Sunday, May 10, 2015

Henny's latest Squawk

Henny Pulse, Deputy Squawker for the Associated Cluckfusters Collective, is all a’flutter about the proposed Special Henhouse Areas.

Your humble scribe interviewed her on the background. Henny, resplendent in polished wattles and her customary bright pink legband, came out firing.

‘Why’, she warbled, ‘there just hasn’t been enough thought given to the infrastructure needs of new Henhouses. Nesting materials, for example. Without a prior delivery of this material, no SHA can possibly be started. So, it’s simply the Responsible thing to do, to demand a commitment from those pushing the SHA’s, to stump up with nesting and other materials. So, along with my fellow Cluckfusters, we just won’t permit any new henhouses until this happens.’

Assuming the royal ‘we’, we then asked Henny what about the issue of Homeless Fowls, and the recent wave of immigrants from Other Farms, attracted by our local culture, the prospect of free-range dwelling, and the not incidental prospect of massive Nest-price Gains (non-taxable).

‘Oh, them’, she waved an arm dismissively. ‘Well, we already have a HenHousing Unitary Plan for that lot. It’s taken years and years to get this to the starting point, we have a whole team devoted to it, the grey-leg-banded ones. We call them the ClusterFlock.

The Plan envisages that we just stack a whole bunch of little cages up into the sky and invite these new flocks to take up residence. No need for new HenHouse Areas at all. Why, on a Good day, they can, with some effort, turn around in their tiny piece of real estate, and see the Sea!’.

At this point, a very Flustered PR Flackbird flew in, alighted on Penny’s back, took a mouthful of wattle and a right old henfight ensued.. The upshot of which was that ‘cages’, hutches’, ‘battery fowl’ and any mention of square centimeters per fowl were deemed ‘prohibited speech’ and were to be stricken from the record. The replacement phrase was, evidently, to be ‘sustainable sky-home’.

Armed with this sitrep, your scribe then turned to the Head Farm Rooster – a rare bird, sporting matching Blue and Green legbands, and asked for his reaction.

‘Henny, I regret to say, he intoned, ‘is on a hiding to nothing. Not only do the CluckFusters lay enough eggs to buy all the nesting material they need, but they actively sustain a nest-banking industry by dribbling out new-nest permits at a frankly appallingly low rate. This keeps the nest pricing structure way out of whack with eggs-per-day income possibilities. So, it’s up to them.

And, anyway, as Farm Management, we can overrule this shed any old time we feel like it. But which, to be perfectly honest, we don’t want to do. There may indeed have to be a few Omelettes, to teach this sorry flock their place in the pecking order. But you’re not ever gonna see any Blue-legband clawmarks on any of those broken eggs…..’

'We prefer to let Nature to take it's course. Red in tooth and claw, isn't that the way?'

Thursday, May 07, 2015

Awkland housing - again

Auckland City Council and the Gubmint are having a hissy fit.

ACC has overplayed a weak hand in any case.. They are infested with Brit-style Town and Country Planning Act 'planners' (the Brit's motto - we Finish what the Luftwaffe Started), who have not the slightest notion of economics, development cycles, affordability or the other aspects which, on the ground, determine what is built, where, when, and for how much. Planners are expensive in themselves, and they certainly add cost to the development cycle, if only via the injection of Time to all processes.

The build-out of the major world cities of yore was, in many cases, following infrastructure provided by private speculators, but with Gubmint incentives. London's tube (John Lanchester 'What we talk about when we talk about the Tube'  is a useful primer here, as is Kunstler's 'Geography of Nowhere' for the USA scene. Development followed the lines (tubes in London, horse trams, electric trams, buses in the US). The London tubes were private companies (and at each other's throats) until the early 1930's.

I'd point to another Gubmint aspect which is a significant contributor to housing unaffordability: regulation and licensing. Examples:

- Scaffolding (a recent and extremely expensive requirement)
- LBP - at least 5 licenses for various bits of a building = downtime, overheads, cost
- fencing and worksite safety in general - way out of kilter in terms of cost/benefit ratios. Ask an older tradie.
- tool certification (at least the battery-powered kit is proof against this madness - for now)

The question is, of course - how much benefit is actually derived from this very significant cost (I'd estimate not less than 10% of build, could easily be twice that)? Again, the older tradition of craftsmen builders has little patience with all of this: they operated in a time when one built Up to one's reputation, not Down to some Code.

The Christchurch earthquakes give us an answer.

I estimate that 70% of residential builds were done in a time when regulation was absent (pre 1950's), light (to 80's), or at least sensible (to the mid-90's).

No-one was killed by bad build structures in residences, once one excludes URM, chimneys and exogenous sources (rockfall etc). Structures twisted, tilted, and cracked. But they did not kill their occupants, in a 2+g vertical acceleration sequence.

So the 'old', lightly regulated practices and their built results, have withstood probably the most severe test Gaia could devise.

Modern codes add cost but little to no incremental benefit, compared to these.

And more cost = less affordability. It's as sad and as simple as that.