photo credit: euzesio

Mason Gaffney

February 2009

“Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more” – from Alain Boublil, Les Mis

Many stores have closed in the last year; they stand empty behind signs reading “Available”, “For lease”, or “First month free”. So have many industries, their gates locked, their girders rusting. The capital in them is wasted, poured down a rat-hole. Multi-million dollar freighters are mothballed, with no cargos to carry; others sail with unfilled capacity. Vast warehouses stand half-empty. Fleets of trucks wait for loads that never come. Redundant McMansions stand waiting for buyers, some advertising “Bank-owned”. Freight trains haul too many “empties going back”.

It’s not just the capital that’s wasting. There is land under and around those empty buildings, often more valuable than the buildings themselves. It might better be vacant, for then at least the owner would not feel committed to speculate in the old building as well as the land. It’s more than the land literally under the building, too. Even residences have yards, garages, and driveways; some have palatial grounds. Retail and wholesale and industrial buildings have vast parking areas and aprons attached for employees, customers, and deliveries. When city planners count up vacant lots, if they do, they usually see just lots without buildings, of which there are many, but nowadays there are as many or more invisible vacant lots under and attached to empty buildings.

We worry about attacks from Al Quaeda, and invasions of immigrants from Central America, but these empty spaces and vacant lands might just as well be ceded to the Taliban, or drowned like the lost continent of Atlantis, for all the good they are doing us. Osama bin Laden’s attacks are pinpricks compared with the damage we do ourselves by mismanaging our economy: we are doing his work for him.

photo credit: °Florian

C’mon you can’t be serious but that’s what the lobbyists are looking for with commercial property …

Media Release

Housing Shortage in Inner City a Myth

2,317 properties have been found empty in central Melbourne during Australia’s worst ever housing crisis.

Read the Full Report (PDF 432kb)
“The 2008 I Want to Live Here report has found a 7% genuine …

Busting the myths of housing affordability

We’ve set up a competition to inspire film makers to look into the eyes of the housing and land affordability quagmire. There’s a $3000 cash first prize and more to come. We rarely hear …

The Sydney Morning Herald is on our side. Today’s headline news includes an article featuring Bubblepedia.net, a wiki set up by Dr Daniel Cox for photos of vacant homes to be uploaded onto the web. What a great idea! We have a Panoramia page with some of our vacant photos uploaded.

The article, entitled Empty Homes for All to See, is an indictment on the inaccuracy of vacancy figures collected by a group with a vested interest in skewing the results their way.

We pointed out in the I Want to Live Here report that the published vacancy figures of the Real Estate Industry of Victoria are inaccurate. They only list those properties on the market at present, those advertised through Real Estate Agents. This excludes:

those that are being held off the market because the capital gains of 15% per annum are at least double the annual rental income – why bother renting them out?
all those properties that are being privately advertised
those that are used only once per year (ie owners fly in when Melbourne Racing Carnival is on or Sydney Fireworks)

The overstated scarcity of land and property encourages an atmosphere of desperation in the buying market. A genuine vacancy rate would include all vacant property, especially vacant land, which constituted 93% of the vacancies in the I Want to Live Here report.