May 18th, 2008
| Filed under Misc
|
My old team-leader Scott “Satan” MacGibbon pointed out a couple of Economist articles that touch on some of the things I’ve been thinking about…
The first article is on the migration to less centralised and specialised workplaces. Most of it is another variation on the “Starbucks is the new cubicle” theme that seems to be discovered by journalists every couple of months, but I found the discussion on the revival of “Third Places” interesting, not least because I hadn’t actually encountered the term before.
The other is a short and (for the Economist) to-the-point article on the further damage that the boomer retirement wave of housing sales may do to the already seriously-wounded US property market. Most of it is along the line of the points I made below, in that the same logic applies in the Australian market, maybe even more so given that the investment property has been the preferred method of salting something away for the future for some time now. However his paragraph caught my eye:
Suburbs, which swelled with the baby-boomers, may begin to decline. If the building industry contracts, home prices may remain more stable. Or developers may switch to serving the old, building more compact housing near amenities. Towns may make new efforts to attract immigrants, who already accounted for 40% of the growth in homeownership between 2000 and 2006.
Unfortunately what the article fails to address is how this will interact with the rising cost of private transportation caused by peak-oil (or the less hysterical “plateau-oil“, as John Quiggin terms it). My first thought is that there are two ways this can play out; rising costs will further speed the collapse of the suburban lifestyle, or they will force the accommodation of more flexible work conditions. But there is another factor; the most remarkable effect of the changes in the oil market is likely to be in food production. There is already a recognition that most of the food we eat travels are ridiculous distance to our plates (supposedly ~2,500Km on average, although I can’t find a source for that). This may cause a fundamental change in the way we live as it becomes more economical to move closer to the centres of food production. This in turn may revitalise the currently bland and homogeneous environment of the suburban tracts; it’s possible that in the end the suburbs may become the country villages of the 21st century.
May 8th, 2008
| Filed under Misc
|
Last November I posted the following to a private mailing-list in a discussion on telecommuting:
My feeling is that such arrangements will become more common in the future. The reasoning behind this is that as Australia’s population ages there will be an increasing shortage of skilled knowledge workers, and consequently working conditions will become more negotiable. Add to this the likely gradual increase in oil prices (reflected at the pump) and the continuing high cost of property near the city and this option will be attractive to many employees.
If the above holds (and I may very well be wrong) then this will start to really kick-in in 2010 (when the baby-boomers start to retire), peaking around 2015. But we’re already starting to see some of the effects, with companies going to lengths to hire and retain younger employees ….
The Australian Financial Review today had a article (paywalled so no link) on the coming hiring crisis that reflects a lot of what I’ve said there. Particularly interesting is this quote from the Terence Budge of the Australian Institute of Company Directors:
This generation want to live where they work and not just be in the office from nine to five … They want to do some work over a coffee at the cafe, something else on their laptop at night …
I think this problem is going to see a lot more attention over the next couple of years, and is going to have other side-effects that are as yet unseen. Certainly it is going to affect the tools that are used by these increasingly mobile workers; SaaS, wikis and other manifestation of the internet-as-the-platform are likely to have an even greater uptake than we are already seeing.
Another quote that caught my eye is this from Craig Perrett of act3:
Mr Perrett said only about 25 per cent of workers at retirement age believed they could afford to retire and many were rejecting the traditional notion of retirement.
If it is true that 75% can’t afford to retire then this is going to have some huge implications. The first one that springs to mind is that unless these underfunded retiree’s are prepared to work full time they are going to have to find money from somewhere, and for most the only significant asset they have is their home. This will lead to a glut of housing entering the market in the medium term. Ultimately this and the decentralisation of the workplace could have a far greater effect on the Sydney housing crisis than government intervention.
