this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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Maybe this isn't very "lemmy" but I think the bottleneck isn't really money, but the stuff you want.
In Australia the main problem with the "housing crisis" is that all efforts to resolve it are on the demand side, and very few on the supply side. Giving first home buyers grants and discounts is great, but that increases demand and increases the price. Removing some of the ridiculous tax benefits to owning multiple properties is great, and has reduced demand somewhat, but it hasn't solved the problem.
To really solve the housing crisis you need a house for everyone that aspires to own one.
In the last decade, having the people able to build the houses has been the real bottleneck. All of the able tradespeople are already building houses. We can't build a million more in a year just because everyone has the money to buy them.
It's frustrating how there's no way to say "anything people need should be provided free or at-cost" without sounding like a loony radical, but it's true.
If businesses could figure out how to make you pay for the air you breathe, it would come in a variety of qualities and flavours, and I would have been banned from r/air long ago.
The profit incentive can barely even be trusted with stuff we don't need. Never let necessities turn a profit.
You have been banned from c/Conservative.
I just explained why everyone can't have a free house though.
I'm aware that I'm essentially calling for a global restructuring of society when I say this, and I'm used to the fact that it's not likely to occur.
Glancing at the first numbers to come up in searches, it seems like there are about 3 Aussies for each residential dwelling currently in existence. It seems like there's already about enough to share, if these weren't unequally allocated. Just saying!
This might shock you but some people dont want to share a house.
The statistic you're looking for is how many vacant houses there are. Spoiler: there's not enough.
If there were, prices wouldn't be what they are. Just saying!
Sidebar - I wish others wouldn't downvote people I'm just trying to have a normal conversation with. Makes everything feel needlessly strained and rude. It always feels like people are crowding around trying to make simple disagreements into fights, doesn't it?
Other than getting private equity out of housing (easy answers first, shadow banks shouldn't own houses) it seems like we should be able to come up with a way to create a lot more highly basic housing at high speed and minimal cost, even if the housing was a bit brutalist it'd have a cooling effect on the cost of mid-range homes.
Of course, at some point we butt up against the fact that when your economic system treats real estate as an investment, you can't also undermine that subtle class system without damaging your economy. At some point the way we do things just depends on a maximum sustainable amount of suffering to keep the markets ticking along.
I agree.
Planning policies that promote lower cost housing.
I like the idea of condos which are exclusively owner occupied. Like renting to a tenant for more than 3 months or something is prohibited.
Also developments exclusively for tiny homes.
Also I feel as though, in the era of work-from-home, small country towns where land is as cheap as dirt, should be more desirable.
I think there's a lot of scope the build out the lower end and take the heat out of the upper end.
I know a guy who lives in a condo like that in Seattle, apparently the building is managed as a co-op. I think it's a model that has promise in urban settings or in more remote work zones, an idea I really like by the way. As soon as remote work started to become feasible at scale I started asking myself when you'd start to see a flight from cities.
I think a lot of people are really set in the mindset of wanting to live where stuff happens, but I could see a case for housing developments in cheaper areas geared more towards young parents - build what they need and maybe a train into town, and there's no reason it couldn't work. People still want to have kids, but it has to be made more economically realistic.
Combine that with tiny houses, wind and solar development, all mixed in with allotments, and I think you could make a case for that as a development model that works. It'd be really spread out, but it's hardly as if a place like Australia lacks room. Run trains and trams through it, and you'd hardly need that many roads even.
Put a few 20 somethings in a sunny sea side town with free power and cheap home ownership and things will start to happen in that town.
In Australia we try with the supply side too. There are ugly-as-fuck housing estates going up all the time. The problem is there are no restrictions on who can buy, so investors, both domestic and foreign, buy up huge numbers of houses before aspiring home owners have a chance to get in to the market. It's fucked.
Merely building estates and houses is not a supply side policy to solve the problem, building houses is just the market ticking along.
We have significant barriers to foreign investment in the form of additional duties and other taxes.
The federal governments recent changes have made property investment less attractive.
None of this has solved the problem, but perhaps these measures are part of a change in the long term trajectory.
I mean, we have some in the past, in the Victorian era, the UK invented the idea of Council Houses, houses given to those who earn less than a certain amount of money per year, which you live in until you reach a threshold of earnings that you have to move out
They built over 2 million of them in 1880-1950
Yeah. This style of housing was very unpopular in Australia because it created ghettos of welfare dependent families.
Social security does most of the heavy lifting now.
Yes we have homeless people, but this is a complex problem requiring a lot more social services than simply "a house".
Segregation was common policy back then, but nowadays mixed social housing projects aren't that hard to conceive.
So you'd put a mixed group of poor and uneducated people in the same place?
What a great idea. I can't possibly imagine how that could produce any unintended outcomes.
Those idiots in the government right?
No, I'd put a group of educated/uneducated, poor/wealthy, native/immigrant, ... people in the same place.
Educated and wealthy people don't want to live in these places. I think that's obvious.
Like everybody else, they don't want to live in ghettos. If there are no ghettos, nobody has to.
Ghettos are not built, they are a result of segregating poor/uneducated/... people into certain areas. If there is no segregation and people from all demographics live in the same area, ghettos do not form and everybody can live in a nice neighborhood.
God this is tedious.
If you spread the houses around and make them normal houses then they're no longer low cost houses, they're just houses.
We can't build a free house for everyone because of the reasons already stated.
Strawman: Nobody is asking for free houses for everyone.
The point in the OP is: In the past we were able to house n% of the population while working less and with much worse technolgoy. So why can't we house more than n% now if we work more and have much better technology?
There are obviously multiple factors here. More people want to live in big cities, which can only expand so much. Living standards have increased, so building new houses is more expensive.
But investors are also expecting more profits from their housing investments. I don't know the situation in Australia, but in Germany the largest owners of big city houses barely build anything. They buy existing houses, which are often many decades old, and raise the rent. They make double digit profits with that business model while adding zero value to society.
This means tenants often need 50% or even more of their income for rent while building the exact same houses was payed for with only 30% of their tenants income. There are well-off people who could afford new, big houses in the country, but because they live in the city they qualify for social benefits so they can pay rent.
Again, ghettos are not defined by building quality. If only poor people live in a neighborhood of premium houses, you still have a ghetto. And if a diverse group of people from all demographics live next to each other, you won't have a ghetto even if they all live in budget houses.
Exactly what I've been saying as nauseum. It's a supply problem that can't be fixed with money.
You don't do segregation at all, it's that simple.
UK council houses, until the 1950s when they started building ghettos basically, were just interspersed into the middle of normal housing estates, completely indistinguishable, like 1 in every 10 houses
As I said in my other comment:
They're not just low cost, they're none-profit, that's the point
The only thing is that if you get too much income, they'll kick you out and pass it on to someone who needs it more
Well, they used to, then Thatcher introduced "Right to Buy", as a way to destroy the council housing system cause she was Tory scum, which is "if you live in a council house for 10 years you may buy it"