The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
A peek outside my bubble: property speculator whining group
Something washed up on my Facebook a while ago.
Sponsored. Hmmm. Someone is paying to spread this stuff. Maybe I have been targeted due to my searches about growing veggies in my garden, something which you pretty much can’t do unless you own your home. *1
Oh well. It’s not the first piece of useless advertising I’ve come across. But this one strikes me as particularly odd. Not because of the tacky language use — we’ve all seen the stupid fake panic and feigned outrage in clickbait before.
(And sorry about the text-as-image, but I have little desire to make this searchable.)
$10,000
That number immediately jumped out to me. I don’t know if that number is accurate, but anyway the premise of the article is what an absolutely outrageous sum this is.
But is it really? You have to do this only once. Just your rates will set you back a couple of thousands each year. Add insurance. And maintenance will come up every so often. Oh, you’re actually maintaining those rental properties, right? *2
Go to any townhouse complex with a body corporate and ask how much it is per year. My guess is between that and rates you’ll be paying $10,000 within 2 years.
And how does that compare to income? Anyone who owned a property for at least the last 3 years or so has likely made an investment gain of a few hundred thousands dollars. So now you have to spend, maybe, 5% of that capital gain on improving your property. Aww, you poor thing *3.
18 °C
You often hear about people paying electricity bills of many hundreds of dollars per month. Much of that is heating.
A lot of what passes as houses over here, would be more aptly described as glorified garden sheds. Weatherboard outside, gib board inside, that’s it. These old houses are also often damp inside, with mold growing everywhere. If you heat an uninsulated house you’ll have water running off your walls after a while. And if you switch off that heater, it will be freezing cold again within a few minutes.
Insulation is cheaper than electricity to heat your home. *4
Some say that due to all this crappy housing, medical students can come here to study third world diseases.
Long story short: yes, some standards would be good.
Values or rules
And yet, here we are, passing propaganda around. Pretending to be outraged. As if those people deserve to live in a decent home. This is what happens in a society without values. All is good as long as you don’t break any rules. If that gets someone else sick, or even dead, well, not your problem.
Sometimes living in New Zealand feels like being in a twisted, neoliberal real-life version of Black Mirror.
Growing a veggie patch is a lot more appealing if you don’t have the possibility of getting a 42 days eviction notice. Renters can expect getting evicted every 1 to 2 years.
If you’re a Master of Business Administration, the answer would be of course not. It doesn’t make any financial sense. It’s not unusual in upper scale suburbs to see little dilapidated sheds which are still valued at over a million. The thing which is actually valuable is the piece of land under that house. The house itself is essentially worthless.
That is paraphrasing the angry baby boomers in a council meeting in Kohimarama a few years ago. It was yelled across the room when someone pointed out that given the status quo, many younger people will never have a decent place to live. That meeting is more or less public record. A lot of people over here genuinely don’t care whether or not the generation of their grandchildren grow up homeless, and it is a bit unnerving to see people shouting that out in public, seemingly without any concern about their reputation.
Add to this that many old houses don’t have a heat pump. If you spend $10,000 on insulation and a heat pump, and subsequently save $1000 per year on your power bill, that’s a decent return on investment.
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