Green plans for housing affordability

If they want to make this a goer, they’d need buy-in from the ACT Government to change the way that Land Tax is calculated. At the moment, it seems that if you rent out 20% of a property, you’re liable for Land Tax on 100% of it (the same as if you rented the whole thing out).

“Encourage landlords to provide dwellings to people on low-moderate incomes, and set appropriate levels of rent”

GREAT! another policy that means absolutely nothing. Will this be like “I’ll give you a gold star if you are really nice to low income earners and don’t want your property to make any money”?

“Provide incentives to property owners to convert their unused buildings/empty spaces above shops etc to affordable rental properties ($21,000 per dwelling maximum loan)”

Are we still living in the 70s in a city like Melbourne or Sydney or did I miss the strip malls with flats above the houses that have suddenly been build in Canberra? The basis of the idea to convert buildings into apartment accommodation is somewhat sound, but would $21,000 convince any building owner to do that to their multi-million dollar office building? Any building owner would laugh at that offer.

“Provide additional funding of $5000 for buildings and spaces to be modified for people with a disability”

It may be a good idea for people with a disability, but what does it have to do with housing affordability? The majority of people in the market are not disabled and housing with these modifications are not generally attractive to the general buyer or renter, which means that the changes will eventually be removed.

Another cobbled together load of rubbish policy from the Greens to try and score some cheap votes. You’re wasting your vote if you believe their crap.

Spooky! Saturday night we were discussing a similar initiative over a beer or six.

To summarise: We all spent a few years living out of dongers or canvas. Mostly military, but a couple of mining and one “Medicins sans Frontieres”. That “Grand Designs” bloke recently featured a block of flats made out of shipping containers. Basically each cell was a self-contained studio apartment. (For those playing at home, you should be up to 3 beers by now).

The undeniably genius of our proposal is – planned mobility. Every evening the containers are unpacked at shopping centre carparks. And every morning they’re stacked to the side of the road to prevent blinding sun on dangerous corners. We solve homelessness and reduce the road toll with one play!

(If that last step made no sense, you haven’t drunk enough beer.)

A lot of houses up for sale are empty temporarily.
5-6% does seem a lot though.

anzac park west?

Interesting idea. I would have thought that the tight rental market and relatively high rents would have served as a pretty good incentive for people to convert unused space.

Also perplexing is that in 2006 the ABS reported that more than 1 in 20 (6.4%) dwellings in Canberra were unoccupied, up from 5.7% in the 2001 census.

I’m not quite sure what to make of that. Assuming a population in Canberra of 345,000, and about 120000 dwellings (at 2.7 people per dwelling), that would suggest there were roughly 8000 empty homes in Canberra in 2006.

watto23 said :

I know some people are against the idea, but when i travel overseas i use backpacker hostels. Surely the cheap alternative for people is something similar, maybe 1 bedroom apartments and such with shared kitchens etc. I know there can be hassles and all, but given what people were living in in those slums that were shut down recently, surely a hostel type of accomodation would come in handy. I know if i was out of work a bed and some place to cook food and have a shower, would be appreciated. Even for the long term, living in a small room with shared facilities may not be great, but it would be better than paying hundred more elsewhere or having no where to live.

The previous generations of my family lived in hostels when they first moved to Canberra, as many people did then because of the shortage of housing. Later my husband also spent time in one of the remaining hostels while looking for a place to rent when he first moved here. Surely hostels can be part of the answer. Why is it so difficult to provide more basic affordable housing? Interesting idea too to convert vacant commercial space.

It’s great to promise the world when you’ll never be in a position to implement anything. Perhaps she should talk to her buddies in the Legislative Assembly about this policy because they’re the ones with all the power at the moment. Plus the fact that housing and rent is a state/local government responsibility.

It’s a good idea when you have a flat property market or lots of unused commercial buildings etc but it wouldn’t really be suitable for the current Canberra situation, as we don’t have many buildings sitting idle.

This sounds like a really good idea.

I know some people are against the idea, but when i travel overseas i use backpacker hostels. Surely the cheap alternative for people is something similar, maybe 1 bedroom apartments and such with shared kitchens etc. I know there can be hassles and all, but given what people were living in in those slums that were shut down recently, surely a hostel type of accomodation would come in handy. I know if i was out of work a bed and some place to cook food and have a shower, would be appreciated. Even for the long term, living in a small room with shared facilities may not be great, but it would be better than paying hundred more elsewhere or having no where to live.

with the huges swathes of unused commercial space we currently have, if it was set up with support from the ACT Government, we could make some significant positive changes in housing round these parts. Alas.