1 March

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the comments on any social media post, the pile-on as people look to promote their own status. One interesting approach to housing problems that targets status directly is ‘Yuppie Fishtanks’, a concept Noah Smith (economist) invented I think. It says if you build high-end dwellings, the better-off will buy those and move out of the lower-cost dwellings they will otherwise gentrify, driving prices up for those. Real world data shows this tends to work, if you build high-end dwellings, the richer members of the community will shift to those, freeing up cheaper housing stock for others. As Noah says (and I’ve always believed), supply and demand explain nothing, it’s a complete fiction. Target status, that drives everything.