While governments focus on how to ease congestion and make affordable housing more accessible for workers in our biggest cities, fast rail could be a mixed blessing for regional cities.
A rally for affordable housing in Vancouver, Canada.
Mark Klotz/Flickr.
The policy focus remains on home ownership, but a new survey shows slight improvements in affordability do little to help people on low incomes. Their plight calls for better social housing policy.
Students march through the University of NSW in Sydney calling on the university to divest from fossil fuels.
AAP/Danny Casey
There are more than 1.3 million young Australian voters in NSW, but they feel excluded from traditional politics. To win the youth vote, politicians must address the key issues that matter to them.
When prices are falling, fewer home owners will choose to sell if they can afford to stay put.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
It’s natural to assume that a downturn in the property market is good news for people who’ve been priced out of the market. In practice, they might still not be able to buy a home.
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
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.
Tight finances are the main reason more older Australians, especially women, are living in share houses.
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While share houses are more a matter of financial necessity than choice, many older Australians are discovering it has unexpected social benefits for them.
You can’t build housing without land, and developers typically control the rate of which it’s released to stop prices falling.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The thing about new housing is you need land to build it on. Developers are able to control its release at a rate that doesn’t put downward pressure on prices.
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
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
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.
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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
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
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.
Only in the past couple of years has housing construction got close to matching population growth in Sydney and other big cities.
Brendan Esposito/AAP
Migrants have similar home ownership rates to the overall population and rely less on public housing. But housing supply shortfalls and higher prices have reduced ownership among recent migrants.
The rise in new housing in Australia is outpacing population growth.
Brendan Esposito/AAP One
It’s said Australia’s housing affordability problem is the result of new housing stock not keeping pace with population growth. But there is actually enough housing, so why can’t the poor afford it?
Gradually reducing stamp duty and negative gearing would minimise the impact on investors.
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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
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.
Will Sydney’s property market calm down now? Don’t bet on it.
AAP Image/Joel Carrett
Foreign investment in Australian property has plummeted by more than half, signalling an apparent end to the China-fuelled real estate frenzy. Along the way we learned some useful lessons about boom and bust.
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 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
Even though house prices have risen substantially over recent decades, housing affordability for those with mortgages or own their houses outright hasn’t worsened
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University