Individual households in Australia, on average, own 83% of all investment dwellings rented to private tenants or resold. They are people who usually have another main source of income.
A tax on empty homes will make a modest difference to housing affordability. The sheer wastefulness of our housing system calls for something much more ambitious.
A variable special rate on new residential housing developments in selected centres could be used to create a local incentive to supply more affordable dwellings at higher density.
The light rail project pushed up property values within 800 metres of the stations by over 30% from 1996 to 2016. Gains on this scale offer a potential source of finance for public transport.
When people do downsize, financial incentives are generally not the big things on their minds. And so most of the budget’s financial incentives will go to those who were going to downsize anyway.
About 84% of cranes in Australia are used on residential sites, with commercial projects making up 5% of crane activity. Health, education, infrastructure and recreation projects make up the rest.
What critics of the plan to use superannuation for housing miss is that Australia’s super system already channels a significant proportion of retirement savings into housing.
We now value the house as a wealth builder, not just a place to live in and raise a family. The result is a distorted investment market that makes home ownership and rental unaffordable.
As domestic construction slows, Chinese property developers are starting to look overseas. The potential impacts are diverse, from property prices right through to regional diplomacy.
Do affordable housing projects drive down property values? Does neighbours’ quality of life suffer? Case studies in Brisbane and Sydney suggest such fears aren’t justified.
The community needs affordable housing and that requires meaningful targets for new developments. The only ones who will lose out are landholders who make windfall profits from rezoning.
If the sharing economy is here to stay, planners and designers must respond with imagination to spread the positive effects of the tourism economy for the benefit of residents as well as tourists.