God-honouring property development?

For the last ten years or more, many homeowners in Perth’s older suburbs—and those with larger blocks in the not-so-older suburbs—have sub-divided their properties.

To an outsider who’s never done this, it looks like a simple, surefire way to make money: chop down a few trees, level your yard if necessary, whack up a fence, plonk down a house, and sell it for a packet.

Over the same period, another, larger-scale area of property development has boomed—retirement villages. My grandparents live in one, together with a few hundred other ‘seniors’, in what used to be a paddock.

It’s sad and curious that these two trends are occurring side-by-side: we’re downsizing our blocks so that we can make money out of strangers living in what once were our yards; at the same time, we’re shipping off our grandparents to homogeneous villages that are almost fully self-contained.

An alternative?

How about a return to the horribly named granny flats? Looking after the elderly rather than making money. Radical. Or, to guesthouses, so that more visitors from out-of-town—or those who live in-town and need a bed—have a place to stay?

I’ve a nagging feeling that this is the sort of unspectacular yet counter-cultural stuff that God commends to those who belong to Jesus.

(If building a granny flat or guesthouse is as out of the question for you as it is for me, maybe we could start by putting the bed in the spare room to more use.)