Yabby, Cranbourne is barely even part of Melbourne - as little as 10 years ago it was quite a distinct town in its own right.
If your job is located anywhere within 15km from the CBD, you could easily be looking at 3 hours a day commuting - the main freeway that connects Cranbourne to the rest of Melbourne is little more than a car park during peak hour. According to whereis.com, it would be a 45km drive for me to get to work, a similar distance to my mother, and up to 60km away from other friends and members of our family, all of whom we exchange visits with regularly, not least for babysitting duties. It's also at least 30km away from the nearest *decent* shopping options - the main Cranbourne Mall is, well, somewhat limited.
You say the median price is $230K - well 5 years ago that's exactly how much we paid for our previous house in Blackburn, which itself is 15km from the city, and a 15min drive to work, family and friends.
As I said before, today, that house is on the market for $550K (the new owners have only been there a year, oddly).

It's all a matter of perspective. Even as a privileged baby-boomer, my first house was 60km from my workplace, requiring a minimum of three hours commute a day. I was surrounded by similarly privileged people, all with mortgages stretched to the limit of their earning capacity.

We didn't think in terms of affordability in the general sense of "is housing affordable", but in the specific terms of "can we afford this and also feed and clothe ourselves".

I am not at all convinced that the equation has changed significantly. Except that kids stay at home longer these days, thanks to indulgent baby-boomer parents who can't bear to send them out into the world to fend for themselves. This quickly turns the kids into a bunch of cargo-cultists, who won't venture out until they can afford to live to the same standards as they enjoy under the parental roof.

They then sit around and moan about how "the government should make houses more affordable".

Sorry, I simply don't believe there is a problem. For every sale there is a purchase. If houses are unaffordable, how come people are affording them every day of the week?

Baby boomers generally bought houses that were equivalent to 3 times their gross earnings. In Cranbourne the median house price is $320,00, the median wage is $58,000 or 5 times a workers gross wage.

Those Cranbourne estates are next to land that is currently rural but will be rezoned industrial then used for an inland port for 450 container movements per day. There is also a toxic waste dump in Cranbourne with housing estates behind the fence.

My friends who hire low paid casual labour try to avoid hiring Cranbourne residents because if there is an accident on the freeway the workers arrive 2 hours late. They are not paid enough to cover the cost of petrol burnt waiting in a traffic jam.

Billie “Col Rouge what are you smoking? Stop it, its not good for you!”

I was responding to daggetts claim of “the Big Lie” of capitalism.

I countered with the obvious reposte to the far bigger and multiple lies of socialism.

We live in a comparatively libertarian-capitalist society which has held the excesses of socialism in check thus far.. I will smoke and express what I want, when I want, with no deference to you or your sensibilities.

That is the point of my comments.

We do not live under the jackboot of advanced socialism (communism) where the state is responsible for everything and no one is responsible for the state.

ccacofonix “treated as a medical problem and not one for the police, law courts and the prison system.”

Your comment reminds me, of those who dared dissent with the state view in the people’s paradises of USSR and its satellites, had their beliefs
A “treated as a medical problem” and were locked up in state psychiatric asylums or
B “one for the police, law courts” and imprisoned in Siberia.

and those who happen to follow the religious beliefs of Fulang Gong in China, simple, sub-human conditions in the Chinese gulag.

If you think, for one minute, that when the likes of daggett suggests capitalism is “the Big Lie”, I am ever to let the massive abuses by the socialist states against their own citizens go without mention, then you are a deluded fool.

Ultimately if you don’t like the benefits which capitalism delivers over socialism, I suggest you go to where socialism is de-rigueur (like Costello suggested for those who want to live under sharia law) and leave Australia to its plight.

Strange, how all these lefties want the benefits of libertarian capitalism, including free speech and the right to personal views so they can slag off the very system which tolerates their excesses. Why they would support and seek to impose socialist systems which gag dissent and would presumably gag them, is completely beyond me.

The only words which explains it are

“Rampant Hypocrisy” (= typical socialism)

What a waste of space Pericles' last post was!

So, Pericles doesn't "believe there is a problem"?

What planet has he been living on these past two decades?

Has he noticed in the papers and in the news the plights of millions of fellow Australians or the hard data in Mr Smith's post:

Prospective first home buyers where I live in Sydney
face a market where a median priced home costs 8.5
times average yearly income whereas their counterparts
10 years ago were paying 4-5 times (déjà vu). The
long-term average is even lower. The current situation
is unprecedented.

--end-of-quote--

?

How about the fact that mortgage repayment periods are being extended from a previous maximum of 20 years to 30, 40 and, in some case, 50 years? How about the fact that two and sometimes three or more incomes a necessary to pay a mortgage?

I am sure Pericles' could have easily found somewhere much closer than 60km from where he worked if he had wanted to. Most likely he made that choice in order to have a large yard or to live in a rural location. These days many homebuyers simply don't have that choice, and on top of that face escalating fuel prices.

----

There are a lot of astonishing leaps of logic in Col Rouge's most recent post:

To advocate any Government intervention in the economy makes one a 'socialist' and of course the real goal of every socialist is 'communism', that is necessarily Stalin's gulags or Pol Pot's Killing Fields.

So, presumably, if the Latin America military juntas in the 1970's, 1980's and 1990's had not implemented the extreme free market agenda of Milton Friedman, Friedrich van Hayek and their followers from the Chicago School of Economics, whilst murdering, torturing and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of those opposed to those policies, Latin America would today be ruled by Khmer Rouge style regimes?

Whilst I would admit to having occasionally, in the distant past, used hallucinogenic substances, I could not contemplate touching whatever it was that Col had taken in order to come up with this.

Mr Smith, I agree that the houses in question do not disappear if investors sell out. I am not suggesting that the investors WILL sell out. But take it that we have a record low vacancy rate in much of the country. That means that if investors as a whole want to raise their rents, than they jolly well will, and tenants will have to adapt or get out.

Added to that, even if a moderate number of properties were removed from the rental market and placed into home ownership, not as many as you might expect would be lining up to be homeowners. There is currently a VAST leap between what rental payments cost and what home ownership cost, even with a decent deposits. To give an example I am trying to sell my home at the moment for a moderately priced $160,000 (country). With a 10% deposit, the weekly payments are around about $245. Weekly rental is worth about $170. That's a significant jump, particularly if it is a young couple thinking about having children soon (and either losing an income or paying for childcare).