Veronika Wild

A Tiny House on Wheels - Fixed or mobile, most are prefabricated and transportable, saving time and money in construction - This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY Still thinking about housing. This time I'm looking at Tiny Homes, not the least because youngest can’t get a place to live, nor even to rent, because there’s simply nothing affordable in his price range. In Queensland, at least one place is renting out shipping containers for $200 per week. By using standardised components, fewer materials, prefabrication and economies of scale, tiny homes   can indeed be much cheaper to build than conventional ones, but given that even wealthy people such as Elon Musk are choosing to live in a tiny home, there must be other good reasons for considering them.   Here are some of the main ones. Speed of Construction, Transportability and Flexibilty Tiny Homes come in a wide range of configurations and can usually be adapted to your specific needs. Standardised an...

Building houses in factories for the Commonwealth Games was meant to help the housing crisis. What now? Shutterstock Louise Dorignon , RMIT University and Trivess Moore , RMIT University Huge sporting events come with substantial public investment in housing. After Melbourne hosted the 1956 Olympics, about 600 houses in the athlete village became public housing in West Heidelberg. After Melbourne hosted the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the athlete village in Parkville was largely sold off , with 320 houses going to social housing. Victoria’s now cancelled 2026 Commonwealth Games were meant to have the same effect in the state’s smaller cities. New dwellings were intended to help boost social and private housing supply amid the ongoing housing crisis. Ironically, the broader housing crisis may have contributed to the cancellation, as worker shortages and building material price spikes took their toll. Importantly, half of these were...

I was putting away the Christmas things when my gaze fell upon an envelope which still had a stamp. They, like greeting cards have become rather rare which is of course much better for trees, emissions and the like, and also much faster, but I was on the point of putting it into the recycling bin when I remembered how Dad and his father before him, had so carefully removed each and every stamp for their precious collections. Even my children did a bit of stamp collecting in our pre -TV and Internet days, though none were as passionate about it as my Dad. When everything came by mail and travel to exotic places depicted in stamps was also rare, those small squares of brightly coloured paper gave glimpses of a colourful and fascinating world beyond, memories of distant friends and the hope that one day in the distant future, those stamps might yield a small return. People queued for hours in anticipation of a new issue so that they could get those prized First Day Covers. These sometim...