urban planning

Community Builder . I am a community builder, I have 20k followers across social media - which is small but my community is highly engaged, I follow back any other creators making meaningful content as well as marginalized folks who need my support!

I think the best way to build community is to be authentic and vulnerable, it's what drew me to this app. 

What do you all think? 

Who Really Benefited from the Pandemic Housing Boom? The housing debate often frames investors as the villains of Australia’s affordability crisis. It is easy to point to negative gearing, cheap credit and capital gains concessions and conclude that speculators drove the pandemic bubble and pocketed the windfall. But this misses the real transfer of wealth that occurred during the COVID years.

During the pandemic, investors accounted for roughly 30 per cent of housing purchases. Some did well, particularly those who bought established homes in markets that surged. But many others were caught out, not only by labour shortages, soaring material costs and stalled projects, but also by the rapid rise in interest rates that followed. As a class, investors did not profit nearly as much as is often assumed.

What really drove prices higher was a collision of extraordinary demand with constrained supply. Ultra-low interest rates, mortgage deferrals and direct stimulus programs such as JobKeeper and HomeBuilder supported household incomes and encouraged housing activity. These policies were necessary to keep the economy from collapsing during lockdowns, but we did not walk into them fully aware of the long-term consequences. Not only did they fuel demand, they also channelled activity into supply-constrained sectors like construction, where builders already faced material shortages and labour bottlenecks. Many firms simply could not deliver what was promised and went bankrupt under the strain, leaving buyers stranded.

With more buyers chasing fewer homes, and a building industry unable to expand supply, prices were pushed sharply higher.

So if both new investors chasing yield and first-home buyers entering at peak prices often ended up worse off, who actually gained? The biggest winners were long-term owner occupiers. Households that had purchased decades earlier, whether down-sizers cashing out or families simply holding, captured the largest windfall from the surge. In effect, they became accidental investors. In fact, anyone who has ever bought a home is, technically, an investor because they have put capital into an asset regardless of if they were expecting it to hold or increase in value. The fact that so many owner occupiers closely follow the value of their property shows a level of awareness that they are investors, whether they choose that label or not.

The real wealth transfer was not to the people most often blamed. It was to those who already owned, and who were best placed to benefit from extraordinary policy support and tight supply. Unless we recognise this, we will keep misdiagnosing the roots of today’s crisis and blaming the wrong people for it.

New structures for family-friends? Chatting with a friend recently and came up with this novel idea.

Historically, many people would end up married, having kids, and having responsibilities to their family and local community and groups.

These days, we have less family and civic integrity, less people are having kids. More people are creating their family of choice with friends.

I think there’s a general love and aliveness everyone wants to express and be in connection with.

But without the usual routes of kids/religion/local community, it doesn’t get routed well anymore.

We need more structures/ideas/understanding to support new kinds of families and community structures.

Examples:
How about an app that makes it easier to crowd source among trusted local friends to babysit?

Most housing is built around one nuclear family 1-4 bedrooms. But what about community homes with larger kitchens and living rooms and smaller but more bedrooms?

I’m gesturing at this general area at the idea that modern, industrial civilization is built around nuclear families but we have a lot more forms being generated now but still lagging behind in the idea/social practice/phys infrastructure to match.

Who Really Benefited from the Pandemic Housing Boom? The housing debate often frames investors as the villains of Australia’s affordability crisis. It is easy to point to negative gearing, cheap credit and capital gains concessions and conclude that speculators drove the pandemic bubble and pocketed the windfall. But this misses the real transfer of wealth that occurred during the COVID years.

During the pandemic, investors accounted for roughly 30 per cent of housing purchases. Some did well, particularly those who bought established homes in markets that surged. But many others were caught out, not only by labour shortages, soaring material costs and stalled projects, but also by the rapid rise in interest rates that followed. As a class, investors did not profit nearly as much as is often assumed.

What really drove prices higher was a collision of extraordinary demand with constrained supply. Ultra-low interest rates, mortgage deferrals and direct stimulus programs such as JobKeeper and HomeBuilder supported household incomes and encouraged housing activity. These policies were necessary to keep the economy from collapsing during lockdowns, but we did not walk into them fully aware of the long-term consequences. Not only did they fuel demand, they also channelled activity into supply-constrained sectors like construction, where builders already faced material shortages and labour bottlenecks. Many firms simply could not deliver what was promised and went bankrupt under the strain, leaving buyers stranded.

With more buyers chasing fewer homes, and a building industry unable to expand supply, prices were pushed sharply higher.

So if both new investors chasing yield and first-home buyers entering at peak prices often ended up worse off, who actually gained? The biggest winners were long-term owner occupiers. Households that had purchased decades earlier, whether down-sizers cashing out or families simply holding, captured the largest windfall from the surge. In effect, they became accidental investors. In fact, anyone who has ever bought a home is, technically, an investor because they have put capital into an asset regardless of if they were expecting it to hold or increase in value. The fact that so many owner occupiers closely follow the value of their property shows a level of awareness that they are investors, whether they choose that label or not.

The real wealth transfer was not to the people most often blamed. It was to those who already owned, and who were best placed to benefit from extraordinary policy support and tight supply. Unless we recognise this, we will keep misdiagnosing the roots of today’s crisis and blaming the wrong people for it.

Who Really Benefited from the Pandemic Housing Boom? The housing debate often frames investors as the villains of Australia’s affordability crisis. It is easy to point to negative gearing, cheap credit and capital gains concessions and conclude that speculators drove the pandemic bubble and pocketed the windfall. But this misses the real transfer of wealth that occurred during the COVID years.

During the pandemic, investors accounted for roughly 30 per cent of housing purchases. Some did well, particularly those who bought established homes in markets that surged. But many others were caught out, not only by labour shortages, soaring material costs and stalled projects, but also by the rapid rise in interest rates that followed. As a class, investors did not profit nearly as much as is often assumed.

What really drove prices higher was a collision of extraordinary demand with constrained supply. Ultra-low interest rates, mortgage deferrals and direct stimulus programs such as JobKeeper and HomeBuilder supported household incomes and encouraged housing activity. These policies were necessary to keep the economy from collapsing during lockdowns, but we did not walk into them fully aware of the long-term consequences. Not only did they fuel demand, they also channelled activity into supply-constrained sectors like construction, where builders already faced material shortages and labour bottlenecks. Many firms simply could not deliver what was promised and went bankrupt under the strain, leaving buyers stranded.

With more buyers chasing fewer homes, and a building industry unable to expand supply, prices were pushed sharply higher.

So if both new investors chasing yield and first-home buyers entering at peak prices often ended up worse off, who actually gained? The biggest winners were long-term owner occupiers. Households that had purchased decades earlier, whether down-sizers cashing out or families simply holding, captured the largest windfall from the surge. In effect, they became accidental investors. In fact, anyone who has ever bought a home is, technically, an investor because they have put capital into an asset regardless of if they were expecting it to hold or increase in value. The fact that so many owner occupiers closely follow the value of their property shows a level of awareness that they are investors, whether they choose that label or not.

The real wealth transfer was not to the people most often blamed. It was to those who already owned, and who were best placed to benefit from extraordinary policy support and tight supply. Unless we recognise this, we will keep misdiagnosing the roots of today’s crisis and blaming the wrong people for it.

Experiment: How is whatever's happening serving the greater good? If we zoom out long enough, we can often see that massive setbacks created foundations for evolution. Eg:

• The great oxygenation wiped out almost all life on Earth, but also created the atmosphere.
• The extinction of the dinos paved the way for bigger mammals—and eventually humans.
• Industrialization put tons of people out of work and polluted like crazy, but coincided with some of the greatest quality of life increases in recorded history
• In Trump and a Post Truth World, Ken Wilber suggests that Trump’s 2016 win was one manifestation of evolution taking a step backward to correct the way the “Green meme” went unhealthy—because the one thing that Trump was coherent about back then was being anti-pluralistic.

What’s a thing in the world that you don’t like right now, and think is a huge step backward, that might also be a step forward? How so?

By design, this is an unverifiable experiment from a third person perspective. Since we can keep zooming out + everything is interconnected, we’ll probably never know for sure, even if we live for thousands of years. 

But by design, this is verifiable from a first person perspective: Does your experience improve or change in any way by the experiment? How so?

(note that this doesn't ask you to deny any suffering—such as the horror of the oxygenation event's great extinction, or stop trying to make things better. Like everything, this perspective can be misused. "Everything happens for a reason" is usually dismissive, "if there were a reason for this in the long run, what might it be?" is additive. Like allowing versus expressing, it's not about bypassing the difficulty but rather creating a larger container for it. Freedom comes through acceptance rather than resistance.)

#TTT 

What's your view on EMFs? What do you belief about EMFs? I keep hearing seemingly reputable people warning about them. My husband says the argument isn’t scientifically sound. If you think EMFs are harmful, why, and how do you reduce exposure? I use wireless headphones a lot- my phone not so much.

What's your view on EMFs? What do you belief about EMFs? I keep hearing seemingly reputable people warning about them. My husband says the argument isn’t scientifically sound. If you think EMFs are harmful, why, and how do you reduce exposure? I use wireless headphones a lot- my phone not so much.

New structures for family-friends? Chatting with a friend recently and came up with this novel idea.

Historically, many people would end up married, having kids, and having responsibilities to their family and local community and groups.

These days, we have less family and civic integrity, less people are having kids. More people are creating their family of choice with friends.

I think there’s a general love and aliveness everyone wants to express and be in connection with.

But without the usual routes of kids/religion/local community, it doesn’t get routed well anymore.

We need more structures/ideas/understanding to support new kinds of families and community structures.

Examples:
How about an app that makes it easier to crowd source among trusted local friends to babysit?

Most housing is built around one nuclear family 1-4 bedrooms. But what about community homes with larger kitchens and living rooms and smaller but more bedrooms?

I’m gesturing at this general area at the idea that modern, industrial civilization is built around nuclear families but we have a lot more forms being generated now but still lagging behind in the idea/social practice/phys infrastructure to match.

What will the future literally look like? This idea comes from watching Mad Men- seeing smoking and drinking freely at the office for example, and my brother once pointing out that if a show or movie ever wanted to make it really clear that it was set in the 1990’s, all they’d have to do is have multiple people driving Saturn cars.

So here are a few of what I think (hope) the future will literally look like:

Gas stations will be very rare, and parking spaces will almost always have charging stations.

Having a garage in homes will be rare because car ownership will be rare. Using self-driving Uber-esque systems will be way more affordable, and car ownership then will be similar to antique car ownership now.

Lawns will be very rare, and permaculture-style of local fauna that doesn’t need care, upkeep, or watering will be common.

What do you think the future will look like?

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.

where can i drop in for hiking/walking shoal creek area? what are the cross streets?

where can i drop in for hiking/walking shoal creek area? what are the cross streets?

where can i drop in for hiking/walking shoal creek area? what are the cross streets?

When it comes "the global warming debate," there are often third ways that are ignored. Often the framing is global warming and climate deniers or something like that.

but it seems like there are obviously multiple perspectives here, and these two black and white boxes keep us from really seeing potential solutions.

Bjorn Lomborg for example believes in man-made climate change, but also doesn’t like the alarmism. Although he cherry picks data like he accuses others of, he also I think rightfully points out lots of flaws in the arguments that help us identify solutions. Much of the hurricane damage increase over time is because we’re building bigger and more expensive houses in hurricane alleys; for this problem, we can stop building there; everybody stopping flying altogether until 2100 delays increases the increase by a few weeks, so stopping flying isn’t the solution. Often the solutions are smaller, more local, less sexy: want less polar bears to die? Increase regulation on poaching. (Polar bear populations are up over the past decade because of this, apparently). I would love to identify and popularize these solutions, so they are spoken in the same breath as global warming rather than it being all gloom and doom and end of the world.

There are real tricky questions about what we’re trying to preserve and for whom, as well. If all we care about are humans and climate migration, then building infrastructure in places like Haiti and even evolving to coal power would be more helpful.