What happens when a snake starts to eat its tail? An endless reductive paradox that changes nothing but devours itself.
Welcome to fake left journalism at The Guardian:
Sydney property developers are buying blocks of units, knocking them down and replacing them with fewer luxury apartments or homes, a trend that is reducing dwelling numbers amid a statewide housing crisis.
Numerous developments across inner Sydney and the eastern suburbs have been approved, with more in the planning stage. In most cases interwar low-rise apartment buildings will be demolished to make way for “ultra-luxurious” homes for many fewer residents.
This is how a housing market works. Developers will make money where they can. While mass immigration creates an endless housing shortage, and rising rents prevent a supply-side response by supporting interest rates, capital will flow to higher-margin projects in areas that benefit from population growth.
It’s utterly pointless complaining about it. Sydney’s wealthy suburbs wear zero burden of immigration congestion. It houses a small minority of wealthy beneficiaries of the policy.
Therein lies the irony for the fake left, which refuses to entertain the real driver of the crisis, and, thereby, any realistic solution. The Guardian is the worst offender, publishing under a grotesquely simplified rubric every day.
Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists, and certainly with more care than Abbott seems capable. The inherently racist parties will seek to use any discussion and any seeming evidence of the negative impact of migrants as fuel to burn their fires of hate.
Hence, its housing-related journalism is nothing more than an extravagant act of symbolism over substance.
There is more pointless whinging about prices:
Sydney’s chronic housing crisis is costing the economy more than $10bn a year, according to research from the Committee for Sydney thinktank that also found just five major cities around the world were more unaffordable.
Researchers found the costs were being felt most by young Sydneysiders at the start of their careers who were affected by an inability to find affordable housing near their work, leading to a costly loss in productivity.
The problem is so severe that it threatens to hasten brain drain and squash the city’s startup ecosystem, making it even harder for people with business ideas to make them a reality and costing the city an estimated $2.9bn a year.
And more about dodgy buildings hastily thrown together:
Australian governments are urgently checking public buildings to see if they contain aerated concrete that could be dangerous after dozens of UK schools had to close classrooms built with crumble-risk concrete that can suddenly collapse.
The buildings of concern in the UK were built of lightweight concrete panels called reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) – more commonly known in Australia as autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC).
This is overwhelmingly driven by the one factor that The Guardian will not discuss objectively under any circumstances:
- So long as mass immigration persists, so will housing pressures.
- The banks and developers that benefit own the land and won’t release it.
- They also own the politicians who won’t change it.
- Retrofitting cities is too expensive and difficult to work.
- Albo’s HAFF won’t fix it. Most of what The Greens are proposing will make it worse.
For all of The Guardian’s good intentions, all it is doing is playing the role of housing crisis useful idiot.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you oppose the housing crisis and oppose mass immigration.
Or, you support both.
