Once in a generation the AFR refers to it as. What's a generation in this context? It should be in living memory really to give it context.
I can remember, probably about 1950, going with my parents to visit friends in then rural Fairfield in south West Sydney, (can you imagine that? rural Fairfield).
And they were living in a garage they had built before starting to build a house. And that was a fairly common situation then because there was a housing shortage back then too. We were a lot more fortunate.
(And it just sprang into my memory now, about lifting up a piece of corrugated iron and seeing a huge red belly black snake coiled up. Dropped that tin and ran like hell. Funny how ancient memories just come to mind, wouldn't have thought of that since probably the day it happened.)
So housing shortages are not new, though this one is maybe more serious because of a number of factors:
- broken families
- the humungous cost and the amount of borrowing necessary to fund it
- the higher standards of housing expected and indeed mandated
A lot of things add to the cost:
- people expect more...2 or 3 bathrooms (unheard of when I was young)
- solar panels, aircon, outdoor entertainment areas etc etc (not that there's anything wrong with that), but many things that were not part of the cost in earlier times
- the increased cost I think anyway brought on by the shift to subcontractors about 40 years ago, which added a package of costs greater than when they were carried as a group by employers
- and then of course the cost now of imported material
But as it did in earlier days, these problems will diminish over time. Governments are under more pressure to act on problems, I think, than they once were.
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