Housing experts writing for The Conversation largely agree on the government policies that are causing negative distortions in the market and the wider economy. And supply is not the key concern.
Melbourne is Australia’s most rapidly growing city, a title it wrested from Perth around 2013-14. Several of Australia’s big cities are growing well above the national average population growth rate.
The trillions of dollars spent on infrastructure demands democratic transparency and accountability. This applies to both the investment and to the effects on cities, societies and the environment.
Suburban areas feel infrastructure stress most acutely. Having to deal with severe inadequacies, suburbs offer fertile ground for infrastructure experimentation and innovation.
Long-term privatisation contracts, most of them closed to scrutiny, lock urban infrastructure into 20th-century formats unsuited for a climate-threatened planet.
Not only has income inequality in Australia grown over the past two decades, rich and poor are also more segregated in terms of where they live in the big cities.
Urban planners have been blamed for a lot of things, including higher housing costs. But the solution is to refine the process, not sideline the good planning that makes cities safe and liveable.
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.
New rules offer the possibility of an inclusive Australian society that enables people with the highest disability-related support needs to have equal access to mainstream services including housing.
In contrast to perceptions of other homeless people sleeping rough, Darwin’s “long-grassers” are applying a long cultural tradition to deal with the situation in which they find themselves.