Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Hard News: The Boom Crash, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Don’t have earthquakes yet.
That's what Christchurch thought. And even if you don't... volcanoes!
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Hard News: The Boom Crash, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Indeed. That, in combination with the fact we live in Wellington (and are therefore quake-prone) is why we challenged our last RV as too low. Yes, we pay more rates, but I consider that akin to insurance.
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Hard News: The Boom Crash, in reply to Bruce Grey,
Blurgh for typos (trust me, I loathe “learnings” as much as the next writer’s daughter) and short edit windows. That was meant to say “learning”.
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For those interested in learnings from research on intentional communities, there's also this:
http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/5962/thesis.pdf?sequence=3
Skip to page 225 if you just want the findings. Similar stuff to what Larisa Webb found, as far as I can recall. -
Hard News: The Boom Crash, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Also, Watchmystreet is not up to date. It has the old 2009 valuation for our house, and says the valuation hasn't changed. We challenged our 2012 valuation, which meant the value went up for both the 2009 and 2012 valuations.
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It's pre-electronic, unfortunately, but if anyone's in Auckland and wants to have a look at the University copy (or wants to do an interloan from elsewhere), it's Webb, Larisa, 1999. Living together? : change and continuity of a New Zealand intentional community. MA Thesis, University of Auckland. Library listing here. And I'll ask her if she happens to have an electronic copy at all.
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Hard News: The Boom Crash, in reply to Dastardly Bounder,
I've been wary of cooperative land or lifestyle groups, mainly because I've seen the results of failed 70s communes... When things go wrong the fallout can be quite spectacular.
Yes indeedy. However, I don't think the idea of communal ownership should be dismissed altogether. A friend of mine did her MA thesis on Coromandel area communes. As I recall, she found that the ones that survived were the ones which realised early on they needed to have rules and rosters, and clear consequences for breach of either. If you can do a decent job of figuring out a good range of worst-case scenarios, and figuring out what the appropriate response would be, you're a good way there.
I think of the many company share apartment buildings that manage to tick over nicely, and think if you could take a similar approach to shared ownership of a block of land, with effectively private home ownership on that land (perhaps something in the nature of cross-lease?), it "ought to" work. -
Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology, in reply to BenWilson,
I don’t think our problem is that we don’t have enough houses at all.
Alas, lack of houses is actually a problem. That’s part of the reason that the housing we do have costs way too much. It’s also the reason there’s household crowding, which comes not just from big families living in small dwellings, but average-sized families doubling up in dwellings together, and why people “couch-surf”, and why households are stressed by having to share a dwelling with another household when they don’t want to (even if they’re not overcrowded). The reason they do that is not because they want to, and not simply because they can’t afford to rent something separate: there are not enough separate dwellings* in the country to house all the households that would like to, and should be able to, live separately.
*I don’t mean physically separate, I mean notionally separate, i.e. an apartment counts as a separate dwelling.
Even if we only look at severe housing need, an estimated 34,000 people are inadequately housed. They won’t become adequately housed just by shuffling people round in the existing housing stock.
Adding houses might help matters a bit, indirectly (or it might not, as people will just move to fill those houses)
Adding houses would help matters directly. Yes, people will move to fill those houses. That’s why they’d be built. People being able to move to fill new houses (or the other houses left empty by people moving into the new ones) could meet the unmet housing need if there were enough new houses built. At that point we could judge whether there was a price issue, but at the moment it’s not just price, it’s also lack of supply (or possibly price because of lack of supply).
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I thought that's what he told me, but I just looked it up, and it's not, so maybe it's just uncomfortable. The few times I've tried it it certainly was.
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The world is indeed awash with skilled labour, but bringing in migrant labour to solve the problem brings its own challenges – apart from anything else, there’s the question of where to house them…
But yes, I shouldn't have said cost wasn’t an issue, rather that it’s not the only issue. And I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it’s complex, and even if the political will were there, there would be a bunch of issues to figure out besides just where and what to build.