I f you asked your architect for their opinion on a property you were thinking of buying, you would take their advice, wouldn’t you? Apparently not.
When the owner of this property in Caulfield asked director of Melbourne-based firm, EAT Architects, Albert Mo, what he thought, his verdict was clear.
“We advised him against it,” Mo says. “It was a pretty bad site, squeezed between Caulfield Racecourse and the train lines, which run along in front of the house. It was really rough in terms of the contextual relationship.”
But the owner bought it anyway, settling on the Edwardian house that Mo describes as almost derelict.
“When I walked into the house for the first time, it was in a shocking state,” he says. “The tin ceiling was in patches and the loft area looked like it had been done by a handyman.”
The original house was in a poor state when the architect first saw it but has been transformed into a welcoming entertaining space, complete with pool. Picture: Derek Swalwell
This slightly contrary behaviour could be attributed in part to the attractive sale price but also to the longstanding relationship the owner has enjoyed with EAT Architects.
“This is the third place we have done with him. He trusts me and there is not much constraint in terms of materials but I do feel that it needs to be better than the last one so there’s that pressure to continually impress him,” Mo says.
The same builder the client hired on two previous projects also signed up to work on this one, which speaks well of the relationship.
“He is a great client, although he was tight on the budget and we really worked hard for it,” Mo says. “But sometimes when you have constraints, you become more intuitive.”
The brief from the owner was simple. He wanted a place where he and his family could feel comfortable on a day-to-day basis, as well as creating an inviting space for entertaining.
“He loves entertaining,” Mo says. “He wanted the house back in time for (AFL) Grand Final day because it was all about the barbecue and the outdoor space.”
Despite the poor state of the original house, Mo says he was happy to have an existing structure as a starting point. However, with the train and power lines just beyond the front gate, Mo says providing a sense of comfort and sanctuary proved challenging.
“We had to provide a buffer between the train lines and the new extension,” Mo says. “If you see the exterior of the house, there’s the garden and the swimming pool before you get to the house. Then the long plain side becomes the living, kitchen and open plan area.”
The addition, which also includes the master bedroom suite and guest room, wraps around the original house in the shape of an L-shaped carpenter’s square, which has given the house its name.The new shape lends the family home a sense of structure and permanence. The original house was also restored, including the tin ceiling and brickwork.
Upstairs, the ‘handyman’s’ loft was demolished and rebuilt to create the two kids’ bedrooms, offering an unexpected opportunity.
“Sometimes you can design everything but things happen because you are on site,” says Mo. “I saw the builder shaping out the roofline and it was just there. I call it the Darth Vader window because of its shape.”
Fitted out with an upholstered seat, underseat storage and casement windows, the dormer window is now a favourite reading nook for the kids.
The ‘Darth Vader’ window has proven popular with the kids. Picture: Derek Swalwell
Because budget was a strong driver, Mo extended the expression of the materials as much as possible. Brick has been used in the addition on the internal floors, as well as the walls, in a variety of patterns, elevating it into a true design element.
In practical terms, it also creates spaces in this house that are thermally comfortable all year round, as well as providing easy-to-maintain floors ideal for entertaining and creating a sense of indoor/outdoor flow.
Brick has been used for the walls and floors for practicality, as well as thermal comfort. Timber battens on the ceiling provide some acoustic insulation. Picture: Derek Swalwell
“We were trying to bring the outdoors in and create that sense that it was not just an interior space,” Mo says. “They are a family that likes to have parties and in a high use area in the kitchen and bathroom, you want to be able to mop the floor. They are sealed but it also hides the dirt quite well, and the visual appeal is very high because they are natural materials.”
Timber has also been used in unexpected places, with battens placed in a curved line across the ceiling, echoing the tin ceiling in the original part of the house.
“It helps acoustically when it is not in party mode and it gives the house a human scale,” Mo says.
Noise from outside has also been mitigated, as much as it can be when your neighbours are passing trains.
Female executives face all sorts of barriers when it comes to using one of the great networking tools for business: golf.
That’s according to a new study, identifying some of the benefits female executives derive from playing golf, as well as the reasons more female executives don’t golf. The study’s authors conducted a content analysis, reviewing almost 100 articles from academic journals, trade publications, general-interest publications and golf associations.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Deborah Gray, a professor of marketing at Central Michigan University and one of the study’s co-authors, about the research. Here are edited excerpts of the conversation.
WSJ: What were your overall conclusions?
DR. GRAY: Golf is so much different than other networking activities. The game takes hours, and gives you a chance to learn about someone’s life and personality. You learn how they react when things are not going well. You also get a sense of their integrity by seeing if they are honest on the course. Not surprisingly, many executives say their careers benefit from playing golf. We found one article stating that 71% of Fortune 1000 CEOs reported doing business with someone they met on the golf course, and another article that said 80% of Fortune 500 executives say golf has helped their career.
But only about a quarter of all golfers are women. That’s a problem because women’s careers may benefit just as much as their male counterparts. By not golfing, women not only miss out on the experience but also conversations about the experience. They also miss out on the chance to be more visible within their organisation, converse with decision makers and put themselves in a better position for promotions.
WSJ: Your literature review also found that men and women often network differently.
DR. GRAY: Academic researchers have found women’s networks tend to include people who are more like themselves, whereas men’s networks tend to be less homogeneous and more strategic and include more powerful people. One way men create more diverse networks is through golf. They connect with business associates over shared interest rather than a common background. Women should do that, too.
WSJ: What are some of the barriers female executives may face when it comes to using golf as a networking tool?
DR. GRAY: Women often have unequal access to leisure time. Female executives may be caring for children and ageing parents in addition to their professional responsibilities. Consequently, they may prioritize paid work during business hours and skip networking opportunities. That’s especially true for golf because it is very time consuming. Playing 18 holes of golf can take four to five hours.
WSJ: Are there any barriers specific to the game of golf?
DR. GRAY: Female executives may also spend more time worrying that they are not strong enough or good enough to play with male colleagues. But most people are just average golfers. According to the USGA, the average man’s handicap is 14.1 and the average women’s handicap is 28, which is a long way from being a scratch golfer.
Those numbers from the USGA also suggest that the average woman swings her club 12 more times over a round of golf, which isn’t a lot of waiting time over 18 holes, especially if the ball is hit right down the fairway. A common misconception is that higher-handicap golfers, often assumed to be women, are slower golfers. But golfers with low handicaps can be slow, too. The key for any golfer is knowing when to pick up the ball.
But the idea that women play slower has been used by private golf clubs to exclude women from playing during popular times on the golf course, like Saturday morning, though the practice is now changing. Other parts of the game can be updated to be more inclusive. For instance, the forward-most tee is still frequently called the woman’s tee, though some courses now suggest that someone’s handicap dictates where they tee off. Male executives shouldn’t just assume their female colleagues will tee off at a different spot.
WSJ: Aren’t more women starting to play golf?
DR. GRAY: Major golf associations, including the LPGA, are running marketing campaigns to increase the number of women playing golf. These associations are also trying to get more girls to start playing the game. Girls now make up about 36% of all golfers ages 6 to 17 years old. But corporate America could definitely do more to get women into the game.
WSJ: What can companies do to encourage more female golfers?
DR. GRAY: Companies could teach employees more about networking and include golf as part of their training. They could even help employees evaluate gaps in their network and identify key people who can help them accomplish their career goals. I tell my business students to think about a round of golf like any other business meeting, and consider their objectives beforehand. After all, few people would go into a meeting without an agenda. Companies could also sponsor golf lessons at local courses. The key is that it happens during the workday, just like other professional development activities, encouraging people who tend to skip after-hour events to participate. Lessons and clinics also provide opportunities for employee team building, so there are many reasons for employers to think about sponsoring golf lessons.
“OH, LOOK, the kitchen floors are grey now,” I said, juggling boxes as I stepped inside my newly rented apartment. “Nice!”
When I’d first toured the 1940s townhouse in Queens, N.Y., that floor was tiled in ageing checkerboard squares of black and icky-cream. The promise to replace them had thrilled me, but the colour came as a surprise. Then I noticed the kitchen walls were now a seemingly identical grey. A few months later, when my landlord needed to replace the mid-century-pink bathroom floors, I was less enthused. “Oh, look, the bathroom floors are grey now,” I said. “Ugh.”
This decor style—or lack thereof—that I and so many of my millennial peers have ended up with has inspired the mocking phrase millennial grey. “There’s a millennial grey-looking restroom inside the Mexican restaurant,” TikToker @chloeisag sang in February in a viral video with 3.5 million views. The video contrasts the cheery, piñata-filled decor in a restaurant’s seating area with the clean-yet-bleak bathroom in the back. Grey floors. Grey walls. Grey artwork. A fake plant. “It’s giving ‘airport,’” she sings. “It’s giving ‘live, laugh, love.’ It’s giving ‘corporate.’”
As the phrase circulates online, many millennials are realising, to their chagrin, that it all-too-accurately describes their own homes. “So I just heard the phrase ‘millennial gray’ for the first time,” said horrified TikTok user @victoria.thatsit in another video. “Let me show you guys my house. My bathroom: grey. My floor: grey. My counters: grey…Our chairs: some type of grey. Our dog beds: grey. Our walls are grey. This last one really gets me: Our dogs are grey!”
That video has 5.6 million views. “It’s a thing?” one TikTok commenter said of ‘millennial grey.’ “Cause it’s true lol. Everything I own is grey and I’m buying more grey.” Another pinpoints the problem: Grey harmonises effortlessly with…more grey. It “will go with anything…including everything we’ve bought that’s already grey that we bought to go with everything.” A third writes, “I think we all had intentions of adding pops of color but we have commitment problems.”
Boomers and GenXers have ridiculed millennials for decades, but punches from below, from Gen Z and TikTok and the very internet millennials grew up on, are uniquely gutting. And this one particularly hurts because it’s true. I accept no blame for my walls and my floors—as a renter, I don’t make the rules; my (millennial-aged) landlords do. But you know what else is gray? My sofa. My bedding. I chose those. Me. I’m only 29, but as soon as the “millennial gray” snipe surfaced online, I knew the phrase would haunt me for the rest of my decorating years.
How did my generation, known not too long ago for a penchant for pastels, let ourselves slip into a haze of gray? It isn’t necessarily the result of conscious design choices, says Nicko Elliott, 42, co-founder of Civilian architectural and interior design studio in Brooklyn, N.Y. As he explained, house flippers and property managers tend to like inexpensive furnishings in safe, neutral, durable colors, which means many millennial renters and first-time homeowners signed a dotted line on a space that already had gray in its bones: the floors, the cabinets, the counters, the walls. And even when it came time to renovate, many millennials “have been really focused on…having a blank slate for the next person,” said Jen Cook, 39, a Vancouver-based designer and co-founder of Otto Studio, which sells removable, renter-friendly wallpaper.
And the “take it or leave it” gray of choice is often particularly numbing and middle-of-the-road. “Sensible property managers and landlords might say, ‘go for middle grays,’” said Mr. Elliott. “‘If it’s too light it’s going to show dirt. If it’s too dark it’s going to show dirt.’ Everything’s going to push you toward a middle tone.”
Another factor: Impatient millennials want things fast. When it comes to major design purchases like sofas from mass-market outlets, neutral colors like gray are often what’s in stock, no ordering required, said Ksenia Kagner, 37, the other co-founder of Civilian in Brooklyn. “For colored sofas, these days you have to wait 12 to 18 weeks.” For millennials accustomed to two-day shipping, that kind of wait isn’t an option.
Then, as Ms. Cook put it, there’s the fact that “some folks don’t feel comfortable matching [colors]. They’re worried about getting tired of it, so if people are feeling busy and stressed and tapped out, a gray neutral palette feels much more doable.”
The look was once actually a coveted, luxe trend. “In the late ‘90s, when we were coming out of peach-beige-mania, there was more of a high-end design movement about gray and dark woods,” said Mr. Elliott. That trickled down into mass-market decor options. Now, as the design pendulum swings back around to beiges, a gray palette can seem dated, and millennials are realizing to their dismay that they’ve been living life in colorless spaces for the past several years.
Of course, to some, a simple gray palette might seem like a relaxing choice after a stressful day at work. “I think gray just feels very comfortable,” said Nathaniel Dressler, 24, who is enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and recently bought and redecorated a home with mostly gray furnishings in Panama City, Fla. When he moved in, the walls were green and blue and, to him, seemed “really busy.” After he muted the look by painting it gray, “it felt very peaceful and calming.” Like me, he first encountered the phrase “millennial gray” on TikTok and found it amusing (though, by most definitions, he is technically a member of Gen Z). “We had just picked out the colors for our walls and floors and cabinets, and our furniture was already [grey]…Then when I saw it on TikTok, I was like, ‘Oh, this is definitely what they’re talking about.’”
Mr. Dressler said he notices lots of neutral colour choices among his peers, a contrast to the home he grew up in with its yellow and red accent walls. “Every generation wants to move against whatever their parents had as decor,” says Ms. Cook. “For our parents, it was the Tuscan kitchens, for their parents, maybe it was pastels in the ’50s.” At least one TikToker agrees: “As a millennial with a lot of gray walls…I grew up at a time when it was appropriate for everyone to have this faux Tuscan kitchen,” @corndogbicep said in a video. “So what do millennials do with such traumatizing life circumstances? Well, we all decided to have a mental health crisis simultaneously. This is not farmhouse gray; this is asylum gray. We’re living in peace now.”
So what’s on deck for the next generation of home decor enthusiasts? The bolder, the better, said Ms. Cook. “Gen Z is more open…to the idea that your home can be a reflection of your personality, and they’re really going for the big, saturated colors,” she said, noting the difference in shopping habits she’s observed among buyers of her removable wallpaper. “We do have a lot of neutral and softer color palettes—and nobody’s buying it,” she said of Gen Z tastes. “Everyone’s getting the hot pink, the bright blue. It’s kind of wild.”
ME GRAY? NO WAY
Realized you’re living in a dull daze at home? How to break the cycle.
Think of color as an investment in your happiness. “Our homes impact our mental health so much,” says Ms. Cook. “Ask yourself: Am I inspired by warm, citrusy colors? Am I into pastels? Do I want to go big and bold with some neon touches?”
If you want to work with the gray you’ve already got:Pull in complementary colors throughout your space. Try sophisticated versions of primary colors, like oxblood, a deep yellow or cobalt blue. “These colors would help bring electricity and contrast to a dull gray space,” Mr. Elliott said.
Finally, if you’re dead-set on gray walls, at least choose the right one. Wickham Gray by Benjamin Moore is a go-to gray paint that Ms. Kagner and Mr. Elliott have used in multiple projects. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “There’s a little bit of green in it, a little bit of blue in it, and there’s a richness that will change over time. It absorbs colors, it reflects light throughout the day, and it has different moods.”
Paul Gauguin’s Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Paul Gauguin’s painting, Nature morte avec pivoines de chine et mandoline, which hung on the walls of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for nearly 40 years before it was restituted to heirs of early 20th-century Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, will be auctioned next month at Sotheby’s in New York.
An example of the artist’s early experiments with post-impressionism, the still life is expected to sell for between US$10 million and US$15 million, before fees.
Nature morte is among a group of four works that were returned to Vollard’s descendants following years of legal proceedings, Sotheby’s said in a news release Thursday. The other three include a landscape by Pierre-August Renoir, Paysage de bord de mer, 1884, with a low estimate of US$1 million; a red chalk work on paper by Renoir, Le Jugement de Pâris, circa 1915, which has low estimate of US$300,000; and a watercolor and pencil work on paper by Paul Cézanne, Sous-bois, circa 1882-84, with a low estimate of US$250,000.
All three artists, alongside Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh, and many others, were championed and supported by Vollard, Sotheby’s said.
“The name Ambroise Vollard is one that resonates deeply across generations of the art world, as one of the most legendary dealers of the 20th century,” Allegra Bettini, Sotheby’s head of the modern evening auction in New York, said in the release.
“Each of these works speak to his importance as a central figure who helped shape modern art and whose legacy is still felt today,” she said.
Pierre-August Renoir’s landscape Paysage de bord de mer Courtesy of Sotheby’s
While Vollard died unexpectedly in 1939 before the Nazi occupation of France, his brother, Lucien, who held close ties with the Nazis, and some other art dealers stole and sold thousands of artworks belonging to the dealer. Many of the pieces were sold to Nazi members or German museums and dealers, according to Sotheby’s.
Gauguin’s Nature morte was painted in 1885 when the artist began to pursue his art full time after losing his job as a stockbroker. This still life marked a point in the artist’s career when he began to experiment with vivid colors, a shift that Sotheby’s said became the basis of the post-impressionist movement.
At that time, Gauguin’s new direction got attention from both Vollard, who organised several major exhibitions after Gauguin’s departure for Tahiti in the 1890s, and van Gogh, who invited Gauguin to join him in Arles, France, a few years later, according to Sotheby’s.
The painting is “filled with rich hues and striking tonal contrasts, including the use of blue—something rare in Gauguin’s palette,” Sotheby’s said.
The four works were unveiled Thursday at Sotheby’s galleries in Paris. They will be auctioned at its modern evening sale on May 16 in New York.
Gauguin’s auction record was set during the sale of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last year. The 1899 painting Maternité II sold for US$106 million, with fees.
Nearly a third of marriages today have no primary breadwinner, as women continue to make strides toward greater equality at work and home.
About 30% of U.S. opposite-sex marriages are egalitarian in earnings, according to new data from Pew Research Center, meaning each spouse earns somewhere between 40% and 60% of the couples’ joint earnings. One of the main drivers of the shift is younger women making more money, said Pew.
The share of women earning more than their husbands has more than tripled from 5% to 16% over the last 50 years. In 1972, 49% of husbands were the sole breadwinner, meaning the husband had positive earnings and the wife had no earnings. By 2022, that share had dropped to 23% of opposite-sex marriages.
But the larger financial contributions by women don’t mean that relationships are more equal or women are better off in every realm of life, said Richard Fry, senior researcher at Pew Research Center.
Even when women earn as much as their husbands, they still put in around two more hours a week on caregiving than their husbands do, plus another 2.5 hours more on housework, according to Pew. In those same relationships, men spend nearly 3.5 more hours on leisure activities, such as watching television or playing video games, than their wives do.
Women’s economic role in marriages continues to rise despite a persistent gender pay gap and declining labor-force participation, Mr. Fry said. “In spite of some trends that would suggest to me that women’s economic role would not be growing, what we found was ‘No, it still is,’” he said.
Financial advisers and researchers say the changing money dynamic can cause marital strife, or in some cases, divorce.
Changes in breadwinner status “can lead to a lot of frustrations and arguments and resentment,” said Stacy Francis, president and chief executive of wealth-management firm Francis Financial and founder of a financial-education nonprofit.
When Ms. Francis, who often works with breadwinning women, surpassed her husband in earnings, she said the pair celebrated. After years of bearing the burden of bringing home most of the bacon, her husband was somewhat relieved to turn the job over to her, she said.
But Ms. Francis, now 48, soon found herself spending more time in the kitchen, throwing herself into the local parent-teacher association and planning her son’s prom—all, she said, in an effort to somehow compensate for other work and time spent away.
“It made me feel less feminine to earn more than my husband,” she said. “I realised, looking back, that I myself had to get comfortable with that role.”
Men remain the breadwinner in most marriages, meaning they earn more than 60% of the total earnings, Pew found.
The marriages with the highest total income are those in which both spouses are bringing in money. Marriages in which women are the primary breadwinners earn more than those in which men hold the same role: $145,000 in median income compared with $121,000 for marriages overall, according to the Pew data. A primary breadwinner in Pew’s research occurs when one spouse earns more than 60% of the household earnings.
Sole-breadwinner couples, or marriages in which one spouse has earnings and the other has none, make significantly less, with median incomes of around $75,000. Such couples also are more likely to be below the poverty line.
When women are the sole breadwinners, men spend more time on caregiving and a more equal amount of housework, compared with egalitarian marriages. But women still spend roughly the same amount of time on caregiving and household work, regardless of whether they are in egalitarian marriages or are sole or primary breadwinners, Pew found. Women without children are more likely to be the primary breadwinner than those with children.
Spouses within same-sex couples, however, tend to split the domestic labor more equally than their heterosexual counterparts, research shows.
Some researchers say one reason for the housework divide is that most of these gender roles have been built up over generations. There is a fear from some women that stopping this work could risk their marriage.
“We still see that there are remnants and large cultural issues associated with the sensitivity of women’s economic success, as a thing that destroys relationships,” said Johanna Rickne, professor of economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University.
Both husbands and wives can work to address these imbalances, said Jennifer Clark, a 34-year-old digital marketer based outside Chicago.
While her husband, a director of an audio-production company, has earned more than Ms. Clark for much of their 10-year marriage, she sets the monthly budget and manages household finances.
“It doesn’t feel like he has a larger share of the finances even though he is earning that money,” she said.
Throughout their marriage, Ms. Clark worked in freelance and part-time roles while her husband had full-time jobs. During those periods, she said, she bore a greater share of the household and caregiving responsibilities for their two children. But talking about their finances and making decisions together helped them remain equal partners.
“I would say I’ve always had a pretty good sense of financial autonomy, even with money I didn’t necessarily earn, because we make those decisions collaboratively,” she said.
It might not seem like much, being able to choose what you wear. But for children being treated for life threatening conditions and illnesses, it’s more agency than they’re used to.
Regularly prodded with needles, drips and assessed by monitors, as well as being scanned, x-rayed and more, they often have little control over what’s happening – or being done to – their own bodies during hospital stays. It’s often a frightening, bewildering experience.
And it’s not just the sick children who feel powerless.
When tradie Jason Sotiris’s daughter was diagnosed with a life threatening illness as a young child, he was at a loss to help give her the strength and support she needed to endure.
Creating a hospital friendly range of clothing, known as Supertees, was the result. Designed to be MRI and PET scan friendly, the hospital grade garments provide medical staff with easy side and shoulder access to the patient while still looking like a standard t-shirt.
Starting from scratch and with no experience in the clothing industry, Sotiris trialled a number of designs and fastening options before settling on the end product.
But key to their success is the Marvel superhero characters that are printed on them.
Sotiris said the garments are designed to help put young kids in the best frame of mind as possible as they face the toughest times of their lives.
“These children have to face these things and there’s not a lot of choice for them,” he said. “We want them to be able to choose whatever makes them feel stronger.”
Available free to families of kids facing the toughest health battles, the Supertees are in high demand.
“What you wear matters, what you wear can represent you in a certain way and hospital gowns are a symbol of being unwell,” Sotiris said. “It’s something given to those who are unwell.
“We wanted to create something that someone would wear and make them stand out in a special way. How good would it be that something is so cool and fun that it makes healthy kids just a little bit jealous, because it’s usually the other way round.”
The Supertee is aimed at children from birth through to early teens. It looks like a standard t-shirt but is MRI and PET scan friendly, with side and shoulder fasteners for easy access.
But the benefits of the Supertee go way beyond having a desirable superhero costume.
Sotiris pointed to a joint study by researchers at University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota, University of Michigan in the US called The Batman Effect: Improving Perseverance in Young Children.
The study found that when four and six year olds ‘impersonated’ an ‘exemplar other’ like a superhero character, they showed much higher levels of perseverance when faced with challenging tasks. The findings of the study supported what Sotiris already suspected.
“So it’s not the child going through the MRI, it’s Wonder Woman,” he said. “How would she act in this situation? We’re trying to use the power of imaginative play.”
While Disney, who has the rights to the Marvel characters’ artwork, has waived licensing fees for the Supertees, the charity is not receiving further monetary support.
Sotiris is seeking high wealth individuals and corporate partners to help him achieve his aim of supplying Supertees to 10,000 seriously ill children around Australia.
“I don’t want parents to have to pay for them – they are going through enough,” he said. “Parents are often working less and navigating that with their employer, or they may have left their job to care for their sick child. It would be great to offer them something to make things a little bit easier.”
He is in talks with other community-minded groups such as the NRL and the NSW Police (to create a Tactical Cancer Fighting Unit Supertee) to extend the range and give more kids the mental boost they need.
Just as it is for any parent who has watched their child go through this experience, it’s still a very personal quest for Sotiris. His daughter, now 11 years old, finished treatment some time ago and her last scan earlier this year was clear. Giving back to other parents and children has helped him process his own difficult memories of that time.
“In 2018 I held my daughter’s hand in one hand and a Supertee in the other and I went back to the hospital,” he said. “I started replacing the memories I had of her treatment with these wonderful memories of helping these kids with the Supertee.”
There’s no question that Sydney is experiencing a housing squeeze. Housing affordability and a tight rental market has created a desire for homes able to organically cater for several generations.
This property at 13 Therry Street, Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches offers the kind of comfortable multi-generational living that gives everyone some breathing space without even trying. The two-storey residence has five bedrooms, including a master suite overlooking the back garden and pool. One of the additional bedrooms upstairs has a walk-in robe while a fifth bedroom downstairs comes complete with built-in robes and ensuite, making it ideal for adult children, or as in-law accommodation.
Constructed by award-winning builder, Binet Homes, the house has taken its design cues from Hamptons style, with a spacious Shaker-style kitchen kitted out with double ovens, Bosch appliances, bar and light-filled butler’s pantry.
Plantation shutters, bi-fold windows and sliding doors manage light and ventilation as well as creating a seamless link between indoor and outdoor spaces.
The home is fitted with ducted aircon and a ducted vacuum system, as well as a video security system.
In addition to the generous kitchen, the property includes a generous covered alfresco space leading to the pool, making the home ideal for entertaining. The pool is heated for year-round use as desired.
Less than a 10-minute walk from Careel Bay marina the property enjoys easy access to Avalon Beach and Pittwater.
MUMBAI—Billionaire Gautam Adani has become India’s largest airport operator. He runs coal mines and the country’s largest private port. Now he has set his sights on a massive redevelopment of India’s most iconic slum.
Dharavi, a slum in the centre of Mumbai, gained international fame after being featured in the 2008 Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire.” It was well known to many Indians long before that, and the city of Mumbai has had plans to replace its shanties with gleaming high-rises for nearly 20 years.
The complexities of relocating the estimated one million people who live and work in an area about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park have so far thwarted those efforts. Dharavi is a city within a city. Redeveloping it in the middle of Mumbai will be akin to razing a section of Manhattan—but a far more densely packed version.
The developer will need to house all of those people during construction. Businesses will be disrupted. There will be disagreements about compensation. Protests are expected. Costs will mount.
A man selling plastic toys on the narrow streets of Dharavi. PHOTO: ISHAN TANKHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Thousands of people who live on rent in Dharavi fear that once high-rises come up, the rents will rise sharply, forcing them to move out. “They will remove the poor, not the poverty,” said Mohammed Giasuddin Riaz Ansari, a 46-year-old who has lived in Dharavi for more than 20 years.
Mr. Ansari shares a 300-square-foot rented room with 14 men of his extended family, and makes a living selling toys and balloons in the lanes of Dharavi. He said he manages to save $25 to $35 a month to send to his wife and five children who live in a village in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. If he has to relocate, he said he would have to build his clientele from scratch. “For anyone with a business, this is not good,” he said.
Mr. Adani, who runs a business empire ranging from infrastructure to energy, has had his hands full lately with a dispute of an entirely different nature. His conglomerate, Adani Group, has come under tremendous market pressure since U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research alleged stock price manipulation in its listed companies. The Adani Group has disputed the allegations, but seven listed Adani companies have lost more than $100 billion in stock market capitalisation since the report came out. Adani and his family members said they have prepaid nearly $2 billion of loans since February.
Some of those wary of the redevelopment have questioned whether the financial pressure on Mr. Adani will strain his ability to finish such a massive project. “How will he do it? Who will give him the money?” said Raju Korde, an activist who has in the past protested against Dharavi redevelopment plans.
Mr. Korde said those who live in the slum worry that if Mr. Adani runs out of money and the project drags on for years, many in the slum will get fed up and leave, something that has happened in other redevelopment projects. “There are thousands of people in Mumbai who have given up their rights,” said Mr. Korde. If need be, those who live in Dharavi will protest, he said.
City officials aren’t concerned about Mr. Adani’s ability to finance the project, said S.V.R. Srinivas, metropolitan commissioner of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, a government body in charge of infrastructure development. The city estimates the redevelopment project could end up costing more than 200 billion rupees, equivalent to $2.4 billion.
Adani Properties Pvt., a unit of Adani Group, made the highest bid for an initial investment of about $615 million for the redevelopment, and the government is expected to formally award the contract to the company soon, Mr. Srinivas said. The developer would be responsible for any additional costs required to complete the project.
“It will be a first huge step toward slum-free Mumbai,” Mr. Srinivas said. The government has been trying to find a developer who would take on the work since 2004 but hasn’t been able to find them because of the complexity of the project, he said.
Slums such as Dharavi have flourished in large cities of many developing countries, where people come from rural areas to look for work but don’t find affordable housing. More than one billion people live in slums worldwide; in India, they make up half of the urban population, according to the World Bank.
Homes in Dharavi are so densely packed that they are separated by winding lanes barely 3 feet wide in many places. On a recent afternoon, children played in the lanes, rats scurried along the sides, and women sat on the doorsteps of windowless homes.
Rekha Deepak Gade welcomes the Dharavi redevelopment plan: ‘If it is improved, how nice it will be.’ PHOTO: ISHAN TANKHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A typical home in Dharavi is just a room, about 10 feet by 12 square feet, with anywhere from two to five residents. They rely on public toilets, with 50 to 60 people on average per toilet, according to some estimates. Some homes are made of corrugated metal sheets and tarpaulin, but many residents have invested to build concrete walls and roofs. As families have grown, they have built rooms on top of existing ones, using scrap materials, wood and plastic.
The redevelopment plan requires that the builder make new homes, with more space and private toilets, and give them free to those who meet the government’s eligibility criteria, which includes, among other things, that they must have been living in a Dharavi home that existed before Jan. 1, 2000. In addition, Dharavi will get wider roads and be hooked up to utilities such as water, gas and a sewage system, according to the government’s tender.
In return, the developer gets the right to build residential and commercial buildings on prime real estate. Next door to Dharavi is the Bandra-Kurla complex, one of India’s most expensive office markets, where the U.S. Consulate is located and global banks such as Standard Chartered PLC and BNP Paribas SA have offices.
The new homes for those who live in Dharavi must be ready within seven years under the government’s plan, while the developer has 18 years to build the commercial and residential property that will be sold on the open market, said Mr. Srinivas.
Local real-estate experts say these timelines are ambitious. “It is not going to be a cakewalk that they will start and everything is…smooth,” said Pankaj Kapoor, founder of Liases Foras Real Estate Rating and Research Pvt in Mumbai. “There would be agitations, there would be resolutions, and then it will take its own prolonged time.”
Some Dharavi residents have built rooms on top of existing ones. PHOTO: ISHAN TANKHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Beyond the complexities of compensating and housing Dharavi’s people, the project is also facing legal challenges. In 2019, a consortium led by a Dubai-based company, Seclink Technologies Corp., won a bidding process for Dharavi’s redevelopment. The government later canceled that tender, saying there had been a material change in the circumstances of the plan. The government put out a new tender last year. Seclink has filed a petition in the Bombay High Court challenging the cancellation of the tender awarded to it.
Last month, several opposition party leaders alleged, in a letter to a federal law-enforcement agency, that awarding the project to Adani Properties is an example of how companies owned by the Indian billionaire have “exercised improper influence to obtain concessions and contracts from governments.”
A spokesman for Adani Group said that Adani Properties won the right to redevelop Dharavi through an open and transparent bidding process.
Some longtime residents welcome the redevelopment plan, hoping it will lead to a cleaner, safer Dharavi. “If it is improved, how nice it will be,” said Rekha Deepak Gade, a 41-year-old single mother who lives with four children in a 100-square-foot room.
Yusuf Galwani runs a family business in Dharavi making earthenware by hand. PHOTO: ISHAN TANKHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
But many are worried about what the project portends for their future.
Malliga Gunashekaran, 47, who moved in 2008 to her current home in Dharavi, where she lives with her husband, son and mother-in-law, said she isn’t sure if they meet the eligibility criteria to get a free home. “There is tension,” she said.
Yusuf Galwani runs a family business with his two brothers in Dharavi, where they make earthenware by hand. His grandfather started out as a clay potter in Dharavi more than 100 years ago. He and his brothers have expanded the workshop in the space-starved slum by building one floor on top of another. They have built a kiln to fire the pottery on the fourth floor. They fear they may not get this much space in a redevelopment.
Mr. Galwani said that over the years he and his brothers have refused lucrative job offers, to continue their family craft. They want to expand their grandfather’s business to greater heights and can’t imagine doing it anywhere else, he said.
“We don’t want to leave Dharavi,” he said. “Our hearts won’t allow it.”
Slums like Dharavi have flourished in large cities of many developing countries. PHOTO: ISHAN TANKHA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Imagine what you could accomplish if you had a team of colleagues you could lean on whenever you had to tackle a task that wasn’t in your wheelhouse, or whenever you got stuck, or whenever you needed a piece of information that wasn’t at your fingertips. And imagine if those colleagues were available whenever you needed them—and replied instantly!
Well, those colleagues are now here, in the form of generative AIs that will be embedded into more of our work environment over the coming months and years. Give them prompts about what you want, and they will retrieve information, draft documents, create images or even write computer code.
As of now, AI collaborators are most readily accessible in the form of image-generation tools like MidJourney and DALL-E, text-generation tools like ChatGPT (which can produce everything from essays to data tables, and is especially powerful if you spring for access to the latest model, GPT-4), and Bing’s new chat-basedweb searching. (OpenAI’s GPT is the “large-language model” under the hood of both Bing and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.) Also, Microsoft and Google have both announced that generative AI will soon be embedded in tools like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Teams and Google Meet, as it will be in many other products in the coming months and years. And generative AI is evolving so quickly that the capabilities of a given system may change from one week to the next.
I’ve helped organizations develop and use digital collaboration tools for more than 25 years, and have long used AI as part of my data-analysis work, but there’s something different about generative AI. Traditional search engines and word processors were tools, and a tool has to adapt to you. If you don’t like how it works, you have to choose a different tool.
But working with generative AI feels a lot more like working with another human. And you can only do your best work as a team if you adapt to one another, learning to make the most of your respective strengths, and to mitigate one another’s weaknesses.
Here’s how to get the best out of these new collegial relationships.
Imagine you’re working with a junior colleague
Start your work with AIs just the way you would start out working with somebody with less experience: Give them small assignments, get a feel for their strengths and limitations, and then gradually scale up. Start with something really low-stakes. My own explorations of GPT began with asking it to write silly poems and stories—a project with zero professional risk.
Figure out where you need help.
Once you’re ready to try your new collaborators on actual work assignments, think about where it is you could really use some support. What are the tasks you currently delegate to or rely on a colleague to deliver? What are the tasks you wish you had colleagues to help with?
For example, I would love to have an assistant who could reformat invoices to meet the requirements of our records-keeping system. Alas, I don’t have one. But I realized I could feed a table of data to GPT (along with one sample invoice), and get the info back as a series of identically structured invoices.
Get specific
Like a junior colleague, your AI collaborators benefit from getting really specific assignments and instructions: A prompt like “Help me think about my Acme presentation” would be too vague for a freshly hired human—and it is too vague for an AI, too. You’ll get better results with a prompt like, “Please outline the 5 key points for my Acme presentation, by combining this outline from my recent SmithCo presentation with the key insights in this page from Acme’s latest corporate report.” (Since there’s a limit on how long your prompts can be, you may need to paste this in over a couple of prompts, but you can tell an AI to “stand by” while you feed it information and then provide its answer when you finish your final input with a note like “Provide a draft now.”)
Provide feedback
As you start working together, give your AI colleagues feedback on how they are doing, just as you would a human. If you don’t get the results you want from your initial prompt, follow up with a comment like, “That was good, but make it shorter,” or “that is the right length, but incorporate a point about climate change, and write in a voice like the following example.”
Experiment with adding follow-up instructions until you get the results you want—but be aware that the next time you start a new chat session, ChatGPT will be learning your preferences from scratch. (Which is why it’s often more useful to resume a previous chat session by finding it in the session history ChatGPT displays in a sidebar.)
Treat AI like a nonjudgmental colleague
Sometimes I have a grab bag of ideas I can’t quite mash into a coherent article, or a charming turn of phrase I can’t bear to give up—or figure out how to use. So now I treat ChatGPT as a kind of creative sounding board: I’ll take a half-baked set of ideas and notes, and an unsuccessful or partial draft of an article or proposal, and say, “Rewrite this draft, incorporating the following ideas.” (You can also paste draft text into ChatGPT and ask it to correct or improve your writing.)
Seeing a draft instantly lets me think about what does or doesn’t work, and allows me to fine-tune and iterate multiple drafts over the course of minutes instead of days. It is like having a nonjudgmental colleague accelerate my writing process.
Get a reality check
You can also ask an AI colleague to let you know if you should give up on something. I recently spent the better part of an evening searching the web for some data that I just couldn’t find anywhere. Finally, it occurred to me to ask my Bing AI if it could find what I was looking for. After I asked for the data a few different ways, it told me that the data just didn’t exist. That saved me a lot of wasted time.
Be skeptical
I recently asked ChatGPT to create a spreadsheet for me with three columns of financial data. Within seconds, it spat out a perfectly formatted set of columns ready for me to copy into a spreadsheet for analysis. Just as I was about to hit copy-paste, though, it occurred to me to cross-check the financial figures. Sure enough, the numbers were completely invented: Because (unlike Bing Chat) ChatGPT wasn’t hooked up to a live internet feed, it didn’t actually have access to the data I wanted, so it just injected some random numbers instead.
Know when you need a human
To recognize the stages of work where your AI colleagues can be helpful, you also need to know when it is time for you to take over, or pass the baton to a human colleague. For all that AI helps me get my stories off the ground, it still can’t get me through the last mile like a human editor or my own eyes. I gave GPT-4 a half-dozen chances to edit my 1,727-word first draft of this article down to something like my 1,100-word assignment, but it just couldn’t get the feel for which elements were essential—or for what we could live without.
Residential real estate is the foundation of Australia’s wealth, new data released by CoreLogic reveals.
The Monthly Housing Chart Pack shows residential real estate in Australia is far and away the main source of wealth, worth $9.4 trillion. This compares with $3.4 trillion for superannuation, $2.8 trillion for Australian listed stocks and $1.3 trillion for commercial real estate.
The results show that despite a recent downturn in national dwelling values over the past 12 months with a fall of -8.0 percent, housing still represents the most valuable source of wealth.
While the decline in values represents the greatest fall on record, there are signs that values are once again on the increase. CoreLogic reports that national values rose by 0.9 percent over the 28 days to April 6, driven by a lack of advertised stock, a tight rental market and demand from overseas migration.
Sydney experienced the greatest decline over 2022, with a drop in values of -12.1 percent, following a record high in January 2022. It is also leading the recovery, up 1.4 percent in March. This is followed by Melbourne and Brisbane, who have seen modest but steady improvements in values over March. Adelaide and Perth have proven to be less volatile markets, with Adelaide values -2.4 percent their record high in July 2022 and Perth -0.4 percent lower off their peak, also in July last year.
Being young and ambitious right now often means proving that you can be both of those things at the same time.
That applies even to 25-year-old Charu Thomas, who earned an engineering degree in 3½ years after completing high school in three years. She founded supply-chain software firm Ox at age 18, raised $3.5 million in funding and, in 2020, made it onto Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.
Yet in a breakfast with investors in the fall, she said they wanted to discuss “quiet quitting” and the motivation of younger entrepreneurs.
“They had this impression that Gen Z and younger founders were non responsive, were less legitimate, or lazier,” said Ms. Thomas on a recent morning from her Bentonville, Ark., office. She had just spent much of the night in the office to oversee a Fortune 500 client’s software deployment, she said, then attended a 9 a.m. staff meeting still in the T-shirt she’d worn the day before.
Such is life for many ambitious 20-somethings. Barely in the workforce, they are pushing long hours, building businesses, striving for promotions—even for their more-senior co-workers’ jobs. At the same time they are running into perceptions that their age cohort cares more about work-life boundaries and rejecting “hustle” culture than scaling the career ladder.
Like Ms. Thomas, many say they are intent on knocking down the stereotype. “I don’t want to be a representative of that kind of culture,” she says.
Gen Z, typically defined as being born between 1997 and 2012, isn’t the first generation to be typecast as it enters the workforce. Not long ago employers were hand-wringing over what they viewed as entitled millennials who, some bosses joked, wanted trophies just for showing up.
A growing body of survey research echoes the idea that workers in their early to mid-20s want control over how much they work. In a survey of nearly 5,000 adults by Prudential Financial last year, 43% of Gen Z workers said they went above and beyond in their jobs. More than half of millennials said they did, as did 62% of members of Gen X and 69% of baby boomers. A 2022 Gallup survey of about 15,000 U.S. workers shows younger millennials and Gen Z respondents reported declining levels of job engagement and higher rates of stress than other workers.
To show colleagues she works hard, 22-year-old Brianna Chang says she chooses to put in as many as 60 hours a week as a supply-chain planner at Microsoft Corp.
Ms. Chang said her work ethic was forged as a teenager, when she waited tables in her parents’ Chinese restaurant in Bellingham, Wash. She’s driven in part by the goal of making money to one day support her parents and says she’s disheartened when she sees peers on social media saying they don’t work hard.
But, she adds, that makes it easier for her to stand out.
“A lot of people my age, they are just stuck,” she says.
Managers and recruiters say that remote work made it tough for some young workers to find mentors and learn professional norms in the office. As a result, many of these young workers struggle with resourcefulness, professional networking and communications with clients and co-workers, says Julia Lamm, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Workforce Transformation practice. Some also had to navigate layoffs at the start of the pandemic and are now on their second or third job since.
Jorge Tapia, a 26-year-old software engineer in Indianapolis, said he lets his work speak for itself as he wakes up at 6 a.m. to get to work an hour later. He’s given priority to building relationships with colleagues since starting his position last year at a logistics technology and software provider. On his first week of work, he sat down with a man he didn’t know in the office cafeteria.
The man turned out to be the company’s North America chief executive, who told him how he approached his own career.
It was a valuable lesson, Mr. Tapia said: “If I could talk to my CEO, I could talk to my co-workers, my managers, openly.”
Mr. Tapia said he is working hard in hopes of getting a promotion, which would raise his salary and allow him to better help out his mother and three siblings, ages 23, 15 and 8.
Financial security is important to Gen Z workers, according to interviews with and surveys of about 100 Gen Z workers between November and January conducted by the Conference Board. About half of Gen Zers and millennials said in a 2022 Deloitte survey that they live paycheck to paycheck, and about 30% of each group say they don’t feel financially secure.
Last year, Brandi Jones was working as a dance teacher and at the front desk of a dentist’s office, making about $25,000 and living with family, she said. She quit both roles in July to find a job that would cover her health insurance and pay enough for her to move into her own apartment.
To get that job, Ms. Jones, now 26, got certified in Salesforce’s customer-relationship management software, so that she could work at a nonprofit that uses the tool. She studied sometimes 10 hours a day to pass the exam, she said. After passing, she applied for more than 20 jobs over six months.
Aware of common stereotypes about young professionals, she says she asked questions in job interviews about company culture to get a sense of employers’ generational diversity and how they defined a successful employee. She says she eventually found a job at a nonprofit that pays about $100,000 a year.
No longer working weekends, she marvelled at having more free time at first. Then she started studying cybersecurity tools because she is considering a master’s degree. She wants to advance further, she says.
A pair of Nike Air Jordan XIII sneakers signed and worn by the basketball legend Michael Jordan during the 1998 NBA finals fetched US$2.2 million at a Sotheby’s online sale that concluded on Tuesday—setting a world record for the most expensive sneakers ever sold.
Still, the sale price fell on the lower end of its presale estimate between US$2 million and US$4 million. The buyer was the sole bidder for the sneakers, according to Sotheby’s, which declined to disclose the identity of the buyer.
“Today’s record-breaking result further proves that the demand for Michael Jordan sports memorabilia continues to outperform and transcend all expectations,” Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of streetwear and modern collectables, said in a news release.
The previous record was held by a pair of Nike Air Ships worn by Jordan during a regular season game, which sold for US$1.472 million at a Sotheby’s auction in Las Vegas in 2021. The most valuable game-worn sports memorabilia ever sold at auction is also a Jordan item: A red jersey he wore during the first game of 1998 NBA finals sold for US$10.1 million in September 2022, double its presale estimate of US$5 million.
Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls (1997-1998) is often referred to as “The Last Dance” after the ESPN/Netflix documentary series of the same name released in 2020.
Jordan wore the pair of sneakers during the second game of the 1998 NBA finals, during which he scored 37 points to lead the Bulls to a 93-88 victory against the Utah Jazz. He would finish the season with his sixth NBA championship and sixth Finals MVP award.
Jordan, 60, is also known for his product endorsements during his professional basketball career. His partnership with shoemaker Nike is chronicled in the film Air released last week.
Australian house prices are bouncing back with some areas hardest hit expected to hit their peak in the second half of 2023, leading real estate firm Ray White reports.
Chief economist for Ray White, Nerida Conisbee said figures revealed that Sydney, which experienced the largest decline over the past year, is now leading the price recovery, with growth up by 4.1 percent since December 2022.
In Mosman, where the median price fell by $530,000 over 2022, there has already been an increase of $172,000. Manly, the northern and eastern suburbs of Sydney, Chatswood-Lane Cove, Dural and Pennant Hills-Epping have also shown strong signs of bouncing back with price increases in excess of $100,000.
South Canberra is the only area outside NSW to record similar increases, with prices up by more than $104,000 from December 2022 to March 2023.
“While Sydney’s most expensive suburbs dominate the list of top growth suburbs, there are two outliers,” Ms Conisbee said. “South Canberra has seen an increase of $100,000 this year, while the regional NSW town of Dural is up a similar amount. Premium markets led the 2022 downturn and are now leading the way out of it in 2023.”
However, not all areas have bounced back so strongly so far. Canada Bay in the inner west and Ryde-Hunters Hill, which saw median prices fall by $367,664 and $347,505 respectively did not make it into the top 10 greatest increases.
Apple’s playbook in India is evolving, from testing the country as a counterweight to China’s supply-chain dominance to viewing it as an emerging growth hub for demand.
Both of these strategies are working off each other.
Last week, Apple unveiled the look of its first retail store in India that is set to open this month, signalling India’s growing importance for the Cupertino, Calif.-based company. Until now Apple has sold iPhones and other products in the country mostly through resellers, e-commerce websites and large format retail chains. With the opening of its own famed brick-and-mortar store, it is adding another critical layer to this wide distribution.
The move isn’t surprising given Chief Executive Tim Cook in February called India a major focus for Apple, adding that the company is putting a lot of emphasis on the market. On the call, Apple said it posted record iPhone revenue in India in the December quarter, though they didn’t give a specific figure, even as overall revenue declined.
It is no secret that Apple has been growing its manufacturing base in India as it works on a China + 1 strategy. But this narrative has overshadowed India’s steady climb up the luxury ladder over the past few years, and the opportunity it presents for Apple to find the next lucrative market similar to China.
Making iPhones and then selling them in India ensures a smooth supply chain—a page directly out of Apple’s massive success in China over the past decade. Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, believes that now the company will have “skin in the game” building out production in India with retail success along the way.
For several years, Apple struggled to make a dent in the Indian market and compete against more affordable Chinese models. Only now is it gaining traction. Apple had a mere 1% market share in 2019 and may cross a 5% share this year in the country’s overall smartphone market, according to Counterpoint Research. To be sure, that contrasts with Apple’s market share in China of 22% in the last quarter of 2022.
Still the market has potential, even if prices of iPhones may have to come down further. According to another research firm, Canalys, India’s premium smartphone segment, defined by sale prices above $500, has doubled to 6% of overall market share last year from 3.1% in 2019, and Apple’s share of this segment was at 60.13% last year.
Harsh Kumar, an analyst at Piper Sandler, argues that India and China are quite similar in their demographics and even in their potential buying power, at least in large cities—and that India can show large numbers for Apple with some effort.
India is the second-largest smartphone market globally, both in terms of annual shipments and sales, accounting for almost 12% of the global market, according to market intelligence firm IDC. Despite this, smartphone penetration is still less than 50%—providing an unmatched potential for growth for Apple.
Navkendar Singh, an analyst at tech researcher IDC, believes that Apple’s work on channel expansion, focus on affordability through attractive trade-in programs, discounts, cash-back offers and better pricing on prior-generation models are finally bearing fruit. But the gap between Apple and other models is still quite wide—the average selling price of a smartphone in India was $206 last year, excluding taxes, vs. $898 for an iPhone, according to Canalys.
But the price of Apple’s cheapest model can go below $500 with discounts. A larger manufacturing base with a thriving component ecosystem in India could bring prices down a bit further.
India is at the forefront of Apple’s efforts to decouple from China’s factory floor but may even prove itself as a growth market—with some conditions applied, of course.
SYDNEY—Northern Australia’s tropical coast used to have a vast covering of lush rainforest that supported the cassowary, often called the world’s most dangerous bird. Now, one organization is developing a program they say will encourage landowners to reforest the area and create a habitat for native species.
Their plan: Cassowary Credits.
“The idea of the Cassowary Credit was about bringing in the large-scale investment that’s needed to really do that work to protect the valleys of the region from climate change,” said Sarah Hoyal, biodiversity and climate leader at nonprofit environmental group Terrain Natural Resource Management, which wants to sell credits to investors that are valued by how much land is restored to its native state over time.
Australia’s government has similar plans, albeit on a larger scale. On March 29, the government introduced legislation to create a nationwide market for so-called biodiversity credits, the first large advanced economy to undertake such an effort.
Australia is betting that businesses will be hungry to buy credits as they face pressure from shareholders and customers to be more socially responsible. If the market flourishes, Australia could be a model for harnessing money from the private sector to reverse environmental losses, but the plan is facing skepticism from investors and industry groups questioning how the credits will be valued and what will drive demand for them.
“Until there is an economic return, you will not get investors coming to nature projects except on a philanthropic basis, or some early stage voluntary action,” said Martijn Wilder, chief executive of Pollination, an advisory and investment company. The legislation is a good start, he said, but more needs to be done to show it can work.
Australia’s government argues that the plan offers a way for companies to invest in managing the environment without having to buy land. The market will also give landowners extra income, overcoming one of the roadblocks to conservation, and create jobs for indigenous communities that become involved in restoring the land, said Tanya Plibersek, the country’s environment minister.
Under Australia’s scheme, landowners would get a credit, in the form of a certificate, for conducting repair or preservation projects on their property. This credit can be sold on to businesses and individuals. To help these investors figure out how much each credit is worth, information such as how much land is being repaired or how long it will take will be disclosed. The credits would be tracked via a public register and overseen by a regulator.
How Australia tackles these issues could offer lessons for other countries considering ways to prevent nature loss. The U.N.’s environmental arm estimates that $384 billion annually—more than double current levels—needs to be invested by 2025 to protect against climate, biodiversity and land degradation.
Australia’s plan illustrates how some governments don’t think they can fill the funding gap alone and want the private sector to step up. Conservation efforts have largely focused on national parks or wildlife refuges. But with more than 60% of land in Australia owned privately, officials say that is no longer enough.
“We live in the extinction capital of the world—losing more mammals to extinction than any other continent,” said Ms. Plibersek.
The concept of using credits to achieve an environmental goal isn’t new. The European Union and several U.S. states allow trading in carbon credits as part of programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A challenge for Australia’s scheme, however, is figuring out how to value nature itself.
“Biodiversity is inherently more complex than carbon and thus less divisible into interchangeable units,” said Dr. Jody Gunn, chief executive of the Australian Land Conservation Alliance, which represents organisations working to protect nature. “How many koalas is worth a hectare of protected rainforest?”
Some businesses will buy from the market voluntarily when it opens, but it remains to be seen that there will be enough to sustain the market in the short term, she said. That means the government would need to step in and become an active investor, Dr. Gunn said.
Ms. Plibersek said the government hasn’t decided whether to invest in nature projects, but the legislation allows it to do so.
As lawmakers figure out the mechanics of the market, some organisations are plowing ahead with separate plans to develop credits.
Wilderlands, an Australian company, sells credits for several projects, including the rehabilitation of privately owned land in South Australia state that was once used to graze cattle. The purpose of the project is to allow native animals and plants to thrive on the land, and not to use it for agriculture, said Wilderlands, which runs a marketplace for the credits. Buyers of its credits include Lendlease Group, a $3.38 billion Australian construction company, and Monash University, which wanted to showcase efforts to protect nature to its students.
In the northern tropics, much of the coastal lowland habitat of the cassowary has been cleared for farms and the growth of towns. The area is also threatened by cyclones, diseases such as avian tuberculosis and wild dogs. These threats have increasingly driven the bird, which can grow to two meters tall, to higher ground. The cassowary is listed by the government as endangered,
Restoring its lowland habitat will be a slow process. The value of Terrain’s proposed credit is tied to how the rainforest recovers at various points over 25 years. Terrain is developing its credits separately from the government’s effort to establish a national market and is awaiting further details before deciding if its own credits can be part of it.
“It will be 500 years before it’ll look like the rainforest that’s there now,” said Terrain’s Ms. Hoyal. “But it’ll be a substantial habitat at 25 years.”
