Sunshine Coast housing market unaffordable for battlers: Bernard Salt

Leading demographer Bernard Salt has warned that workers could be priced out of in demand Queensland property areas like the Sunshine Coast in the same way New Yorkers can’t afford there.

Just over a week ago the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia released a report that identified 112 suburbs in Perth where it is cheaper to buy than to rent.

Local experts say the reason is that The West has closed all borders. Stop the inflow of overseas and interstate migrants and house prices fall.

The Sunshine Coast is a long way from Perth. Closed international borders apply to both cities but unlike Perth the Sunny Coast isn’t cut off from internal migration. In fact, quite the reverse. Anyone with the will and the means to escape north can do so, and have done so, driving up property values.

To some extent this reinforces what many Coasters already know: this is a great place to live and, frankly, what took you Southerners so long to work it out? But then, reality sets in. How can my kids afford to live here? How can low-skilled workers find an affordable place to even rent?

Indeed without a deep local pool of low-skilled labour (supplemented by backpackers and international students) where do we get cleaners, fruit pickers, waiters, taxi drivers, labourers?

Demographer Bernard Salt says the Sunshine Coast was suffering from the “Manhattan effect”. Picture: David Caird

I call this the Manhattan Effect where it is well known that only the wealthy can afford to live on Manhattan Island. However every city, including New York and the Sunshine Coast, needs essential workers to make the city work.

One solution is to bus-in workers from “across the river” in New York. Another is to ensure there’s dedicated (social or subsidised) housing for essential workers.

If there is no intervention and the current situation continues as I think it will — after all, there’s five million Baby Boomers on the cusp of retirement — then what manifests is a process by which the market filters in the well-to-do and filters out the battlers.

To some extent this is the way vast cities operate: every city has its ritzy and its (relatively) affordable suburbs.

But with a liner city built around the beach (views of which command a premium), and that serves as a retirement, lifestyle and escape-from-lockdown destination for Australia’s east coast, it is right to be concerned about the changing demographic mix on the Sunshine Coast.

At a pragmatic level the Manhattan Effect (if that is indeed what’s happening on the Coast) means that there’s not enough low-skilled workers to do the work required to make the city operate efficiently. This issue plagued Perth during the peak of the resources boom a decade ago. Things settled down within a year or two.

The Sunshine Coast Daily has launched the Locked Out campaign.

But the post Covid lifestyle-rush to the Sunny Coast isn’t like a resources boom; it will continue, in my view, well into the 2020s driven by retiring Boomers. And this presents a problem. Not just in terms of how to attract staff but also philosophically.

We Australians like to think of ourselves as easy going and inclusive. In fact I’d be surprised if local governments across the Sunshine Coast and hinterland don’t have something in their annual reports (or mission statements) about diversity and inclusivity.

The issue is that it’s not very inclusive to mostly accommodate the well-to-do. The Manhattan Effect tends to create a closed culture. Australian communities (of scale) are multicultural with a vibrant mix of ages, ethnicities, skills and other attributes.

Creating a pathway to be part of the Sunshine Coast for the young, the immigrant, the low-skilled delivers labour, sure, but it also builds a mechanism by which everyone gets the opportunity to get ahead.

Yes, come to the Sunny Coast work hard as a cleaner, a labourer, whatever, and over time you too can change your situation.

I know this pathway maybe more problematic today than it has been in the past, but it’s an incredibly powerful aspiration — the quintessential Australian dream — that I think is worthy of fighting for to retain as part of our culture.

Many Australians would love to live the Sunny Coast lifestyle. But I think we need to make sure we create pathways for those who share common values to come to this piece of paradise.

The big question is how is this best achieved. Let’s put our heads together and make the Sunshine Coast an even better place in the post Covid 2020s

Bernard Salt is executive director of The Demographics Group and a frequent visitor to Noosa when not in lockdown.