Desperation in the housing market is leading to varied responses. The latest the Age has promoted is the Container Home phenomenon. Miners earning $100,000 have been forced into them in Port Headland and other fast growing mining communities. Now a company is promoting shipping containers on the eastern seaboard as a means to solving the housing crisis.
Nice try. However, it requires the land to place them on. Whilst public lands could be used, why not free up the 119,623 unoccupied properties identified in the 2006 Census?
Even if the public land is made available for affordable housing, the cheaper construction costs for the containers only accounts for at most 20% of the total cost for housing. Market rates on the land component would still be accounted for by the public housing body, ensuring that the ‘affordable’ price is a minimal improvement.
If however a Resource Rental system was implemented, the Site Rental on all land would soon see the 119, 623 unoccupied properties placed onto the market. They could no longer be withheld from the market as speculative vacancies when a yearly holding charge was in place. The 119, 623 vacancies only includes dwellings. We estimate a similar amount in vacant blocks of land exist in Melbourne. Then land prices would drop for all, and pressures on renters would drop, as would it on the increasing percentage of baby boomers with mortgages expanding in their 60’s as they upsize. We must remember that everything is relative as the transition occurs.
