Menu Close

Articles on Housing affordability

Displaying 81 - 100 of 234 articles

Housing affordability becomes less of a concern in the years after buying a house, especially for people who bought a decade or more ago. Paul Miller/AAP

Head start for home owners makes a big difference for housing stress

Affordability is a problem across Sydney for prospective home buyers. But if they are able to become owners, new research shows affordability becomes much less of a problem over five to ten years.
Airbnb’s likely impacts on people and their responses to it are related to their status as property owners, investors, prospective buyers or tenants. Justin Lane/EPA

Who wins and who loses when platforms like Airbnb disrupt housing? And how do you regulate it?

Short-term letting via digital platforms benefits some in the market at the expense of others. Closer regulation might be needed in Melbourne and Sydney, where a permissive approach prevails.
Australian cities need to sustain higher levels of construction and to provide higher-density developments to ensure growing populations have access to affordable housing. Brendan Esposito/AAP

To make housing more affordable this is what state governments need to do

Governments should stop offering false hopes and pandering to NIMBY pressures. As well as increased public and private housing supply, growing cities need well-designed higher-density development.
Vancouver has scaled up delivery of affordable social housing to about 15 times as much as Melbourne over the past three years. Shutterstock

Ten lessons from cities that have risen to the affordable housing challenge

Cities overseas that have been able to overcome the affordable housing challenges facing cities like Melbourne have adopted a coordinated and systemic approach to scaling up solutions that work.
Local councils across Australia are concerned about a shortage of affordable housing, but feel the problem is beyond local government’s capacity to solve. Dave Hunt/AAP

Local councils put affordable housing supply in the too hard basket

A national survey shows councils know much of the housing in their local areas isn’t affordable. But providing affordable housing is not a priority because they see it as being beyond their means.
If you want to separate investor demand for property assets from demand for affordable housing, rent is a better indicator than property prices. James Ross/AAP

Rents, not prices, are best to assess housing supply and demand

Property prices have soared in the past decade, but much more modest increases in rent, with the exception of Sydney, suggest less of an imbalance of supply and demand for housing as a place to live.
Gradually reducing stamp duty and negative gearing would minimise the impact on investors. Shutterstock

Gradual reform to capital gains, negative gearing and stamp duty will make housing more affordable

Housing affordability has declined significantly over the past few decades. Slowly reducing negative gearing and capital gains, and switching to property taxes, could reverse this trend.
The problem of having jobs on one side of the latte line and housing growth on the other is driving the Greater Sydney Commission’s plans for the city. Danny Casey/AAP

Another tale of two cities: access to jobs divides Sydney along the ‘latte line’

In Sydney, a ‘latte line’, that runs from the airport to Parramatta and up to the northwest, divides white-collar jobs from blue-collar jobs. This perpetuates inequality.
Housing is just one of the essentials in household budgets and it’s when there’s no way to manage all these costs that financial stress really sets in. Emma Baker

Housing affordability stress affects one in nine households, but which ones are really struggling?

Housing affordability is one of Australia’s great unsolved problems. Some households can make adjustments to cover high housing costs, but the ones deprived of essentials are under real stress.
Highly inflated house prices are more concerning to people wishing to move from renting to purchasing a house (mostly potential first home buyers). Dan Peled/AAP

Housing costs are actually the same as in 1993, but renters still struggle

Even though house prices have risen substantially over recent decades, housing affordability for those with mortgages or own their houses outright hasn’t worsened
The argument that stronger supply will deliver more affordable housing isn’t borne out in areas where new unit and apartment construction is booming. Joel Carrett/AAP

Affordable housing policy failure still being fuelled by flawed analysis

The clichés about housing supply and regulatory restraints are distractions from the need to focus on expanding the affordable housing sector to directly meet the needs of low-income households.
In the past, house building matched high immigration. Construction has increased, particularly in Sydney, but needs to make up the backlog of a decade of undersupply. Dan Himbrechts/AAP

How migration affects housing affordability

Australian governments are faced with a choice: make the difficult decisions to fix planning systems so more houses can be built, or tap the brakes on Australia’s migrant intake.

Top contributors

More