Extreme refashioning
In other news, the Craft Cartel has been a bit blimmin busy.
Last weekend kicked off the Anti-Gentrification Festy Fest in Fitzroy. We got together with Earthsharing Australia and started talking about the crazy state of our economy and what impact it’s having on creative peoples, and young people. And we thought it was a bit mad that this boom bust system which seems to be all about property speculators totally cashing in everytime a community starts making things a bit more blimmin interesting. It seems to us that the world would be a much radder place if we could all afford to make and grow things and hang out in our communities. looking after each other more. Instead we’re all stuck working stupid hours in boring ass jobs trying to pay the rent which never seems to stop going up. And don’t even think about buying a house ’cause the baby boomers have got all the land locked up and are quite content charging younger generations whatever they can to fund their retirement.
SO
Rather than sit around bitching and moaning about it or throwing our arms up in dispair that we can’t do anything about it we thought let’s get some creative people with creative brains together to try come up with some SOLUTIONS.
The festival has started brilliantly with a giant gory craft session with the old Tote hotel carpet as our chief material. Casey donned a ballgown made out of the stuff by the stupidly talented Kathryn Jamieson and thanks to some hardcore stinky branding, festivalgoers got to take home their own Tote souvenier doormat. Also on hand was a mad fun Lagerphone making workshop.
Best of all the bar was aflush with wonderful conversations about potential models for change and plenty of stories were told about histories of creative resistance against the landed gentry.
The festival continues with an exhibition in the windows of the Workers Club with the Ballgown and other crafty carpety stinky artifacts. And finishes off on the 27th at the Workers Club with the DIE YUPPY, DIE! concert and festy fashion jam.
We’re also putting together a zine of IDEAS and THINGS YOU CAN DO to smash the property monopoly that has our beautiful creative selves captive. If you missed out submitting your idea at the Festival in the weekend, you can submit an idea via our website. And we’ll pop it in.
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Also,
Craft Cartel presents:
Vogue – Bike Fashion Jam
DIY BICYCLE GEAR WORKSHOP TO KEEP THE COPS & THE FASHION POLICE HAPPY
11:00 – 13:00
Saturday 19 June 2010
Coburg Library
Cnr Victoria & Louisa Streets, Coburg
Craft Cartel, alarmed by sights of fluoro lycra clad cyclists and equally aghast at the thought of coming a cropper while partaking in our favourite form of transport, are proud to present a solution: High Viz Vogue, a DIY bike fashion workshop.
The event, which is part of the Moreland City Council Coburg Carnivale, invites members of the public to adapt helmets and other clothing bits they’d like to make roadway and catwalk friendly, or to start from scratch using supplied materials. Local designers Miss Viz will be on hand to provide guidance and there will be displays of innovative bike fashion solutions such as designer Ann Maher’s ‘biker bustle’.
The event will culminate in a fashion parade with prizes supplied by Crumpler and will be followed by a celebratory ride through Moreland to parade the new hip gear led by Sugar Spokes all female bike crew.
“We don’t think riders should have to choose between having a sore body and being an eyesore,” says Cartel co-founder Casey Jenkins, “You can look hot while you’re cycling and still keep yourself safe, we’re going to show you how.”
Free! No experience necessary! All materials supplied. Ace prizes from Crumpler to be won.
Supply Side Solutions – My Ass
I bet you been hearing a whole lotta talk from the housing/building/development industry recently about how the reason housing is so expensive is ’cause there’s not enough houses. And – my favourite excuse – that the industry hasn’t got enough land to build on.
The politicians, of course lap this up. Given that the majority of them aren’t actually trained classical economists, and a fair amount of them get some pretty nifty donations from the industry and a decent percentage probably make a reasonable income from property investment. It all makes sense to them.
And land rezoning is about the easiest thing a politician can do. It doesn’t require any legislation and they get a cool photo op with a spade and a pretty yellow sun hat.
UNFORTUNATELY this is all a bunch of bollocks.
Thanks to Tohm Curtis and his recently released report commissioned by Earthsharing Australia, we can now quite conclusively demonstrate that the issue isn’t supply it’s speculation.
Any idiot can tell you that if you have a resource and you want to make it more valuable, you don’t sell it all at once, you drip feed it into the market. That is exactly the issue facing our housing market. Far from the real estate industry’s advertised vacancy rate of 0.7% in inner Melbourne, the actual vacancy rate is 7%. To put that in real terms that’s 2,317 properties empty in central Melbourne during Australia’s worst ever housing crisis.
This speculative vacancy is what’s really driving the housing crisis.
So while there’s over 200 Melbourne University students without a home, there is enough housing vacant in Carlton alone to house every single one of them. And it’s their parents’ generation that is doing it to them.
At the start of last year there were 38,000 existing residentially zoned blocks of land vacant in Melbourne being help by the six big developers. This year Brumby gave a massive handout to the development industry and rezoned another 90,000 blocks of land for residential purposes.
NINETY THOUSAND
So has anyone noticed the price of land drop this year? Didn’t think so.
Of course the majority of that land was already owned by the developers so the rezoning made them overnight bajillionaires. And no, they won’t be building affordable housing, they’re building more suburban mcmansion ghettos which will be drip fed into the market to ensure they can charge the maximum amount for each and every one of those houses.
Our generation has come aboard the space ship of planet earth but all the seats are taken and we are left squeezing in the aisles.
The time has come to get real angry about this. Not angry and irrational, but angry and organised. Anyone keen to help out with creative action on this issue (and there are so many fun, beautiful things we can do!) should get in touch. We’ll be getting together in the new year to plan what to do.