When Marilyn and I were doing the census, we were amazed at how many empty houses we came across, especially in Marilyn’s rural area. These were usually smaller houses on farm properties, seemingly built for farm workers in the days when most properties had a team of workers on hand. However, there were at least half a dozen much larger houses which might have once been used by the estate owner’s family and several modern constructions in very good liveable condition. One two-story mansion we visited twice before we accepted that nobody lived there.
We commented, then, what a shame it was that there were all these attractive dwellings lying idle and, just up the road in Launceston, there were hundreds of homeless people living in shop doorways and sleeping under bridges. Of course, these empty houses we found were miles from the nearest shop and, probably, the nearest available work, which might be an issue.
Finding a house to rent in Hobart or Launceston is a dire business. The vacancy rate in Hobart is 0.9% and in Launceston it’s 0.8%. What chance do potential renters have when there are twenty candidates for every available dwelling? Taswater, the local water provider, has conducted a very clever survey. They, of course, measure the water consumption of all the properties they service but they decided to identify the houses which used 10% or less of the average water consumption of a house over a 3-year period, and assumed that these were empty. They came up with 2000 properties in Hobart and 256 in Launceston.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a way could be found for these houses to be brought back into circulation.
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