Tim Williams’ Post

I think we should have both a pattern book and an award for the worst designed housing in New South Wales. A kind of 'rotten tomatoes' award for dwellings. I exempt the example below as this is clearly not meant either for humans to live in or near: it's some kind of barn or shed for animals - otherwise there would be windows facing the road, right? Right? And what are the bars for?

An aside: the owner of a digital platform can now be arrested in Europe for failing to censor material. The answer to ideas you don't like is better ideas. Surely. Also: If you worry about the power of digital platforms, break them up through anti-monopoly legislation. So fewer. less powerful and ubiquitous, platforms is an answer not government censorship of them. The US is in theory protected against government censorship by the 1st Amendment though in practice civil libertarians need to stay alert to the threats. No-one else in the Anglosphere is as protected against censorship and abuse of power. That's a real worry - and is what we used to call a fact or what others may call disinformation. I remain on the free speech beat.

Of the many differences between Old South Wales, where I am from and New South Wales where I and my Aussie family live, this is one: lemons from our garden in Manly....though we did once plant a ferociously growing Eucalyptus in my Welsh home garden, which loved the Welsh climate too much and started towering over local houses! Had to be cut down to my chagrin.

Minister Rose Jackson strikes me as eager to be a serious reformer with a passion for what she is doing. Remarkably few politicians seem to really want to change things - and many actually have an overly developed sense of what can't be done. Whatever the plan for change, you actually have to start with a desire for change, reform, betterment. Rose has all the above: and while change in housing is hard, I think we will see some innovations from Rose - fingers crossed - tied to a genuine interest in and fellowship with people in social housing or waiting for housing help: another thing weirdly absent in some others active in public life. I come from a 'houso' background BTW - a term I'd never heard until I came to egalitarian Australia - so I like people who don't treat 'housos' with disdain. Note to Australia: maybe the term 'houso' induces us to 'other' our neighbours. Mat Campbell Rebecca PinkstoneGrimshaw Michael JanekeNicola LemonKerry Robinson OAMAndrew McAnultyScott LangfordSean MackenMichelle Washington https://lnkd.in/gSuad_CH

Whenever ennui descends, I seek solace in videos of the countryside and hills near where I grew up in Old South Wales. My nana was born up in these hills between Pontypridd and Caerphilly in 1901 and my dad conducted the brass band in Abertridwr just down the road. Yes it rains in the Valleys: everyday, all day. Still striking and evocative for me. Am walking in these parts next February on a Valleys pilgrimage of sorts....

The greatest public policy failures of the US since the 70s and the UK for a lot longer have involved the collapse of the former vibrant, job-rich, towns of what in the former would be called the rust-belt and in the UK is where I'm from. The industrial areas once the economic drivers of each country, now feeling - and actually have been - left behind. No serious policies for their restoration are currently on the table. BTW I no longer feel that a London or a Chicago is safe from renewed decline and I also suspect that whole segments of the knowledge economy - and the places supporting it - will get radically damaged by AI. Home-workers will not be immune to that 'industrial restructuring'. If I were optimistic, I'd tell you.... Anyway: this is a good read: 'Dramatises vividly how a half century of economic 'progress' dismantled America's once sturdy middle class' (the peculiar US term for working class).

The 2018 Report into developer business models and practices in the UK, by Tory Lord Letwin. It's very useful as it demonstrates that developers have a margin maintaining approach to the build out of their housing pipeline in each local market they are in. They calibrate the price of their stock to match the latest valuation for housing of this type in such an area, so as to maintain their bank-required margin and so as not in practice to bring prices down for that kind of home in that area. That's the business: a margin maintaining business, calibrating new delivery to meet local market demand at stable or rising prices. This is very sensible - why would you start producing more homes when the price is coming down and you cannot achieve the margin/return required by your business model and investors? - and should not be demonised. I don't. I just point out the empirical, theoretical and philosophical error in looking to that business model to lower prices let alone to make housing affordable in any real sense - in terms of the multiples of salary required to buy a home today compared with the 1980s. It's not the private sector's job or ability to do that. I want to be clear that the problem is not their model: let them get on with it and where appropriate, governments should help them maximise output from that model. The problem is over-reliance on that single model to achieve all the housing we need let alone broader societal outcomes around access to shelter, ownership and a more efficient, balanced and equitable economic strategy. That's the official view from Manly anyway.... #housing

We need a grown up conversation about fast migration growth and housing. It's almost like the very same people in Australia who say our housing industry is not producing enough homes, and supply is the answer to why ownership among 35 year olds has dropped to half what it was in the 80s, are blocking their ears when you try and say that the logic of their position is to put a hold on in-migration. They may even call one racist: usually proof that the argument has been lost. The reality is being discussed in the UK and not just by right of centre newspapers but by academics and consultancies too. This UK Telegraph piece points out that in-migration is heavily concentrated in city rental markets, as it is in Australia. then it quotes work from Capital Economics which estimates UK immigration in the two years to June 2023 led to an additional 430,000 households wanting to privately rent homes, 'pushing rents up 11pc higher than they would otherwise have been'. It's worth noting that until May 2022, annual rent growth in England had not exceeded 3.7pc for nearly 20 years. Then post Covid, in-migration ramps up dramatically. From this date, for the next 22 months in a row, rent growth would either match or hit a new record high, peaking at 9.1pc in March 2024. By July this year, the annual pace of growth was still 8.6pc – more than double the previous record high. I'd be interested to see what the Australian data would show -in a context remember of even faster growth per head of population due to in-migration than the UK. The UK has not been able to generate a housing response to mop up this extra demand and of course there are plans in the UK to 'improve the planning system' and 'reduce 'red tape' rather than to seriously look at migration policy - when the former is a lot less impactful and immediate than the latter. Australia's population growth being faster and its housing industry being smaller (27 million versus 65 million in the market remember) suggests an even greater impact here and need to reflect on growth. But again, the emphasis in Australia has been not on what national governments do to stimulate excess demand - migration, tax and monetary policy - but on what the public and private sectors at local and state level are supposed to do in an essentially futile attempt to mop up this demand. Inflation is caused by 'too much money chasing too few goods'. I have said repeatedly that I am content to support efforts to increase the number of 'goods' (that is homes, as long as we understand that the limits on the private sector supply of homes for sales is intrinsic to their business model, and that we need a shedload of non-market homes generated by governments) but wonder why there is so little interest in the 'demand side' problem. BTW why don't state governments tell national government that while the former are trying to up supply it's a bit like a dog chasing its own tail unless the Feds also join the party on demand.

None of them in the UK obviously though I have hopes the new UK government will review restoring at least some of HS2 beyond Birmingham (and linked to central London) so bungled by the last mob. Australia has begun to look seriously at a faster rail service between Sydney and Newcastle to its north. Great to see the game-changing Brightline West Trains project - from LA to Vegas (and indeed back!) - on the list, as Grimshaw are working on this. It is intended to be open by the time of the LA Olympics and will do what a great project of this kind is meant to do - shrink distance between centres, reduce unnecessary car-use and create the possibility of TODS along the route. Aaron Vaden-Youmans Andrew ByrneMark Middleton #rail

Peal Keating, former Treasurer and Prime Minister of Australia and one of the most impactful social democratic politicians the world has ever seen. If only he had brought in just compulsory superannuation, he'd be celebrated here and internationally but there is so much more. He left school at 15, from Bankstown in Sydney's unglamorous south-west, and on his way to conquering the nation, educated himself about art, music and culture overall and became a collector of furniture and clocks. This is an amazing interview with The Australian journo and author Troy Bramston where he talks a bit about politics and a lot about art and Keating's current concern that 'the West has lost its moral mandate' and is 'bored with its own culture - it is culturally exhausted. Nihilism and an attendant loss of faith characterises modern life. There is no guiding light'. Keating argues that the basis of his politics has been the culture and art of previous eras and what his historical studies of them, taught him. Brilliant, amazing man. I once saw him address a Mastercard dinner and despite being factionally from the Labor Right, spoke impressively like a radical socialist, still burning for justice and the inclusion of all in the best that has been thought and said in world culture. Make many of the current crop of 'progressives' seem philistine and flaccid.