One word: Immigration. If we dont admit this then we can scream into the echo chamber forever but its not improving!
No, blaming immigration is just a racist scapegoat. The amount of housing being built far outstrips the number of new households due to immigration. The problem is that the number of houses being bought by investors (instead of first home buyers) is almost equal to the number of new houses being built. Which is a problem caused by our incredibly harmful policies that treat housing as a financial instrument more than a right that people need to have. There’s also a huge number of completely empty homes—again, a problem caused by pro-investor policies.
There are also issues with our council policies around what kinds of housing can be built where. Restrictive zoning laws that prevent more efficient medium-density housing, instead of most of our cities being made up of low density zoning that uses obscene amounts of land, and a preference to use the highest zoning possible in the smallest number of places possible, when low density is not sufficient (which is more expensive per capita due to the higher costs of materials, labour, and technical requirements associated with high rises compared to 2–4 storey row houses and apartments). And a severe lack of investment in public housing from our state governments.
Tax incentives. Public housing. Zoning laws. This is a problem created by all three levels of government. But immigration? Not a significant factor.
Awww, and I was sure that this was going to be the year my paycheck finally did more than keep me alive until the next one…
The fundamental problem with housing EVERYWHERE is that it’s a finite resource and we allow individuals and orgs to stockpile/horde it.
All of the neoliberal and conservative measures to date were a lie designed to either inflate the cost of housing, or not have any meaningful impact while sounding like it does. Most would be completely unnecessary if we only allowed citizens and perm residents to own 2 properties max, including their PPOR; banning every other entity from owning residential property entirely.
I’m not generally a fan of bans. I’d rather just see the tax incentives to owning multiple homes behind your PPOR removed. And, if people do own multiple homes, there should be strong incentives to actually rent it out, such as a vacant home levy, and much, much stronger tenants’ rights protection to enable tenants to treat their home as the home that it is.
Once again, I’m not a tankie, but Mao was definitely onto something with the landlords.
Landlords are drains on the economy. Shifting capital into non-productive parts of the sector. Relying on a collective of mom-and-pop landlords to ‘build’ dwellings for a nation’s population is akin to harvesting a coal mine with picks and shovels. It’s moronic policy that doesn’t scale. Where are the large institutions building? Why isn’t the government providing a right to shelter? Fuck off with ‘starter’ homes. There are none. I’d be happy with a shoebox to sleep in at night.
This is the problem with tankies. By supporting the worst things about communist governments, they make people hesitant to support the actually really beneficial aspects of communism.
💯
