Recent posts from crabmusket.net
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A statement of intent for affordable housing
08 Jan 2025
A big part of my life in the past year has been working towards creating more affordable housing in Sydney. As a layperson with no position of power, this isn’t an easy thing to just do. However, I find it such a worthwhile challenge that I’m going to keep doing it for as long as I can.
Housing in Australia
Australia faces a housing affordability crisis, especially in urban areas. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most pernicious is that Australians have largely chosen to treat housing as an investment. This implies that house prices must increase. Governments since the 90s have encouraged this with policy settings such as the combination of negative gearing and capital gains tax discount.
Our public and social housing sector has withered. It is seeing new investment under the current Labor government, but it will take a long time for it to recover.
As a software developer with a relatively high income, I am not eligible for public housing. But I don’t want my only other option to be playing the “housing as investment” game of snakes and property ladders. I don’t want to participate in a system which I see as poorly-designed to suit the human needs of security, community, sustainability and affordability.
The examples are rife, but here’s one study which describes the shortcomings of the developer-led approach to housing.
An improvement: rental co-operatives
I’ve come to believe that the best way to deliver on the needs of the middle of the housing market is via European-style rental co-operatives. Under this model of long-term secure rental:
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A property (or multiple properties) are owned by a co-operative, which is a particular type of member-controlled private company.
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The members of the co-operative have a right to reside in its property as long as they adhere to the co-operative’s bylaws. They also have an equal right to vote in the governance of the co-op.
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Members typically “buy in” to the co-op with the equivalent to a small deposit on a home, which is refundable when leaving the co-op. Members then pay rent to the co-op while living there.
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Members of existing developments, and potential residents of new ones, are often involved in the design and planning stages. This is crucial to ensure housing is designed not as a marketable commodity, but for those who will actually live in it.
In some European cities, this democratic not-for-profit housing sector provides as much as 20% of dwellings. This is not without significant government support, of course… but our current housing system also benefits hugely from government support!
There is growing awareness of and interest in this model in Australia. Have a look at:
- If a home is a human right — how can citizens and architects seize control of housing design?
- Australia urged to look to Europe for solutions to housing crisis
- Housing cooperatives: an answer to Australia’s housing shortage?
- Could co-operative housing solve the current crisis?
While I don’t think a co-operative sector is a panacea for the many issues we have, I strongly believe it would be a huge improvement. At its best, a co-operative housing sector can deliver quality affordable housing to people on a range of incomes, not only those who are relatively well-off.
Sydney Cohousing
At the start of last year, trying to work out how to go about creating a La Borda-style development in Sydney, I found and joined Sydney Cohousing.
https://sydneycohousing.auWe are a small group of Sydneysiders who want to promote the ideas of the co-housing movement in Sydney. We want more opportunities to live in places where we know our neighbours, where people of diverse backgrounds, of all ages, of different levels of income can live side-by-side.
Our main project right now is creating a co-operative development of affordable co-housing in urban Sydney. It’s going to be a big challenge; we are blazing a trail that is new for Australia All these separate elements exist here already, but not all in a single project.
In November, I was elected to be the secretary and president of Sydney Cohousing. (No congratulations are necessary; we’re a small association, and the six of us on the committee pretty much share the work.)
In 2025, I hope that we can make significant progress on our goals:
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Building a community of people who want to live in this kind of co-operative, non-profit, community-oriented housing. (And those who want to help it become a reality even if they don’t want to live with us!)
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Finding funding to develop our financial model, which is common elsewhere in the world but innovative in Australia, and requires legal and industry expertise to define.
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Searching for land or existing property, and funding for the development itself.
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Advocating for our vision with local councils and the state government, with allied organisations, and in public.
I think Australians deserve better than what’s on the market right now, and I’m so keen to be part of making that happen.
Link dump 2
07 Jan 2025
Things I have been reading recently.
Illustrated edition of Margaret Cavendish, the Blazing-world, 1666 (also as a thread on Bluesky)
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World is commonly considered a very early SF novel. It has strong elements of the fantastical as well as science and engages with and criticizes science. It is also unique with centering on women characters.
Sydney apartment layouts don’t suit families, study suggests
“Generally, developers focus more on the number of bedrooms and location than on architectural design or room layout,” says Prof. Oldfield. “They prefer generic, standardised apartment layouts that meet the minimum regulations because they’re cheaper to make and easier to sell, but that is fundamentally mismatched with what families want.”
Voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, create a local clean energy utility
The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.
Spirit Airlines CEO Got A $3.8 Million Bonus A Week Before Its Bankruptcy
Is the bankruptcy actually bad? Sure shareholders will get wiped out. Guess what? GOOD. They deserve it. They opted for an illegal deal instead of a legal one. Plus Spirit will keep flying as a competitive airline, at least for now. This particular kind of bankruptcy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means you reorganize the creditor relationships but keep the entity as a going concern.
I’ve Stopped Using Box Plots. Should You?
These alternatives to box plots can be used to communicate a wide variety of useful insights, don’t require the audience to understand complex concepts like quartiles, and show distribution shapes clearly (i.e., they don’t make everything look bell shaped). More to the point, they make more visual sense than box plots, so audiences grasp them in seconds instead of minutes, and they’re less prone to misinterpretation. Ultimately, this means that using these chart types instead of box plots substantially improves the odds that your audience will understand and act on your distribution-based insights.
The decline of disruptive science and technology
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes, wherein prior accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, “stand on the shoulders of giants”. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields of science and technology.
The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland
Virginia has no prior programming experience but has started combining code she finds around the space into her own creations. Here’s part of a birthday surprise she left me over winter break. Even our visiting ethnographer Goetz created a great spatial music game in Dynamicland (also no prior programming experience). Like learning French by going to France, people in Dynamicland learn programming through immersion.
What the Myth of the Coffee Cup Mass Gets Wrong - and Why It Matters
What Day learned from the “Coffee Cup Mass” was that the ceramic cup from which the homeless Christ sips her morning coffee is no less holy and no more profane than the gold chalice that holds Christ’s blood in the form of wine at the Mass: “There Christ is with the poor, the suffering, even in the cup we share together, in the bread we eat.”
To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition
Part of the problem in the case of these Americans in Mexico is that they could not understand the language. But that is only part of the problem. The more significant issue is a deeper incapacity to listen to others not because you do not speak the language but because you have already decided that you know what is best for them. Then, convinced of your wisdom and goodness, you are prepared to impose your will on the other.
Ephemerality in User Interfaces
The constraints of hypermedia, and the desktop form factor, created empowering software. The keyboard and mouse allow high-bandwidth, high-frequency interaction. They permit creation. Users were expected to be “computer literate”, to learn to operate the computer before a specific software program. Desktops are interactive. Phones are cramped, bad at multitasking, impossible to type on. Nothing is expected of mobile users. Phones can only be interpassive.
That's all folks! Thanks for reading ♥