Low quality homes and the housing crisis

Sites removed from existing urban connections can be connected by a free but limited bus service, if required, to connect people to social infrastructure or workplaces. Alternatively, fund this as a shared service via the local area utility district mechanism. In reality, most people have cars and cars are much cheaper to afford than housing in established urban areas where public transport options are more widely available. This may offend anti-car urbanistas who think that cycling to work via manicured cycle ways on $10,000 carbon fibre pushies is the way of the future, but for young families looking for starter homes, that’s the reality.  

This isn’t fantasy and is all entirely possible. They’re doing very similar things in third world nations like Nigeria or India. “But we are NOT third world” I hear the indignant urbanists shout. Really? We have people living in tents and young families barely managing to get by given the globally high cost of our housing. Is that the sign of an evolved, advanced economy? Or a sign or policy and market failure?

Business as usual policy settings have failed us. Business as usual will not rescue us. Maybe history can.

Low cost housing in Nigeria. “… a multitude of uniform and unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste” is maybe the pill we need to swallow?

Modular, pre-fab, manufactured or built on site. Very basic but also very affordable housing is possible, but will we allow it?

Queensland Housing Commission house, Chermside, 1958.  Have we totally forgotten how to deliver basic entry level affordable housing at scale?