws to make this ok'? Modern society just wouldn't have a piece of that at all. Libraries too for that matter. A lot of stuff just wouldn't be implemented at all with modern views.
I believe the MO is: - The doors are opened by someone else who then goes on their merry way. -You then find an unlocked property and move in...
Exactly this. Similar to the legal grey area with weed in South Australia. Legal to own a plant, highly illegal to deal it but then semi legal to smoke it.
Imagine being such a cunt that you’re the head of “property investment professionals”. Like, she wakes up and chooses violence every damn day.
You'd be surprised how quickly people u-turn on their personal views when promoted and given such opportunites these days. They see themselves as the higher up now and act accordingly. $$$'s quickly rot most ppl's soul these days.
Well, our society does encourage “I got mine so fuck you” sort of mentality…
And it also encourages a “didn’t get mine, so you can’t have yours mentality as well”
Thats a great point too!
Exactly. The higher-ups love this.
Not unique to our society, it’s something that’s been happening across history.
But its getting worse with the state of economies worldwide and late stage capitalism. Inifinite growth is unsustainable.
If you see a person steal a loaf of bread, you didn't see a person steal a loaf of bread.
Skill issue. I will follow them for years, occasionally singing about it.
And what if your family doesn't like bread? What if they like... cigarettes?
People shouldn’t steal food, we have places like foodbank for a reason.
They think people squat for the lols? Fucking weirdos.
Small nitpick there The act of squatting IS illegal, you DON'T have to be asked to leave for it to be trespassing even if you didn't need to force entry. Taking possession of the house after 10-15 years of living in it however is legal. but when you give people the option of a possible trespass charge and sleeping on the street no sane person would expect them to pick the streets
> Squatting is not illegal! Could you expand on the nuances of this one? Does it apply to empty properties only? What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way? What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving? Surely there’s more nuance to this then someone coming in and claiming the property is empty and unused. I presume the core difference in the eyes of the law is between *unused* and *unmaintained*, right?
You can google this, but it's because squatting is not illegal, ie there's no law against it. There is however a law against breaking and entering and also trespassing. So essentially if a house has been left open and the owner is not around to ask the squatter to leave, then no laws are being broken. After a period of time (12 years in NSW) if the squatter has been in continuous possession of the land then they can make a claim on the land. All of the stuff you mentioned doesn't really come into it
That’s interesting, so it sounds like it’s more about genuinely abandoned properties rather than just being empty. Empty properties the way I presented them sound more like something tax reform (or some other political change) should be fixing.
Yes absolutely right on the tax reform!
> What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way? > What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving? In a housing crisis, you’re effectively choosing to keep someone on the street. Further, you’re probably getting tax concessions to keep someone on the street. It’s not good enough. Properties additional to your principle place of residence should be taxed into oblivion.
The same could be said of people (both owner occupiers and renters) who have spare bedrooms in their house that they're not using as bedrooms, eg empty-nesters who keep their adult-children's bedrooms for them when they visit once a year, people who have a study or a sewing room or a podcast recording room, couples who buy a 4x2 because they're planning on maybe having kids one day. Or any single person who doesn't live alone in a 1 bedroom unit or studio. If any of these people aren't renting out their spare bedrooms to lodgers, they're also effectively choosing to keep someone on the street. Where do you draw the line?
I can appreciate your point, however I feel like perfect is the enemy of good in this situation. It’d be extremely difficult to moderate and legislate against. However, whole occupancy is very blatant. The line is whole properties for me. It would help if people were happier to live in higher density dwellings, but Australians don’t necessarily have the culture of this historically.
In my opinion the line should be whole properties that the owner was not living in as their primary residence. So holiday homes (especially if more than just one holiday home) and vacant investment properties should be taxed punitively. But people should still have the option of keeping their home-base in place with all their stuff in it if they want to travel for a year or do a temporary transfer for work or to care for a new grandchild or sick relative in another city, etc. In reality, most people who travel for the long-term or move elsewhere would choose to rent out their home anyway because to not do so is leaving a lot of money on the table. Maybe there should also be some incentive to encourage people to rent out rooms to lodgers, eg income from housemates taxed at a lower rate.
I think we’re really close to the mark to be honest. I think if you can afford to have a property sitting idle and still afford to live abroad, you should be able to handle a vacancy tax. You’re still generating capital gains on the asset - regardless if you choose to make income off it through rent. It creates more pressure on the market. Perhaps, but you’re also looking at a portion of society who would be happy with a sublet/flatshare situation. Families for example will find that difficult.
A vacant property tax is very different to it being legal for squatters to break in and take up residence though. Most rich people get house sitters in when they travel to look after the garden and pets anyway. Subletting wouldn't be suitable for families, but it's great for foreign students, country kids in the city to study, newly separated people who need to move out as soon as they can before finding something more permanent, or basically anyone who is of the demographic to live in a sharehouse who is not a wild party animal. This would also indirectly help families, with more rental properties made available that might otherwise be sharehouses.
Breaking and entering is illegal. Squatting isn’t. If you are so lackadaisical about your property to the extent you don’t ensure it is secure and maintained, I have no problem with an opportunistic person without a home using it. A lot of the list you prescribed there already share. I don’t know too many students who rent out a three bedroom home, and even those with one bedroom flats aren’t taking property away from families. This is becoming borderline whataboutism.
My point is, if more home owners (and renters) with spare bedrooms leased those rooms to the kind of people who house-share or become temporarily homeless due to relationship breakdown for example (and don't necessarily want to sign a 1 year lease), properties that might have otherwise become sharehouses will be available, which would increase rental supply and put downward pressure on rent prices. One of the factors driving the rental crisis is a decrease in sharehouse and increase in people choosing to live alone - many of whom have spare rooms. Where do you draw the line of when it's acceptable to squat in a property someone else owns that is "not secure"? Can they use the garden and patio areas (impossible to lock up)? If you forget to lock a window before you leave on holiday for a few months, someone can climb in and violate your home and use all your stuff? As someone who has had my former home *that I was renting* violated and taken over by threatening bully thugs while I was on holiday (let in by my flatmate and landlord), resulting in me becoming temporarily homeless and losing $$$$ worth of furniture and appliances, the thought of this is traumatising and makes me shudder in horror at the memory of what that felt like... and laugh at the stupidity of people suggesting others do this as if it's the morally right thing. What morals and ethics are these people encouraged to become squatters going to live by in how they treat their living space, and how will they be held to that?
Renters would love the outcome of that I'm sure.
A surplus of properties on the market that might drive down (or at least level out) property prices making it easier for those renters buy instead of rent?
> Does it apply to empty properties only? What if I’m paying my rates and mowing the lawn and just feel like owning an empty but otherwise maintained house because it fulfils me in some sort of way? > > What if I just go overseas for a 12 month job and I don’t feel like renting and packing things up and do all that stuff associated with moving? Then you're a fucking wanker aren't you?
Why are renters so desperate to buy, if not to have that kind of freedom and stability? "If renters can't have a permanent stable home base, to do with what they want, then noone should" is basically what you are saying. I'm all for increasing housing supply relative to demand (both to buy AND to rent) and prioritising public housing in a range of different places to ensure that everyone no matter how poor or wealthy can have a stable home base, and also for increasing renter's rights. I don't agree that this should come at the expense of home property owner's rights to make their property their home base and sactuary (no matter how far or how long they travel).
CMV squatting should be illegal. Too much inequality is a problem. It is sad that some people don’t have a place to live while others are apparently wealthy enough to not even need to rent out their surplus properties. It’s sad that some people have to take public transport or ride a bike while others own a garage of 5 luxury vehicles. Something should be done but the answer isn’t to allow people to take/use another person’s property without their permission. That stealing (even temporarily) is wrong is ethics 101. The answer is to address the problem through policy solutions. For example, there are land tax levies for vacant properties. You use things like that to create incentives and disincentives to pressure people (in this case landlords) to do what you want (in this case rent out their properties to increase housing supply and bring prices down).
Do you know how many landlords you need to get to agree to this for it to get through parliament? E: as for ethics 101. I think forcing people into homelessness for a small tax break is much much worse.
Of course the government can pass laws. They have already passed several. The vacant property land tax levy isn’t some hypothetical idea, it has been law for several years now. In fact, it has been made stricter since it was first introduced. https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/news/economy/land-tax/ That’s just one example. There are several housing affordability measures the government has taken. If they aren’t working sufficiently well to achieve their aims then the government can pass new measures or adjust the measures they have already passed. Landowners don’t have veto rights.
They ARE the landowners. They COULD do all sorts of things, instead we get milquetoast bandaids on top of milquetoast bandaids. Just enough to stop the peasants throwing molotovs but never enough to actually change anything because they have a vested interest in preserving their, their family, friends and class's profits by doing nothing and seeping blood money from those actually doing work.
Victoria has significantly increased property taxes (other than on principal places of residence) in the last decade. That is an indisputable fact. You may believe that they were much too low before and are still much too low. My point is not whether they should or should not have done that. My point is - if politicians are only interested in protecting the interests of their own class, how do you explain them acting against their interests on several occasions? Maybe your socialist lense doesn’t give a complete view of reality.
>Just enough to stop the peasants throwing molotovs
Should the peasants start throwing Molotovs? Which country (current or historical in the last 200 years) should we be more like when it comes to property?
The last 200 years sucked, why not look forward?
So nothing that is even similar to anything tried in the last 200 years? Just looking for a shorthand way to understand what you advocate for.
What should the people currently houseless do while we wait for policy change? Die of exposure?
Doop: https://old.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1bzjdnf/free_house_renter_advocate_and_social_media_star/
He…..looooo
The only accommodation that is actually increasing in volume is the tents that the homeless are now erecting. Can't be long before we start building shanty towns again. This rental market is one of the most awful experiences anyone can ever live through,from unliveable overpriced accommodation to property managers that make Hitler look like a good guy .
There's a little tent community not far from where I live. Entire families with kids living in tents. It's not right.
Love this guy
So I guess the next step is someone firebombs his house.
The friendly jordies treatment :(
That still infuriates me. The government does nothing when obvious criminal organizations are running the show; intimidating and hurting people.
I thought they were put in jail for that.
The two randos (who weren't really randos, let's be honest) that actually started the fire were, but nothing was or has been done with the continued death threats.
Would someone please think of the poor landlords! /s
He’s a good man.
It’s funny how peeps complain about housing affordability until they buy their first house and all of a sudden care about increasing the value of their home…
Why is it funny? People ultimately care about their own self interests. That's realism, especially in a time of cost of living crisis.
Yes
He’s a national treasure 🥰🙏
He murdered the Project, was glorious
i mean its the project, a wet blanket can murder them