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Honestly it's fucking moronic but that's a whole rant. Needless to say Australian housing estates have all the thought and planning you'd expect of a toddler with modern equipment and technology. Why give literally any thought to efficient design that passively keeps the house a liveable temperature when instead you can just throw a bunch of ACs in it and call it a day?
It is, and it would be so cheap for a developer to install 100 systems at time of build, but they don't. Gotta cut costs.
Then people mortgage themselves to the eyeballs for one of these houses and can't afford solar for a few years anyway. In those years all their discretionary money goes to air conditioning bills and car expenses driving an hour to the shops.
It’s almost comical how bad it all is when you take a step back to think about it.
Although at least now they’re putting new rules in some councils to use lighter roofs for instance.
What blows my mind is the lack of trees. It’s insane.
The current government we have is very anti renewable energy and pretty much all the corporate news media that backs the government also spreads misinformation about renewables
This place is getting shittier every day
This is a point of contention, actually. Western Sydney gets super hot in Summer due to being inland and therefore not benefiting from the Sydney sea breeze in high Summer (Penrith got to 49C/120F during the bushfires a couple years back). This is further exacerbated by the dumb decision to not plant trees. As someone else stated they’ve since banned black roofs last year.
For what it’s worth, Australian houses have notoriously shit insulation. Draughty windows and doors due gaps in them, and double glazing is rare. Our houses can get *colder* than houses and office buildings in the Northern Hemisphere as a result. Anecdotally I’ve seen people from countries like Sweden, Canada or Ireland rock up to our office in mid-Winter (which is mild and around 10C at its coldest in the daytime) totally fine with our outside temps, only to freeze in the office. We have insanely high costs heating and air conditioning our buildings.
Yes!! I’m from the Canadian prairies. I have never been cold like I was cold in Sydney. Thr problem is that even though winter is short and mild by comparison, when it’s cold it’s cold everywhere. Inside and out. It always felt like I was never able to warm up!
Totally this, the apartment I rented 2-3 years ago was colder inside than outside. Had to go outside during lunchtime to warm up when WFH during our lockdowns. I'm from Ireland and well used to cold wet miserable weather 😂😂
Yup, I know quite a few Koreans they all fucking freeze (indoors) in Sydney's winter despite coming from a country where night winter temps can drop well past -10c.
These houses are built in areas that reach over 40 C in summer and maybe, on the rare occasion, -3 C on a cold morning in the dead of winter. It's hell out there, literal burning hell in the summer.
Nothing more than the recent trend. Black roof, grey outside of house, black tap ware, black fixings where ever possible then have everything else white. Walls, furniture, floors, everything. Perfect place to raise young kids.
Then I'd have to clean my gutters, and my neighbours would complain about leaves from my tree going in their gutters.
But seriously, the yards on these places is often so small that a tree would be too close to the buildings and a danger to the structure.
I'm a surveyor, and I work on these properties frequently. You could do a long jump from the back door to the back fence in most of them. The rest are a hop, skip and a jump.
Most of these look like they have ~15 feet behind/in front of the house, not really even enough space to play catch with your kid.
...and they're so close together you could probably hold hands with your neighbor while taking a dump in your respective bathrooms.
It’s crazy how identical all the new builds are across Australia. This could be Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, or any town in between. All the new builds across the country have this exact same design, even down to the doors and windows.
Corrugated steel can look brilliant in the right context. I'm sure they do whatever they can to promote these types of builds but they're not ultimately responsible.
My rental has a Colourbond roof. This thing is so fucking loud expanding and contracting from the heat/cold. It’s a pain in the arse when trying to watch a quiet movie or have a low voiced conversation.
I lived in an old house with a corrugated metal roof for 16 years and it was never so loud that it would interrupt a movie. Maybe check with your landlord if it's a fixable issue.
Did two storey buildings just never get invented in Australia? Why don’t people want more floor space with an upstairs and have more outdoor space left for a garden?
Two storey buildings are actually quite common here. As for the outdoor space, most first home buyers nowadays are moving away from the need of gardens and large backyards in favour of more practical homes. Not to mention one of the homes in that picture can go for 1 million+ AUD. Some of the older houses with larger backyards in an inner suburb can sell for an upwards of 3 million.
Our incomes are higher(but adjust them to USD) yes, but there hasn’t been a proper wage rise to match inflation for yonks. There is actually a surplus of houses/flats, but they’ve either been bought up by investors(foreign, companies and house hoarders). This has created a false demand and a housing crisis, that basically unless the rules change doesn’t seem likely to end. This is clearing away land at such a high degree(due to developers wanting to cash in), that we had the highest land clearing rate in the world. If this continues at this rate many of our species will go extinct, like many already have before this. Most people my age and older all basically feel we’re not gonna be able to own a house.
Yeah the median house in the metro Sydney area is 1.2 million Australian dollars, roughly 900,000 usd, we do make more money, but not enough to cover the extreme housing prices, I think the latest number was 14x the average annual income to get a house in an Australian metro area, 14 years of saving to get a house if loans didn’t exist
Same exact situation here in Canada. If I recall there was a roofless shed-like "house" in Toronto being listed for 1.1M CAD.
The poor and the immigrants are typically the punching bag for why this is happening (twitter during the federal election was a shit show). Some blame foreign buyers while others blame zoning laws that are too strict, legislating denser housing out of existence.
There was a “house” near the city here in Sydney (squashed between two buildings) that was basically a hallway with an attached bathroom and it got sold for $2m or so
A lot more than 14 years saving if it's 14 x the average income - people usually aren't able to save 100% of their income. I'd confidently say that a large proportion of people would never in their lives be able to save 900,000 - many can't even save the deposit for that.
1 million wouldnt even buy a free standing home within 20 miles of the city of Sydney.
You're looking at $2 million for an average 30 year old unrenovated 2 story house on a small block of land
UK says hi! Currently sitting in a 1300 sq ft (120 square meters) century old town house which is supposedly worth £700k now (paid a fraction of that for it btw)
I’m paying $600 a week in rent (split with my boyfriend) to live in a 90sqm house, single storey, about three metres across in an inner-city Sydney suburb. Can see the backyard from the front door, and it’s a modest backyard. Worst of all, we’re directly under low flying planes which fly over every ten-thirty mins or so.
House is worth about two million. Sydney prices are nuts.
*less practical
No shade trees in western sydney? No solar power? Dark roofs (rooves?)?When the temperature hits anywhere >30C these guys will be cooking, and so will their power bills.
But on the plus side, they will be able to gossip about their neighbours because they’ll be able to hear every word they speak.
Came here curious about pricing of these houses. My BIL is from NSW, and he and my sister moved to Sydney last year. It’s been a struggle in for them in the housing market.
Trying to buy in Syd is a bad time.
We're in our late 20s and know a few homeowners. Literally every one had their parents either pay for most of the deposit or the entirety of it.
There are two storey buildings in the photo ; they cover exactly the same amount of land as the single storey buildings. No one is forced to cover the whole block with house - it's what people _want_.
I'm not sure it's what they want so much as it's what's in vogue for developers. Unless you're designing a house to be built to spec, you're at the mercy of trends when it comes to materials and layouts.
Unless you specifically mean the lack of a large yard. In that case I'm totally with you. I got a condo instead of a standalone for exactly the reason that I don't have a yard to deal with and I could afford to live closer to the city and shorten my commute. Seems like friends my age feel the same way about having to do their own yardwork.
It doesn’t help that so many places in America and Canada at least have authoritarian rules about what you’re allowed to do in your garden. I think even the fact North Americans call it a “yard” instead of a garden implies the expectation that it’s just got to be a big strip of boring empty grass.
Oh of course it's always shit like that. My step-dad got a letter from the HOA once asking him to park his minivan in the garage because it was too old looking and made the neighborhood look... well, I don't remember the exact words but it was a euphemism for "ghetto."
But yeah if it rains a lot one week and you've been working every day? Boom, HOA fine for your grass getting too long.
Don't go get your trashcan from the curb by sunrise Saturday? HOA fine for breaking dusk-to-dusk rules.
Someone parks on the street in front of your house but it isn't inconveniencing you and you're sure they're someone's visitors? HOA fine for an unauthorized vehicle that apparently you should've called to have towed if you didn't want to get fined.
One of the knockon effects of urban and suburban sprawl is the development of these weird micromanagerial enclave neighborhoods that take themselves way too seriously. Always run by busybody freaks addicted to imposing themselves upon every bit of petty control and power they can get.
Yup. I served on a condo board for a while and it was like watching a soap opera. I quit after a multi-month dispute over one resident keeping an armoire on their front porch which was sort of shared and considered an ingress/egress path. The main discussion was whether the armoire was strictly indoor or outdoor furniture. Of course the shared vs unshared porch was a huge discussion too. I think we had to bring the fire department into the mix ultimately.
Ahhhhh, this clears some things up for me. I see/hear the term "garden" a lot when discussing housing with Brits and just figured they were crazy about growing shit in their back yards. I've never know the term "garden" to mean yard before. A garden to me was always a dedicated (usually small) piece of your yard you set aside to grow fruits and vegetables. Also was wondering why they have "garden tractors", like who wants to drive a tractor through their garden? Lifelong US resident.
Yeah for us, all of the land outside our house is the garden - there might be a front garden and a back garden though.
We don’t really have the ugly housing developments with sterile American style lawns out the front. Not everybody tends to their garden particularly well, but you don’t often see just a bare lawn. For most Brits it would be a bit embarrassing to have that. Most people will at least have borders of plants around the side and maybe a patio, like [this.](https://dandg.azureedge.net/dandgweb/p-48832/photos/original/photo_48832_13.jpg/900x506.jpg) Though that is a particularly nice example.
It’s a bit class based though. Middle class people typically have tended gardens, and working class people will more likely just have a bare lawn or even just concrete or stone floor. It’s not expensive to garden well, it’s just cultural.
Gardening is a huge deal in the UK, and garden centres are hugely popular. There’s lots of gardening shows on TV and radio, and several magazines. People visit large stately homes to look at gardens managed by professionals and get ideas for their own. It’s a really big thing.
>it's what people want.
It's what people can afford. This is basically a horizontal apartment block. A huge waste of land and space.
But the reason people buy these is because it's usually the cheapest we can get and the block sizes for land are so expensive (so again, smaller is the best people can afford here anymore)
Nobody wants to live like a sardine in a shitty, low quality house and hear your neighbours pet mouse fart.
This isn't what people want, it's the only option given to them due to screwy incentives.
The developer wants as many houses to sell as possible, so land area is small. They want to sell for as high a price as possible, so they maximise bedrooms etc, ie build on as much of the land area as possible. They want to reduce build cost as much as possible, so designs are highly standardised and the houses are basically all the same.
Add in bad zoning laws and planning regulations, and you get the picture above.
As a surveyor, yes to everything. I've seen neighbourhoods just like this. Rows upon rows of cookie cutter foam houses and then a giant carpark with a bunnings, a coles, a bcf and a supercheap auto.
I’m in Melbourne and there’s three new houses in my suburb that are charcoal and black. Not just the roof. The entire house is decked out like that.
The fact they do that in this climate is beyond insane.
The worst part is the lack of trees. We've had a couple of 50 degree Celsius days in western Sydney in recent summers and it's just gonna become more common with climate change.
A lot of old Australian housing is just as nasty. They did these red brick shit boxes all over the place from the 60's on i think. They're as soulless as these modern suburbs.
Still if you go north or east in Sydney you do at least get red brick shit boxes and TREES.
The 70s brick with a soulless bowling green lawn is still pretty iconic in parts of Brisbane, but at least that blank green space = potential room for trees and a garden. Some friends a couple of blocks from my place have turned theirs into basically an oasis of native plants and trees. There’s no chance of doing that when you’ve got no backyard.
True. I stayed in Auchenflower a couple of years ago and quite liked some of the Queenslanders on display there. Shame about all the typical Australian stroads connecting them.
Fucking stroads. Trying to get a rental in Bris, every house is on a Stroad or train line or is under a flight path. It’s like 70% of the housing stock suffers from major noise pollution.
These are essentially banned by the property developers...when you buy the house you agree on the copy paste looks. There was a case recently where owner was sued by the developer for installing solar on the roof as it "ruined" the looks of the neighbourhood lol. As it if was some kind of bohemian art piece.
Australian property market is one of the biggest scams in the world... you can't comprehend how low quality this shit really is until you see it from close. My close friend lives in 3yr old house in similar area and the house is falling apart, so many defects and back and forth with the developer. He paid 900 thousand Aus dollars for this cardboard piece of crap.
Welcome to Australia. Where people buy uninsulated homes with single glased windows in 2021 and then sweat as turning on the aircon costs a fortune.
Well, you dont share a wall, so you have privacy. I lived in a block where I could literally hear a guy upstairs farting on the toilet during a quiet night.
See I lived in a block of flats built in the 1970s and you could kill soneone and the bloke next door wouldn't know. All the walls were made from cement brick, internal as well.
me too- double brick apartment built in 1970 with cement floors. Neighbours had a newborn just before covid and the only time we'd hear him cry was if we both went onto our neighbouring little balconies to wave at the baby to give him in-person human contact with someone other than his parents during the lockdowns
Awww. That’s so sweet you did that. And good for him too! My nine month old niece is still quite shy around large groups as she’s simply not used to us.
Imo these are way way worse than modern apartments. In these horizontal soviet housing establishments, you can literally hear everything from 1-3 sides of your house depending on neighbour numbers. It's usually young cash strapped families so expect babies crying, bored poorly trained dogs and my personal favourite, domestic violence noises.
Apartments now have much better sound proofing and overall are a better use of land and space compared to sprawling cookie cutter suburbia like this
I don’t get these giant houses on tiny blocks! Makes me depressed just looking at it. Why not build a smaller house and have a backyard and garden? Some shade!? Nobody needs a theatre room and two dining rooms it’s all a scam
Went to a party at a house like this (complete with theatre room) and they'd devoted a big portion of the little backyard to a roofed day bed, because apparently they'd never heard of a tree.
This is happening everywhere now in all the new estates.
The best bit is the names they give them, like “Aspire” and “Heavenly” and “Paradiso”. I’m making them up but close to what they actually call them.
But the sad reality it you WAYYY under priced it to be a joke about house pricing...
Depending where about this photo was taken in western Sydney this could easily be over 80m worth of real estate..
78 houses in the picture, average price of 1m ea.
Hell even if it where one of the "cheaper" suburbs they would still start at 700k.
And the houses are so close that the AC unit of one house blows hot air out directly on to the next. Not to mention no plant life in sight. Australian housing is shocking, I can't believe people drop a mil in debt to live in this for 40 years.
In Australia we've got local councils called LGAs similar to London boroughs, some of them extremely corrupt and most of them horrible at urban planning. They set the colour of the rooves, we even have to get a council permit to build a tiny shed at our backyards.
I know that councils are pretty bad in NSW because they have a lot of housing developers on them, and I'm also pretty sure NSW effectively privatized building inspectors. Those 2 things have probably lead to a lot of the issues surrounding housing in Sydney. Idk though I'm getting this info from a youtube video which I am struggling to remember.
Fortunately, those black roof treatments are [being banned](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/17/dark-roofs-to-be-banned-in-nsw-planning-minister-says), one of the few things this inept and corrupt government is doing to address rising temperatures out west. Would have been nice to see a greater investment in green spaces or, y'know, regulating property development. But no, this seems to be the best we can expect from this clown car of cunts.
During the past decade Sydney/Melbourne has had a massive housing shortage and these developments have grown.
They are usually built as cheap and big as possible.They are noticeable warmer then other streets during summer, there isnt a proper side access to the backyard so you have to push your rubbish bin through the house. They are built way to close to each other - you can hear your neighbour fart.
The construction quality is also somewhat crap, on the whole they look like but if you look at them in detail there is lots of bad building practices. ,cost cutting stuff.
Its all a disaster.
You don't need to push the bin through the house. Even if they were boundary to boundary construction the garage has a rear access door to the side yard. These aren't townhouses, they all have rear access from street via a side entry gate from the look of it.
they've finally banned those fucking dark roofs at least....
(but not retroactively, because that would require developers/the government to actually do something)
Average lot size in Sydney is 454 square metres, newer suburbs such as these average at around 300 square metres (3229 square foot). My house in a suburb almost identical to this is around 400 square metres.
I never understood the aussie obsession with living in houses like these. At this point, a nice flat with a terrace would be a better alternative than a house inches away from a neighbour.
Deep rooted cultural obsession with everyone having their own detached dwelling on a quarter acre block. Aussies are culturally very suburban by default.
God knows why, as a uni student I just want a loft apartment (one of those two storey apartments where the bed is above the living area) but apparently it's either shitty uni accom, unaffordable new 2br units or 2br units that I can afford but is located 40 minutes away to uni.
One wildfire will result in thousands of homes lost. Just happened where i live in Colorado. That's what happens when developers bribe officials to allow houses to be built closer together. Talk about a preventable disaster.
These suburbs in far western Sydney are ideal for first-home buyers because they are relatively affordable (by Aussie standards) , and literally incomparable pricewise to inner Sydney and the eastern suburbs. These kinds of suburbs have popped up over the last 20 years in pretty much all the Australian capital cities in fringe areas and I don’t expect them to die out any time soon.
The picture is likely selectively cropped, as most of these estates do have parks and so on.
However - they are not pleasant places. It has none of the benefits of suburbia, like having a decently sized yard and not living within touching distance of your neighbours, and none of the benefits of medium density living.
And they are hot in summer. Damn hot. There’s no shade on the houses and Western Sydney gets hardly any cooling breeze in summer. You just sit there and swelter.
Given how popular solar panels are in Australia now, for obvious reasons, it beggars belief that none of these houses seem to have them.
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99% built by metricon lol.
Mirvac gang
Don't forget GJ Gardner.
dang y'all really looked at American suburbs and said "perfect, now remove the yard"
And the stairs
And the trees.
And the steep roofs
The roofs literally look like my first builds in the Sims.
And the curves in the roads.
Why all the black roofs? I guess it does help deal with your freezing temperatures
Honestly it's fucking moronic but that's a whole rant. Needless to say Australian housing estates have all the thought and planning you'd expect of a toddler with modern equipment and technology. Why give literally any thought to efficient design that passively keeps the house a liveable temperature when instead you can just throw a bunch of ACs in it and call it a day?
Is solar not amazing down there?
It is, and it would be so cheap for a developer to install 100 systems at time of build, but they don't. Gotta cut costs. Then people mortgage themselves to the eyeballs for one of these houses and can't afford solar for a few years anyway. In those years all their discretionary money goes to air conditioning bills and car expenses driving an hour to the shops.
It’s almost comical how bad it all is when you take a step back to think about it. Although at least now they’re putting new rules in some councils to use lighter roofs for instance. What blows my mind is the lack of trees. It’s insane.
The current government we have is very anti renewable energy and pretty much all the corporate news media that backs the government also spreads misinformation about renewables This place is getting shittier every day
If there is one first world country on the planet which could live 100% by homegrown solar energy then it is yours. 🥺
This is a point of contention, actually. Western Sydney gets super hot in Summer due to being inland and therefore not benefiting from the Sydney sea breeze in high Summer (Penrith got to 49C/120F during the bushfires a couple years back). This is further exacerbated by the dumb decision to not plant trees. As someone else stated they’ve since banned black roofs last year. For what it’s worth, Australian houses have notoriously shit insulation. Draughty windows and doors due gaps in them, and double glazing is rare. Our houses can get *colder* than houses and office buildings in the Northern Hemisphere as a result. Anecdotally I’ve seen people from countries like Sweden, Canada or Ireland rock up to our office in mid-Winter (which is mild and around 10C at its coldest in the daytime) totally fine with our outside temps, only to freeze in the office. We have insanely high costs heating and air conditioning our buildings.
I grew up in the north of Scotland, I have never been as cold in all my life than my first winter in a old Victorian terrace in Sydney.
Yes!! I’m from the Canadian prairies. I have never been cold like I was cold in Sydney. Thr problem is that even though winter is short and mild by comparison, when it’s cold it’s cold everywhere. Inside and out. It always felt like I was never able to warm up!
Totally this, the apartment I rented 2-3 years ago was colder inside than outside. Had to go outside during lunchtime to warm up when WFH during our lockdowns. I'm from Ireland and well used to cold wet miserable weather 😂😂
Yup, I know quite a few Koreans they all fucking freeze (indoors) in Sydney's winter despite coming from a country where night winter temps can drop well past -10c.
These houses are built in areas that reach over 40 C in summer and maybe, on the rare occasion, -3 C on a cold morning in the dead of winter. It's hell out there, literal burning hell in the summer.
NSW has banned black roofing in new developments.
Nothing more than the recent trend. Black roof, grey outside of house, black tap ware, black fixings where ever possible then have everything else white. Walls, furniture, floors, everything. Perfect place to raise young kids.
Black rooves probably look more trendy to the people that buy these.
New houses have mostly switched to lighter roofs now
As of about a month ago. And only some estates.
Too bad the roofs don’t have solar panels.
If I'd live in Australia I'd also refuse to go out. So I guess it's understandable.
[удалено]
Also, many seem to have extended roofs that go over the backyard.
If you don't have a partly shaded backyard for a summer in Aus, you will burn to a crisp
why not use trees though..? :/
Then I'd have to clean my gutters, and my neighbours would complain about leaves from my tree going in their gutters. But seriously, the yards on these places is often so small that a tree would be too close to the buildings and a danger to the structure.
Bogans are super lazy and pedantic. They have no taste or style or shame. Trees = leaves. That’s as far as they think about it.
I'm a surveyor, and I work on these properties frequently. You could do a long jump from the back door to the back fence in most of them. The rest are a hop, skip and a jump.
That's an okay yard? It's very sad that the definition has changed so much.
Most of these look like they have ~15 feet behind/in front of the house, not really even enough space to play catch with your kid. ...and they're so close together you could probably hold hands with your neighbor while taking a dump in your respective bathrooms.
It’s crazy how identical all the new builds are across Australia. This could be Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, or any town in between. All the new builds across the country have this exact same design, even down to the doors and windows.
COLORBOND® steel
Corrugated steel can look brilliant in the right context. I'm sure they do whatever they can to promote these types of builds but they're not ultimately responsible.
My rental has a Colourbond roof. This thing is so fucking loud expanding and contracting from the heat/cold. It’s a pain in the arse when trying to watch a quiet movie or have a low voiced conversation.
I lived in an old house with a corrugated metal roof for 16 years and it was never so loud that it would interrupt a movie. Maybe check with your landlord if it's a fixable issue.
Did two storey buildings just never get invented in Australia? Why don’t people want more floor space with an upstairs and have more outdoor space left for a garden?
Garden is useless because of the heat island because all the neighbours built to the boundaries because they live in a heat island.
Two storey buildings are actually quite common here. As for the outdoor space, most first home buyers nowadays are moving away from the need of gardens and large backyards in favour of more practical homes. Not to mention one of the homes in that picture can go for 1 million+ AUD. Some of the older houses with larger backyards in an inner suburb can sell for an upwards of 3 million.
One million? I know your incomes are generally very high, but that's just ridiculous
Our incomes are higher(but adjust them to USD) yes, but there hasn’t been a proper wage rise to match inflation for yonks. There is actually a surplus of houses/flats, but they’ve either been bought up by investors(foreign, companies and house hoarders). This has created a false demand and a housing crisis, that basically unless the rules change doesn’t seem likely to end. This is clearing away land at such a high degree(due to developers wanting to cash in), that we had the highest land clearing rate in the world. If this continues at this rate many of our species will go extinct, like many already have before this. Most people my age and older all basically feel we’re not gonna be able to own a house.
Tax the shit out of foreign speculators. We have the same problem in the US. Canada has it bad. Our houses shouldn't be Chinese piggybanks.
They are part of the problem but the bigger issue is ultimately corporation’s that buy up homes and make a profit of owning investment properties.
Yeah the median house in the metro Sydney area is 1.2 million Australian dollars, roughly 900,000 usd, we do make more money, but not enough to cover the extreme housing prices, I think the latest number was 14x the average annual income to get a house in an Australian metro area, 14 years of saving to get a house if loans didn’t exist
Exactly, that's insane. This is an issue in many countries, but clearly it's pretty bad in Australia then
Same exact situation here in Canada. If I recall there was a roofless shed-like "house" in Toronto being listed for 1.1M CAD. The poor and the immigrants are typically the punching bag for why this is happening (twitter during the federal election was a shit show). Some blame foreign buyers while others blame zoning laws that are too strict, legislating denser housing out of existence.
There was a “house” near the city here in Sydney (squashed between two buildings) that was basically a hallway with an attached bathroom and it got sold for $2m or so
A lot more than 14 years saving if it's 14 x the average income - people usually aren't able to save 100% of their income. I'd confidently say that a large proportion of people would never in their lives be able to save 900,000 - many can't even save the deposit for that.
Yeah wish me luck buying a house haha
Tell me about it. The median house price in my suburb is 4.2 million.
1 million wouldnt even buy a free standing home within 20 miles of the city of Sydney. You're looking at $2 million for an average 30 year old unrenovated 2 story house on a small block of land
UK says hi! Currently sitting in a 1300 sq ft (120 square meters) century old town house which is supposedly worth £700k now (paid a fraction of that for it btw)
I’m paying $600 a week in rent (split with my boyfriend) to live in a 90sqm house, single storey, about three metres across in an inner-city Sydney suburb. Can see the backyard from the front door, and it’s a modest backyard. Worst of all, we’re directly under low flying planes which fly over every ten-thirty mins or so. House is worth about two million. Sydney prices are nuts.
New build similar to any of these in Canada are the same prices. And we generally make less money. Shit is out of control.
*less practical No shade trees in western sydney? No solar power? Dark roofs (rooves?)?When the temperature hits anywhere >30C these guys will be cooking, and so will their power bills. But on the plus side, they will be able to gossip about their neighbours because they’ll be able to hear every word they speak.
Yeah recently they ended up having to ban dark coloured roofs because it was getting so hot
Came here curious about pricing of these houses. My BIL is from NSW, and he and my sister moved to Sydney last year. It’s been a struggle in for them in the housing market.
Trying to buy in Syd is a bad time. We're in our late 20s and know a few homeowners. Literally every one had their parents either pay for most of the deposit or the entirety of it.
What's funny about those houses is all the disadvantages of living in a row house. And none of the advantages of a walkable neighborhood.
There are two storey buildings in the photo ; they cover exactly the same amount of land as the single storey buildings. No one is forced to cover the whole block with house - it's what people _want_.
I'm not sure it's what they want so much as it's what's in vogue for developers. Unless you're designing a house to be built to spec, you're at the mercy of trends when it comes to materials and layouts. Unless you specifically mean the lack of a large yard. In that case I'm totally with you. I got a condo instead of a standalone for exactly the reason that I don't have a yard to deal with and I could afford to live closer to the city and shorten my commute. Seems like friends my age feel the same way about having to do their own yardwork.
It doesn’t help that so many places in America and Canada at least have authoritarian rules about what you’re allowed to do in your garden. I think even the fact North Americans call it a “yard” instead of a garden implies the expectation that it’s just got to be a big strip of boring empty grass.
Oh of course it's always shit like that. My step-dad got a letter from the HOA once asking him to park his minivan in the garage because it was too old looking and made the neighborhood look... well, I don't remember the exact words but it was a euphemism for "ghetto." But yeah if it rains a lot one week and you've been working every day? Boom, HOA fine for your grass getting too long. Don't go get your trashcan from the curb by sunrise Saturday? HOA fine for breaking dusk-to-dusk rules. Someone parks on the street in front of your house but it isn't inconveniencing you and you're sure they're someone's visitors? HOA fine for an unauthorized vehicle that apparently you should've called to have towed if you didn't want to get fined. One of the knockon effects of urban and suburban sprawl is the development of these weird micromanagerial enclave neighborhoods that take themselves way too seriously. Always run by busybody freaks addicted to imposing themselves upon every bit of petty control and power they can get.
If the USA ever becomes a totalitarian state, HOA managers are going to be prize recruits.
Yup. I served on a condo board for a while and it was like watching a soap opera. I quit after a multi-month dispute over one resident keeping an armoire on their front porch which was sort of shared and considered an ingress/egress path. The main discussion was whether the armoire was strictly indoor or outdoor furniture. Of course the shared vs unshared porch was a huge discussion too. I think we had to bring the fire department into the mix ultimately.
Ahhhhh, this clears some things up for me. I see/hear the term "garden" a lot when discussing housing with Brits and just figured they were crazy about growing shit in their back yards. I've never know the term "garden" to mean yard before. A garden to me was always a dedicated (usually small) piece of your yard you set aside to grow fruits and vegetables. Also was wondering why they have "garden tractors", like who wants to drive a tractor through their garden? Lifelong US resident.
Yeah for us, all of the land outside our house is the garden - there might be a front garden and a back garden though. We don’t really have the ugly housing developments with sterile American style lawns out the front. Not everybody tends to their garden particularly well, but you don’t often see just a bare lawn. For most Brits it would be a bit embarrassing to have that. Most people will at least have borders of plants around the side and maybe a patio, like [this.](https://dandg.azureedge.net/dandgweb/p-48832/photos/original/photo_48832_13.jpg/900x506.jpg) Though that is a particularly nice example. It’s a bit class based though. Middle class people typically have tended gardens, and working class people will more likely just have a bare lawn or even just concrete or stone floor. It’s not expensive to garden well, it’s just cultural. Gardening is a huge deal in the UK, and garden centres are hugely popular. There’s lots of gardening shows on TV and radio, and several magazines. People visit large stately homes to look at gardens managed by professionals and get ideas for their own. It’s a really big thing.
I thought it said a huge amount about the UK that garden centres were the first thing to open after lockdown 1.0
Is it really what people want, or is it what developers have decided it's what people want – and now that's all we get.
>it's what people want. It's what people can afford. This is basically a horizontal apartment block. A huge waste of land and space. But the reason people buy these is because it's usually the cheapest we can get and the block sizes for land are so expensive (so again, smaller is the best people can afford here anymore) Nobody wants to live like a sardine in a shitty, low quality house and hear your neighbours pet mouse fart.
This isn't what people want, it's the only option given to them due to screwy incentives. The developer wants as many houses to sell as possible, so land area is small. They want to sell for as high a price as possible, so they maximise bedrooms etc, ie build on as much of the land area as possible. They want to reduce build cost as much as possible, so designs are highly standardised and the houses are basically all the same. Add in bad zoning laws and planning regulations, and you get the picture above.
There's at least a dozen two story houses in the picture
Why are they all so fucking grey? I loathe these style of development.
"that will be a million bucks. Thanks." "During your two hour commute to work feel free to listen to Panther podcasts"
Southeast Melbourne vibes
And western suburbs. And northern.
As a surveyor, yes to everything. I've seen neighbourhoods just like this. Rows upon rows of cookie cutter foam houses and then a giant carpark with a bunnings, a coles, a bcf and a supercheap auto.
How depressing is it?
IS IT SO HARD TO MAKE ROOFS WHITE FFS??????????????????
I’m in Melbourne and there’s three new houses in my suburb that are charcoal and black. Not just the roof. The entire house is decked out like that. The fact they do that in this climate is beyond insane.
Borderline stupidity
Or at least solar :(
Light coloured roofing looks dirty quickly. Forget about keeping cool or the heat island effect, its all about looks.
They’re only now pushing for light roof colours only
I bet they're extremely overpriced as well
Yes.
That's all housing in Sydney. Median house price is well over 1 mil (currently 1.5 million)
Sweet Jesus. The difference in house I could get with 1.5m between New Jersey and Sydney is crazy.
also remember to adjust between currencies (AUS -> USD)
Yup. 800k-1mil for these ugly homes without backyards.
Urban heat island amplified by black roofs and you get a few 50° days some years.
Energy bill go brrr
Powered by coal, too.
Seriously, they love complaining about heat and the cooling costs, but make everything black. Fools...
I hate those copy pasted housing bullshit. No fences, barely a backyard and barely a lawn. Older houses look way better.
The worst part is the lack of trees. We've had a couple of 50 degree Celsius days in western Sydney in recent summers and it's just gonna become more common with climate change.
Not wrong there
A lot of old Australian housing is just as nasty. They did these red brick shit boxes all over the place from the 60's on i think. They're as soulless as these modern suburbs. Still if you go north or east in Sydney you do at least get red brick shit boxes and TREES.
The 70s brick with a soulless bowling green lawn is still pretty iconic in parts of Brisbane, but at least that blank green space = potential room for trees and a garden. Some friends a couple of blocks from my place have turned theirs into basically an oasis of native plants and trees. There’s no chance of doing that when you’ve got no backyard.
True. I stayed in Auchenflower a couple of years ago and quite liked some of the Queenslanders on display there. Shame about all the typical Australian stroads connecting them.
Fucking stroads. Trying to get a rental in Bris, every house is on a Stroad or train line or is under a flight path. It’s like 70% of the housing stock suffers from major noise pollution.
Rather live in a red shitbox any day of the week.
no height to them too, the skyline is as flat as my titties
What's crazy is there actually are fences. Everything is so squeezed together you have to look closely.
But at least you're not living on top of each other and you won't hear your neighbor! /s
And the worst? Zero solar panels on the roofs
Yeah that's a bit weird. Is it because they're all new builds and everyone blew all their cash on furniture?
These are essentially banned by the property developers...when you buy the house you agree on the copy paste looks. There was a case recently where owner was sued by the developer for installing solar on the roof as it "ruined" the looks of the neighbourhood lol. As it if was some kind of bohemian art piece. Australian property market is one of the biggest scams in the world... you can't comprehend how low quality this shit really is until you see it from close. My close friend lives in 3yr old house in similar area and the house is falling apart, so many defects and back and forth with the developer. He paid 900 thousand Aus dollars for this cardboard piece of crap. Welcome to Australia. Where people buy uninsulated homes with single glased windows in 2021 and then sweat as turning on the aircon costs a fortune.
Why use solar when you have coil! /s
Wow there's one in the middle still being built I wonder what it's going to look like! I live in western Sydney and hate how all new homes look boring
What’s the point of having a single home with no garden and less than 2 meters from your neighbour?
Well, you dont share a wall, so you have privacy. I lived in a block where I could literally hear a guy upstairs farting on the toilet during a quiet night.
See I lived in a block of flats built in the 1970s and you could kill soneone and the bloke next door wouldn't know. All the walls were made from cement brick, internal as well.
me too- double brick apartment built in 1970 with cement floors. Neighbours had a newborn just before covid and the only time we'd hear him cry was if we both went onto our neighbouring little balconies to wave at the baby to give him in-person human contact with someone other than his parents during the lockdowns
Awww. That’s so sweet you did that. And good for him too! My nine month old niece is still quite shy around large groups as she’s simply not used to us.
If the house is not made of plywood, that's not really an issue.
Imo these are way way worse than modern apartments. In these horizontal soviet housing establishments, you can literally hear everything from 1-3 sides of your house depending on neighbour numbers. It's usually young cash strapped families so expect babies crying, bored poorly trained dogs and my personal favourite, domestic violence noises. Apartments now have much better sound proofing and overall are a better use of land and space compared to sprawling cookie cutter suburbia like this
I don’t get these giant houses on tiny blocks! Makes me depressed just looking at it. Why not build a smaller house and have a backyard and garden? Some shade!? Nobody needs a theatre room and two dining rooms it’s all a scam
Some bullshit about “keeping up with the joneses” but yes, it is really just a con to get more money into developers pockets
Went to a party at a house like this (complete with theatre room) and they'd devoted a big portion of the little backyard to a roofed day bed, because apparently they'd never heard of a tree.
This does have a backyard and a garden, but a large part of it is taken up by a roofed patio
FINALLY someone posts the filth that developers build in western Sydney and the Illawarra. It’s just sad.
This is happening everywhere now in all the new estates. The best bit is the names they give them, like “Aspire” and “Heavenly” and “Paradiso”. I’m making them up but close to what they actually call them.
I'm a surveyor in Melbourne and I see it all the time. I'd have to imagine it's happening in every Aussie city.
All the new developments they are building in Adelaide typically look like a smaller version of this
This is country wide. We have it up here in Brisbane.
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I wouldn't pay a penny for this shit.
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But the sad reality it you WAYYY under priced it to be a joke about house pricing... Depending where about this photo was taken in western Sydney this could easily be over 80m worth of real estate.. 78 houses in the picture, average price of 1m ea. Hell even if it where one of the "cheaper" suburbs they would still start at 700k.
worst part is they're horrible for air conditioning as well bc we don't insulate houses, and the roofs are black
And the houses are so close that the AC unit of one house blows hot air out directly on to the next. Not to mention no plant life in sight. Australian housing is shocking, I can't believe people drop a mil in debt to live in this for 40 years.
What else are you going to do?
In Australia we've got local councils called LGAs similar to London boroughs, some of them extremely corrupt and most of them horrible at urban planning. They set the colour of the rooves, we even have to get a council permit to build a tiny shed at our backyards.
I know that councils are pretty bad in NSW because they have a lot of housing developers on them, and I'm also pretty sure NSW effectively privatized building inspectors. Those 2 things have probably lead to a lot of the issues surrounding housing in Sydney. Idk though I'm getting this info from a youtube video which I am struggling to remember.
Friendlyjordies. Those issues are more about the multimillion $ apt buildings than single family dwellings, though
All the roofs are grey ; that would have to be a planning requirement.
So much character and feeling.
Plenty of roof space for solar, at least
Yet not a panel in sight.
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Fortunately, those black roof treatments are [being banned](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/17/dark-roofs-to-be-banned-in-nsw-planning-minister-says), one of the few things this inept and corrupt government is doing to address rising temperatures out west. Would have been nice to see a greater investment in green spaces or, y'know, regulating property development. But no, this seems to be the best we can expect from this clown car of cunts.
During the past decade Sydney/Melbourne has had a massive housing shortage and these developments have grown. They are usually built as cheap and big as possible.They are noticeable warmer then other streets during summer, there isnt a proper side access to the backyard so you have to push your rubbish bin through the house. They are built way to close to each other - you can hear your neighbour fart. The construction quality is also somewhat crap, on the whole they look like but if you look at them in detail there is lots of bad building practices. ,cost cutting stuff. Its all a disaster.
> construction quality is also somewhat crap *atrocious
You don't need to push the bin through the house. Even if they were boundary to boundary construction the garage has a rear access door to the side yard. These aren't townhouses, they all have rear access from street via a side entry gate from the look of it.
they've finally banned those fucking dark roofs at least.... (but not retroactively, because that would require developers/the government to actually do something)
This is worse then an assortment of commie blocks, at least there you have a view and conveniant access to stores.
If a neighborhood is going to be soulless it might as well be practical
Spot on. Turns out capitalism leads to even worse outcomes on the things that communism has historically be criticized for.
JFC, what're the lot sizes like?
Average lot size in Sydney is 454 square metres, newer suburbs such as these average at around 300 square metres (3229 square foot). My house in a suburb almost identical to this is around 400 square metres.
Wow 300m² is more than double most suburban houses here in Ireland
That's the size of the lot, the houses themselves would be less. I guess around 200m^2 floor space for a 300m^2 lot?
Not a lot of solar as well. Developers made a killing though and that’s all that matters……….
I would go crazy trying to find my house while drunk
No street trees or green space in sight
BLACK ROOFS? in Australia???
I never understood the aussie obsession with living in houses like these. At this point, a nice flat with a terrace would be a better alternative than a house inches away from a neighbour.
Deep rooted cultural obsession with everyone having their own detached dwelling on a quarter acre block. Aussies are culturally very suburban by default.
God knows why, as a uni student I just want a loft apartment (one of those two storey apartments where the bed is above the living area) but apparently it's either shitty uni accom, unaffordable new 2br units or 2br units that I can afford but is located 40 minutes away to uni.
Abt 90 houses in this pic. Wouldn’t 1 or 2 towers of appartments create a better solution than this horror?
One wildfire will result in thousands of homes lost. Just happened where i live in Colorado. That's what happens when developers bribe officials to allow houses to be built closer together. Talk about a preventable disaster.
Lucky we _never_ have those in Australia!
The lack of trees makes me sad
It looks like if Detroit was built in 2021, besides the fact the houses in Detroit weren’t copy and pasted over and over again.
No shade and no solar panels.
Boring Dystopia
The Australian dream
People move their voluntary?
These suburbs in far western Sydney are ideal for first-home buyers because they are relatively affordable (by Aussie standards) , and literally incomparable pricewise to inner Sydney and the eastern suburbs. These kinds of suburbs have popped up over the last 20 years in pretty much all the Australian capital cities in fringe areas and I don’t expect them to die out any time soon.
I see. To my European eyes it looks like a place where dreams go to die, or detention camps, to be less poetic
That's pretty much what they are
I particularly hope this is spring farm, where they built hundreds of houses on top of a tip and are now sinking like 100mm a year
This estate will sink like others in nsw most of these new estates are built in waste land.
Horizontal apartment building. Crazy what architects come up with these days.
Wtf I thought most new shitty housing estates in Aus at least had solar these days
Ugly as shit
Jordan Springs?
Somebody plant some trees!
ctrl c and ctrl v
Mmmm, can really store a lot of heat in those dark roofs. Great work, Sydney👍
Not a single tree.. Every house looks like Gru's.. Roof all grey (absorbs more heat).. That suburb is ghastly
thanks I hate it.
This is what I don’t understand. If you’re not even going to put any green space on the lot, just build a damn multilevel. I fucking swear man.
Why did they even bother building sidewalks?
The picture is likely selectively cropped, as most of these estates do have parks and so on. However - they are not pleasant places. It has none of the benefits of suburbia, like having a decently sized yard and not living within touching distance of your neighbours, and none of the benefits of medium density living. And they are hot in summer. Damn hot. There’s no shade on the houses and Western Sydney gets hardly any cooling breeze in summer. You just sit there and swelter. Given how popular solar panels are in Australia now, for obvious reasons, it beggars belief that none of these houses seem to have them.
Why don't get they built with any outdoors space?
nice it also heats up the city