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Housing

A collection of 21 issues

Let's not make the housing crisis even worse

The government's policies are unlikely to solve Australia's current housing crisis, which stems from both long-term zoning issues and a recent spike in construction costs. But it could be worse - at least they've avoided reckless ideas like rent freezes, which would devastate the housing market.

A public property developer won't fix housing

The Greens released their much-hyped housing plan last week and while I wouldn't normally give this much attention to a minor party's policy, it was just so full of well-meaning but really confused policy, I just had to weigh in. Before getting into it, I should

How big is too big?

Dick Smith wants to cap Australia's population at 30 million over concerns about a lack of resources and housing costs. In doing so he falls for the 'lump of labour' fallacy, and fails Econ 101: it's poor planning, not immigrants, that erodes housing affordability in Australia.

Inching towards affordable housing

NSW, WA and SA have all announced steps that will increase housing supply. But to improve housing affordability for good, we need to ensure it's politically sustainable. That means communicating with locals and lifting density across entire cities, not just in 'well-located' areas.

Don’t blame immigrants for the housing mess

Whether immigrants fuel inflation is a complicated question, in part because there’s no single, uniform “immigrant”. Immigrants can be students, skilled workers, entire families, refugees, retirees, or backpackers. Their ages also vary, as do their consumption, savings, and working patterns. Each of those features, and how they all come

Inviting criminality

When you create a system that makes it costly to do things ‘by the book’ – common examples are drugs, guns and more recently, building houses – you alter the incentives that individuals face in their day-to-day lives. In the case of housing, strict planning and zoning laws create positive transaction costs,

Good news from Denmark

Denmark has a housing problem. Not Denmark the country, but Denmark Western Australia – population 2,375 – which happens to be the least affordable town in the state and “one of the most inefficient communities in WA when it comes to the balance between large family homes and smaller dwellings, with

Inflation's winners and losers

Who has fared the worst from the recent bout of inflation and ongoing cost of living crisis? It’s not who you might think from reading headline after headline about Australia’s rental crisis: “On average, households with a mortgage have experienced a significant decline in spare cash flows, unlike

Bring on the granny flats

Australia has a housing problem: we simply haven’t built enough of them to accommodate our growing population, which the government estimates will continue to increase from around 26.5 million to 40.5 million by 2050. All else equal, that means we need about 50% more housing than we

Numbers tell the story

According to this tweet (usual caveats apply), a new Deutsche Bank report implied that Australia’s housing crisis is about to get much, much worse: “[W]e estimate that net new migration will be around 530,000 for the financial year 2022-23, but only around 180,000 dwellings will be