‘Affordable Housing Quotas’ Actually Just A Single Floor Of $1M Units Mixed Into 20 Floors Of $3m Units

CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT

After decades of skyrocketing property prices and a complete paralysis of action from the Australian political class, it can finally be confirmed that the Australian housing crisis is coming to an end.

That’s according the nation’s billionaire property developers and the housing ministers that are providing them with rebates to include affordable housing stock in their luxury high-rise apartment buildings.

This new model aimed at tackling the severe housing stress faced by Gen-Z and Millennials has taken nearly ten years to conconct, after it became clear that the problem was going to have to be solved without rolling back the billions of dollars worth of tax loopholes that have been exploited by Baby Boomer property investors since the Howard era.

With a brief moment of reprieve in the early days of the pandemic, it became clear that the conservative scapegoat of ‘immigration’ was not in fact the cause of the housing crisis, as property prices continued to soar throughout two years of closed borders.

In capital cities and regional areas alike, average income households simply cannot compete with a 30-year property bubble that has been engineered by the short-sighted legislation of countless governments.

In 2014, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey said in order to buy a house, the first thing you need to do is get a good job. However, a decade later both sides of politics are now reluctantly agreeing that even lawyers and doctors cannot buy a home within a one hour commute of their workplaces.

The only answer is to increase supply and subsidise a portion of the soon-to-be available stock.

This means the dream of home ownership is indeed available for teachers and nurses who don’t have rich parents. All they need to do is find a partner with a higher-paying white collar job and spend ten years saving up a house deposit on one of the ‘affordable housing’ dwellings in new high-rise developments.

The new term ‘affordable housing’ is a rebranded version of ‘middle class housing’ – which has allowed for a bit more elasticity in the price.

It’s different to ‘public housing’ – which has since been rebranded as ‘social housing’ – and now makes up 3% of metropolitan Australian dwellings, as opposed to 30% in the 1990s.

However, even with the wildly inconsistent language and ever-changing quotas for new builds, politicians remain optimistic that forcing  billionaire developers to make available one single floor of $1 million units mixed in with 20 floors of $3 million units is ‘a good start’