Latest news with #HomeGround
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Why this single photo exposes the brutal reality of Sydney's housing crisis
A Sydney two-bed apartment that's listed as part of an 'affordable' state government housing scheme is on the market for $1,100 a week. The two-bedroom two-bathroom apartment on Waverley Crescent in Bondi Junction, comes with income eligibility guidelines, which advocates say proves 'affordable' housing is out of reach for low-income Aussies. To be eligible to rent the property, applicants must not earn more than a combined income of $121,000 for a couple, $161,500 for three adults, $145,300 for a couple with one child and $169,500 for a couple with two children. NSW Affordable Housing Ministerial Guidelines states a home is 'usually considered affordable if it costs less than 30 per cent of gross household income'. However, the Bondi Junction apartment would see a couple spending more than 47 per cent of their income, three adults would pay 35 per cent, while a couple with a child would spend 39 per cent. The apartment, which has a $4,400 bond, is listed under Affordable Housing Scheme by HomeGround Real Estate Sydney. NSW government sets out the guidelines for the scheme. After a report in The Guardian on Tuesday, the listing price dropped to $1,040 a wekk and then to $1,000. A HomeGround spokeswoman said the price reduction was because of winter fluctuations in the market. 'Initially, we advertised the property with a market rent set at $1100 per week,' they said. 'However, as market conditions fluctuate weekly, especially in the Bondi area, we have adjusted the asking price to $1000 per week as we transition into the winter market.' They had previously said the below-market price point for the apartment may seem highly because the market rent is high in locations such as Sydney's eastern suburbs. However, they insisted the listing was 'more affordable' for families. In NSW, affordable properties must be rented out with a discount of 20 per cent on the market rent, but guidelines state 'flexibility in pricing may be applied to moderate income households'. However, as a result of rising market rates, this discount still means many low-income families are expected to rent properties that cost more than 30 per cent of their household income. A spokesperson for Everybody's Home Maiy Azize told Daily Mail Australia: 'Our governments keep spruiking so-called 'affordable housing' schemes, but nothing beats the real thing: social housing. 'We need genuinely low-cost rentals that people can actually afford. Even people receiving an average income in Sydney don't qualify for social housing, yet they're priced out of the private market. 'Families are falling through the cracks and entire communities are suffering. The only real fix is to build more social housing and open it up to more people.' Managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Michael Fotheringham said many 'affordable' listings do not live up to the name. 'It's a really loose terminology that different state rules apply across the country, and we have both federal and state government investing in programs to deliver affordable housing,' he added. 'But what 'affordable housing' is, is really unclear.'
News.com.au
4 days ago
- Business
- News.com.au
‘Affordable' Bondi Junction apartment listed for $1100 a week
An 'affordable' Sydney apartment that is part of a state government housing scheme has been listed to rent for $1100 a week. To be eligible to rent the two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Bondi Junction, a couple cannot be earning more than $121,000 combined. A couple earning the maximum allowed income would be paying 47 per cent of their salary on rent. The apartment is leased by HomeGround Real Estate Sydney as part of the NSW government's affordable housing scheme. Following a report in The Guardian on Tuesday, the listing price was reduced to $1040 a week and then $1000. A HomeGround spokeswoman said the price reduction was because of winter. 'Initially, we advertised the property with a market rent set at $1100 per week. However, as market conditions fluctuate weekly, especially in the Bondi area, we have adjusted the asking price to $1000 per week as we transition into the winter market.' Renters advocate Jordan van den Lamb said anyone who could pay $1000 a week rent – and still earn less than the income threshold – could not afford food, bills and medicine as well. 'It's nuts,' he told NewsWire. 'The guidelines make affordable housing by definition unaffordable … pretty Orwellian if you think about it.' 'The idea that we would spend billions of taxpayer money to subsidise private landlords to offer something that is tied to an already unaffordable market as the solution to a housing crisis, it's just not going to work and this is what all the experts have been saying.' Mr van den Lamb has risen to prominence online speaking about the state of housing in Australia and unsuccessfully contested a Senate seat for the Victorian Socialists at the federal election. He said the non-profit HomeGround agency had a relatively good reputation. 'These are the good ones … I've got nothing wrong with them,' he said of HomeGround. 'It's the private landlord that's being subsidised by the government and incentivised to do this. That is the problem.' In NSW, 'affordable' properties must be rented out at 20 per cent below the market rent, but the state government rules say 'flexibility in pricing may be applied to moderate income households'.
Boston Globe
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Lynn Freed, South African writer with a wry style, dies at 79
'If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed,' critic E. Ce Miller wrote in Bustle magazine, describing Dr. Freed's writing as 'in equal turns funny, wise and sardonic.' Advertisement Raised by eccentric thespians in South Africa, Dr. Freed immigrated to New York City in the late 1960s to attend graduate school and later settled in California. Her first novel, 'Heart Change' (1982), was about a doctor who has an affair with her daughter's music teacher. It was a critical and commercial dud. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Dr. Freed caught her literary wind in 1986 with her second novel, 'Home Ground,' which drew generously on her upbringing. Narrated by Ruth Frank, a Jewish girl whose parents run a theater and employ servants, the book subtly skewers the manners and lavish excesses of white families during apartheid. 'Here's a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true in every emotion and incident, that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny,' Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote in his review. 'It is also the flip side of rites-of-passage literary tradition, for its narrator is not a boy but a girl.' Advertisement Writing in The New York Times Book Review, novelist Janette Turner Hospital praised the novel's keen point of view. 'Lynn Freed's guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa,' she wrote. 'We experience it in a way that is qualitatively different from watching the most graphic of news clips.' Dr. Freed returned to Ruth Frank in 'The Bungalow' (1993). Now it's the 1970s, and Ruth is married and living in California. After separating from her husband, she returns to South Africa to care for her dying father. Staying in a seaside bungalow owned by a former lover, she confronts past loves and past lives in a country that is, like her, in transition. In 'The Mirror' (1997), she told the story of Agnes La Grange, a 17-year-old English girl who immigrates to South Africa in 1920 to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family and eventually finds her way into bed with her employer. 'The qualities with which Freed endows her heroine are fundamentally masculine, and through this comes a subtle but inescapable feminist message which makes 'The Mirror' more than a colonial family saga,' Isobel Montgomery wrote in her review for the British newspaper The Guardian. Lynn Ruth Freed was born on July 18, 1945, in Durban, South Africa. Her parents, Harold and Anne (Moshal) Freed, ran a theater company. They were certainly characters. Advertisement 'As childhoods go, it would be hard to imagine a better one for a writer,' Holly Brubach wrote in the Times, reviewing Dr. Freed's essay collection 'Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home' (2005). 'The youngest of three girls, Freed was born into a family presided over by a histrionic mother and a debonair father.' She graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, in 1966. She moved to New York City the next year to study English literature at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in 1972. Her books sold well, but they were never blockbusters. In 2002, she won the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award for fiction, among the most prestigious of literary prizes. She also won two O. Henry Awards for her short stories. In interviews, she was often asked how much of her fiction was autobiographical. 'When I am writing properly -- which, I might say, comprises only a fraction of my writing time -- I tend to disappear into the fiction,' Dr. Freed said in an interview with Sarah Anne Johnson for the 2006 book 'The Very Telling: Conversations With American Writers.' 'What is the difference between remembered experience and imagined experience? I don't know.' Dr. Freed's marriage to Gordon Gamsu in 1968 ended in divorce. Her second husband, Robert Kerwin, died in 2021. In addition to her daughter, Jessica, she leaves two stepchildren, Fiona Zecca and Killian Kerwin; a granddaughter; and four step-grandchildren. For many years, Dr. Freed taught writing at the University of California Davis. She was also a frequent -- and popular -- guest at writers' colonies. Friends said her readings were always packed. 'She was beautiful, and she was fun to be around,' writer Philip Lopate, a close friend, said in an interview. 'Her voice on the page was the same as she was in person. Her writing gave pleasure, just as she did in real life.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
New York Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lynn Freed, South African Writer With a Wry Style, Dies at 79
Lynn Freed, a South African-born writer whose mordant, darkly comic works explored her Jewish upbringing during apartheid, along with the jagged feelings of displacement experienced by expatriates and the ways that women negotiate their identities and sexual desire, died on May 9 at her home in Sonoma, Calif. She was 79. Her daughter, Jessica Gamsu, said the cause was lymphoma. The author of seven novels, dozens of essays and a collection of short stories that were originally published in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic, Ms. Freed was praised by critics for her spare, wry and unsentimental style. 'If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed,' the critic E. Ce Miller wrote in Bustle magazine, describing Ms. Freed's writing as 'in equal turns funny, wise and sardonic.' Raised by eccentric thespians in South Africa, Ms. Freed immigrated to New York City in the late 1960s to attend graduate school and later settled in California. Her first novel, 'Heart Change' (1982), was about a doctor who has an affair with her daughter's music teacher. It was a critical and commercial dud. Ms. Freed caught her literary wind in 1986 with her second novel, 'Home Ground,' which drew generously on her upbringing. Narrated by Ruth Frank, a Jewish girl whose parents run a theater and employ servants, the book subtly skewers the manners and lavish excesses of white families during apartheid. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
