NAKED CITY: AN ETHICAL GUIDE TO COMPACT LIVING
The news last week that former Scotland Yard members had been imported to confront the ongoing ‘slumlord’ problem in Sydney again highlights the chronic shortage of affordable accommodation in Sydney. Worst of all was the report that one three bedroom dwelling had been jammed with a staggering fifty eight beds, with each of the occupants paying between $120 and $150 for the ‘privilege’. Imagine the queue for the bathroom in the morning!
It’s a problem that’s existed for years, ever since the increased influx of overseas students and itinerant workers into the Sydney CBD and inner city. Whilst the various councils involved have addressed the overcrowding, they don’t appear to be winning the battle. Petty compliance, like enforcing the number of tables and chairs a café owner can have out front, is acted upon immediately with all the bureaucratic aggression they can muster.
On the other hand it appears to take months, sometimes years before the slumlords are exposed and dealt with. Witness the Mad Max-esque, post-apocalyptic like container and caravan shanty town in Alexandria which was only brought to public attention when it caught fire in July of 2014. The owner has since walked away with a $4 million property sale and is yet to be prosecuted by the City Of Sydney.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the average price of renting a room, in a Sydney share house, has surged to $275 a week, with suburbs like Darlinghurst and Potts Point demanding around the $340 mark. Not everybody wants to share a dwelling with three or four other people of course, but the alternative of renting your own apartment is usually just too prohibitive.
Perhaps what we really need is a complete change of mindset and the rapid construction of compact but super funky mini apartments, particularly in the CBD and surrounds. Most renters would regard anything smaller than 30 square metres as a shoebox but with some ingenious planning and creative design this kind of accommodation could become highly desirable – even hip and downright groovy!
Let’s get some really innovative architects together to design these hipster micro-pads, complete with murphy style wall beds, minimalist kitchens and lots of comfy and cosy features. Super insulated, they would leave a low carbon footprint with lots of solar to power the limited electrical appliances. Banks would be urged to remove their current lending restrictions on mortgages for tiny studios, councils could kick in with subsidies for these budget bedsits and ‘ethical’ developers offered various tax concessions.
Eventually, as the bambino apartments caught on, real estate agents would be forced to delete words such as ‘spacious’ and ‘room to spare’ from their lexicon of hype. ‘Small’ would become flavour of the month as renters shed all superfluous possessions to embrace the stripped down lifestyle. As for the slumlords, they will probably invest the thousands of dollars they’ve made in something more genteel like coffee shops and cafes and run the gauntlet of council ire by cramming as many tables in the outdoor seating as they can.
By Coffin Ed, Jay Katz and Miss Death
