BLOGWATCH: Housing affordability crisis

  • A recipe for disaster: Richard’s blog
    The Victorian State Government has reportedly released a huge quantity of land on Melbourne’s fringe for building sites. This is supposed to help ease the housing affordability crisis. Stuck out a million miles from anywhere, unaccessible by anything other than a motor vehicle, these future suburbs are a recipe for isolation, disenfranchisement, unsustainability, infrastructure problems and hereditary poverty. It’s unlikely they will do much to ease the affordability of housing.
  • Migrants aren’t the problem (no matter what Ross Gittins thinks): Joshua Gans, economics.com.au
  • Australia = seriously unaffordable: Oz Real Estate News

STATE OF THE PLANET

  • Why Tesco’s carbon label scheme failed: Grist
    About a year ago, I was cautiously bullish on British supermarket giant Tesco‘s pledge to start putting carbon labels on its food. But I think that their progress so far — which I’ll get to in a minute — suggests an important lesson about the policy risks of treating a fuzzy exercise as if it were completely reliable.
  • UN climate change warning for Middle East: AP
  • Going green for Lent: Boston Globe
  • Eating for the climate: AlterNet

STUFF WE LIKE

  • Marion Cotillard’s 5-step plan for destroying a burgeoning acting career: Daily Intelligencer, NYMag

  • Expensive wine tastes better (because people are snobbish cretins): Boston Globe

  • Mags grow online, but still can’t compete: AdAge

  • Jilted lover uses eBay to hurt Wikipedia founder: Times Online

  • High there — Coke washes up on Cornish shores: The Guardian
    As a law-abiding citizen – and clerk of the local parish council – Partridge knew he had to had to prevent the drugs from falling into the wrong hands. “I thought if I didn’t take it, someone who might not go to the police would.” So he dragged the 25kg (55lb) package off the beach and rolled it home in a wheelbarrow. MORE: The Nicaraguan town that relies on washed-up cocaine: New Zealand Herald

VIDEO OF THE DAY

You’ll never fly again.

For more, see the Crikey website.