Right across the street from my Shepparton home is a vacant unit.
It’s been that way for nearly a year; it appears to be some sort of public housing; it has an impressive crop of grass growing in the spouts; it’s more than 20 years old; and no one has lived there since the family moved out early last year.
Everywhere — television, radio, newspapers and social media — people lament the shortage of housing throughout the country.
Well, there is what I assume to be a three-bedroom unit right across the road from my home just waiting for a tenant.
The family moved out and nothing has happened.
At first, I imagined the building needed significant repairs or updating, but as I said, nothing has happened.
No workers, no tradespeople, nothing.
The unit is one of six in the complex and while public money created the accommodation, there appears no urgency in again making it available to the public.
The unit has been empty for nearly a year, making, it seems, the shortage of housing something of a lie.
However, the housing crisis is not a lie as people everywhere struggle to find somewhere to live, certainly at a price they can afford.
And so to whom should responsibility for this empty unit be sheeted home to?
Simplistically, probably the public authority controlling the complex is culpable and ideologically that is to where most would point. But maybe there is some other confusion as to why the home empty.
The problem is broader than what I see happening, or not happening, across the road as the idea that you and me, that’s the public, should ensure homes are readily available has been surrendered, or handed over, to the profit-driven market.
And beyond that, most people whose identity is tied to bigger, better and faster, driven by a perverse individualism, build homes that are clearly beyond what they really need to live a satisfying and fulfilling life.
Subsequently, and frequently, our subdivisions are full of houses known now, colloquially, as ‘McMansions’ that may answer identity-driven desires, but do nought in easing the nation’s housing crisis.
A late friend, who had vast experience in urban design, repeatedly argued that at a minimum housing subdivisions should be mandated to have every fifth house built to a high level of thermal efficiency, but at a cost point that made it accessible to even the lowest socio-economic group.
Ironically, and with no prompting, I heard from a Goulburn Valley friend who said he had just heard on the ABC that the Australian population was growing at the rate of one person every 50 seconds, due to births and immigration.
He said, “these new people can be fed but housing is a different question. There is not enough homes for the current lot, leading to speculators in the marketplace.”
My friend was also concerned that building the needed homes (the ‘McMansions’) would stress the environment with the demand for materials and the pressing need for labour was problematic.
He was also concerned about what he saw as “community stress”, which he argued arose from the financial system that “bleeds” everybody.
And so looking across the street I see, in an empty house, just one facet of a bigger problem that could be eased if we, the people, took back the reins and put the wellbeing of people ahead of profit.
Of course that won’t happen and accusations of “utopian” will be levelled at me, but of course what was once utopian is now common in the extreme.