Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Those three suburbs are not on the railway lines, they're not close to the motorway, and that means that a commute to the CBD, or even to Penrose, will take well over an hour
I was about to say "come to Sydney, we have cheap houses close to PT and motorways" but then I read the rest and those cheap suburbs are all more than an hour from the CBD (about an hour by car, off peak and paying tolls or 75-90 minutes by train). The advantage of Sydney is that there are jobs right out, so you can reasonably find decent paid work even west of the geographic centre (the CBD is close to the eastern edge of the city).
I work with a guy who's right on the margin of homeownership (bought on 5% deposit, mortgage is a big chunk of his income and childcare takes most of what his wife earns). His criteria were straight out of the "how to get wealthy" playbook - he preferred areas where no-one has been shot for a few months, few gangs, where you don't have to lock your car in a garage to keep it, and where there is a PT option. They both work west of the CBD, so their commutes are under an hour although PT makes it over an hour by the time he's walked 4km from the nearest train station to work. But, and this is important, his house went up about 5% last year while ours went up about 20%. He's not going to be able to move to a nicer suburb any time soon, because he's not saving the extra $10,000 a year to compensate for the difference in capital gains.
Amusingly, the inner city scary zones have little effect on prices - a nice terrace just off "The Block" will set you back 2 million, or a big old former pub $4M. Gang violence and drug dealing not optional - people do get killed round there most years, but in Australian terms that doesn't matter because they're mostly black. Not kidding. It really doesn't.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to bob daktari,
if you forgo smashed avo and work hard you too can own a home (with mummies and daddies help)
It also works on those parents too selfish or feckless to lend/give their kids that crucial two-or-three-hundred-thousand (say it quickly and it doesn't sound like much). Pity the parents who don't have a mostly mortgage-free house in Auckland to borrow against, or who for whatever reason aren't willing and able to risk that by handing money to their kids.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Anyone able to translate the worst parts of Otara and Mangere into Christchurch?
Closest I recall is probably Aranui, maybe Shirley. Even so, in Auckland terms those are more "the rough end of the North Shore" than "the bad part of South Auckland". But yeah, I could have added "gunshot holes in the roof" but my standards for rough neighbourhoods changed when I got to Sydney.
What kinda of amuses me is that the rough parts of Sydney have weird edges and caveats - a white guy wouldn't want to walk home drunk through "the Block" in Redfern or the alleyways behind Kings Cross late at night, but you're generally perfectly fine wandering through there during the daytime. Whereas some of the western suburbs are just no go zones all the time because you need a car to go there, but you need the right sort of car to go there safely. Specifically, a popemobile or a beaten up Mk 4 Cortina... there's no safe space in the middle.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Glen Koorey,
I'm pretty sure that most first home buyers will be aiming closer to the lower quartile (or even lower 10%),
Only those who have no other options. Buying the bottom-end houses is rarely a good idea because they tend to stay at the bottom of the market. Viz, as house prices go up the bottom of the market go up less as a percentage than the middle and top. That's completely aside from the actual reasons those houses are cheap - often the location is unhealthy or the house has major problems. You don't want to buy "excellent view of the underside of a motorway overbridge, through the holes in the roof".
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
the average Auckland house price increased by $114,000 last year. Which means the average purchaser's average 20% required deposit increased by $22,800 last year
So if you can't save $22,000 a year you're getting further away from buying that median house, not closer. I have been through the "watch my savings, look for places I can afford" thing and it is no fun.
The sad thing about the "start with an investment property" advice is that it's actually correct. You pick up a great number of not-so-hidden subsidies when you invest rather than inhabit, and they make a real difference to how fast you can save for somewhere to live in. Or to put it another way. I'd be about $20,000 a year richer if I moved out of my house, rented it out, and rented a room in a share house (we run our house as a share house now, that part wouldn't change).
The problem with buying a cheap investment property is that capital gains tend to accrue at a higher rate to more expensive properties. You $300k run-down flat will go up slower than the market average but the habourside mansion will go up faster... it all evens out, just not in your favour.
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Speaker: Happy Race Relations Day, in reply to mark taslov,
superficial perceptions of the homogeneity of the hegemony are unlikely to have been challenged much
I remember back in high school we did a geography exercise looking at ancestry, and the all-white class was made up mostly of UK'ians, but with a significant leavening of Germans, Russians, Dutch, Yugoslavia, and a smattering of other European areas, as well as a "Scandinavian by way of Orkney". Then there's the question of whether Russian Jews are from Russia or the Middle East or both as far as ethnicity goes. Oh, plus we had some obvious neanderthal ancestry ... redheads :) But I think that's pedantry at the edges. White skin is what counts, no-one asks for a gene test before calling you a {racist expletive}.
For me, it's obvious here and in NZ that being a white guy helps, and my partner being asian-looking (Australian born) hinders. Albeit a quarter-chinese partner of mine passed for part-Maori when we were on holiday in Northland and that helped. Was a first for her!
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to Sacha,
the intent is to reduce government spending over time
per capita. Remember that they also want to be able to announce increases in the total spend on a regular basis. Pedants talking about "real increases" and "per capita" are unpatriotic nitpickers who should shut up and let those who can, do. Unless they want to be done to, understand me?
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to David Hood,
that for hospitalisation injuries the risk to pedestrians is higher per cycle than per car.
Makes sense, we have very few car/pedestrian shared paths and even fewer uses of the phrase "we can't afford a dedicated facility" when talking about motorists.
But cyclists seem to be killed by motorists at 5x the rate per kilometre that you'd hope - 7/158 in the last 12 months rather than the 1-2 you'd expect from the 1% number.
I mean "killed by roads" since that's the major cause of death the media talk about ("New Zealand roads kill 11 during long weekend"). I wonder if that drives the focus on helmets? Cyclists are not killed by collisions with motorists, they're killed by roads.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to linger,
Kevin has been vociferous in picking apart the wording of the "cranks" he disagrees with. If that's not what he meant, he shouldn't have said it.
Also, what I've siad is true: mandatory helmets would save lives. I expect he agrees. So far he's been vigorously arguing that, anyway, and I agree, and the stats I've seen back it up. So if you or him are willing to let people choose death and serious injury except when they ride a bike, I want to know why.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
Also, you continue, as does Media Watch, to mis-read the arguments being made. There's a big gap between Todd "if you have a serious accident the helmet won't help much" and Cochrane's very careful leap from "Head injuries are responsible for around three-quarters of deaths among bicyclists involved in crashes" to the unrelated "reduced the risk of head or brain injury by approximately two-thirds". Either talk about deaths, or injuries, but switching from one to the other mid-sentence is unfortunate. I expect you'd say "the definitive authority is being deliberately misleading" and conclude that they are therefore cranks, if they weren't agreeing with you.
I think you're doing the traditional "balanced media" thing of finding two sets of experts who disagree and siding with the one your gut says is right.