What housing crisis? For most, there isn’t one – but look how the other third live
Housing was only deemed in “crisis” when the offspring of property owners found themselves locked out of the market. But we used to be better at dealing with the problem.
What housing crisis? For most, there isn’t one – but look how the other third live
Opinion
December 31, 2025 — 1.30pm
December 31, 2025 — 1.30pm
This may come as a surprise given the media narrative, but Australia is not in a generalised housing crisis. Two-thirds of the nation’s householders own or are buying their homes – they are by definition not in housing crisis. The 20 per cent who own investment properties are doing just fine.
House prices in the past two decades have at least doubled and, depending on location, have increased up to tenfold. Rents are high even with market fluctuations. Australia’s home owners not only have a secure roof over their heads but are accumulating wealth in the process.
Housing is a genuine crisis for the have-nots, but not so much for the other 67 per cent.Credit: iStock
Housing was only deemed in “crisis” when the offspring of these property owners found themselves locked out of the market. Unexpectedly, they joined the minority of people in this country for whom precarious housing has been the way since settler-occupation. Suddenly, the ranks of those unable to afford where they would like to live swelled dramatically. It is the rapid expansion of this minority that finally brought media and public attention to what has long been a crisis in low-cost housing.
Recognition of the problem is good. But effective redress requires addressing the behaviour that created the problem in the first place – that is, treating land and housing as investment vehicles, and extracting as much financial return from them as possible in rent or at sale.
Unfortunately, the policy approach favoured by federal and state governments to increase the supply of market housing is just creating more opportunities for the same behaviour. It still offers tax incentives to investors. It still encourages buying and selling churn. It is not bringing prices down.
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Here’s the thing: no amount of increase in density or market-rate housing supply will reduce prices. Nor do governments and most Australians want it to. The market will continue to produce housing that generates profit for its developers and owners, and prices will continue to rise. So let’s do away with the conceit that an increase in supply will increase affordability. It will not. in Vancouver and Toronto, which experienced large increases in housing supply in the 2000s and 2010s, show that far from slowing down, price growth rose more rapidly.