New research finds a state of confusion when it comes to Australian government policymaking on housing, despite its huge economic and social significance.
Driven by higher returns on their equity, debt-financed investors are dominating the housing market and shaping its growth.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
New research shows the actual returns on equity for housing investors are higher than most people realise. This helps explain why investors are able to out-compete other home buyers.
Households are not competing on equal terms in the private rental market – their perceptions of insecurity vary according to their means, location and reasons for renting.
April Fonti/AAP
Private renters' security of tenure in Australia has less legal protection than in other countries with high private rental rates. A new study reveals mixed responses to this state of uncertainty.
The Rental Vulnerability Index for Queensland shows the cumulative impact of factors affecting renters across the state.
City Futures Research Centre
Almost nowhere in our capital cities can low-income households – and those on average incomes in Sydney – afford the median rent. Mapping rental vulnerability finds it in regional areas too.
Unless the demand pressures are eased, first home buyers are still likely to be crowded out of the market.
Sam Mooy/AAP
The budget acknowledges the crisis of affordability for first home buyers, but fails to do enough about demand pressures on prices to put home ownership back within their reach.
When public investment in a development like Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital boosts land values, who should reap those gains: the community or individual owners?
NSW Premier's Office/AAP
Who is entitled to the increase in value created by planning approvals, new infrastructure, population growth or urban development? For John Stuart Mill, the answer would have been the community.
Are the millennials doomed to be nomads, locked out of the home-ownership market forever?
sharon_k/flickr
Owning a home has deep cultural and economic connotations. A home owner is a member of a street, a community. They are a successful adult human. They own a piece of the pie, the dream.
Migrants can no longer afford to live in the ‘gateway’ suburbs that once helped them to leave the ranks of the ‘disadvantaged’ and feel at home in their new country.
Jack Wright/flickr
With the winding back of government support for housing, 'gateway' suburbs that have in the past accepted and supported recent immigrants are becoming increasingly unaffordable.
Despite all the proposals to combat housing affordability, Scott Morrison will need to make hard political decisions on policies that will actually make a difference.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The latest thought bubbles about using super savings for housing might be less harmful than in the past, but they would be just as ineffective.
To meet the needs of lower-income households, housing should be both affordable and located near public transport and other services.
Graeme Bartlett/Wikimedia
Victoria has been lagging behind other states in developing an affordable housing strategy. Now that one has been released, how well does it meet the needs of households on lower incomes?
Generation X and Y are equally, if not more aggressive than baby boomers when investing in property.
Chris Devers/Flickr
Jenni Henderson, The Conversation and Josh Nicholas, The Conversation
Business Briefing: how the attitudes of the next generation are changing the property market.
The Conversation18.5 MB(download)
There's been a shift in attitudes to the property market over generations, from owning a home as a right, to owning a home as a commodity.
Scott Morrison has recently broadened the range of affordable housing policy options he’s considering, and moving beyond simplistic supply-side solutions would be a positive development.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The housing supply solution our leaders are advocating will only work if affordability is simply a problem of supply. In fact, Australia is almost a world leader in rates of new housing production.
The homeless people evicted from Flinders Street in Melbourne’s CBD are only the tip of the iceberg of the housing crisis in Victoria.
Joe Castro/AAP
Weak state policies, which lack clear targets and mechanisms for providing more and better affordable housing, are part of the problem. Victoria still doesn't have an affordable housing strategy.
To understand how households cope, we may need to look beneath broad patterns of affordability to the interplay of housing costs with other problems.
IDuke/Wikimedia Commons
Housing affordability is often not the only problem households face. More often the compounding effects of multiple problems leave people unable to cope, which is why one solution won't work for all.
As well as meeting his UK counterpart, Philip Hammond (flanked by Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer), Scott Morrison has been talking with UK housing finance experts.
Will Oliver/EPA
Scott Morrison has been exploring a UK model for channelling investment via a specialist financial intermediary into new affordable housing provided by landlords with a social purpose. It makes sense.
The housing affordability crisis isn’t limited to the big cities – the Tweed Heads area, for instance, is rated worse than Melbourne in the latest survey.
AAP
The affordability crisis in regional Australia has a long history. In some places the problem is even worse for residents than in the capital cities.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian needs to shed the Treasury view of housing construction as a silver bullet and back former premier Mike Baird’s social and affordable housing program.
Nikki Short/AAP
The new NSW premier is right to identify housing affordability as a priority for the people and economy of Sydney. It's not just housing supply that's the problem – action is needed on many fronts.
The increasing proportion of children living in housing-related poverty confronts us with the question: what will we do about it?
Ollyy/shutterstock.com
Many children are living in low-income families that struggle to pay the rent to keep a roof over their heads. Unaffordable housing is fuelling childhood poverty, so where is the policy response?
Without long-term solutions to the imbalance between incomes and house prices, Gen Ys face a lifetime of renting without the financial and emotional security of home ownership.
Professor of Social Epidemiology, Principal Research Fellow in Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre for Research Excellence in Healthy Housing in Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University