Aussie Young to Never Have Houses, Only Rich Migrants and Overseas Buyers By James Reed
A housing summit in New South Wales, dealing with the issues of intergenerational equity and access to the market, supposedly addressed the issue raised in a Committee for Sydney report, that less than half of all children born today will own their own home in their life time, and thus will be permanent renters. Home ownership rates are declining by around four per cent for every 10 years in "equivalent generational age brackets." There is at present no reason to suppose that this trend will be reversed.
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey did not want to see Sydney going the way of US cities such as San Francisco, and New York. However, the same forces that made these cities urban monsters is present in Sydney, with massive immigration and competition for housing, fuelled by the ultra-powerful real estate lobby/ building industry, who have virtually run Australia since the end of the second world war. Putting up some new out-of-city developments will do little, even if the houses can be built, since mass immigration will absorb whatever is available. This problem is not being addressed by the political class, as in general, at the federal level, they have deliberately created it to serve their corporate masters.
"In short: A housing summit was held today to address intergenerational equity and access to the market.
NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey said the government is playing "catch-up" to address the housing crisis.
A report released today showed less than half of children born today will own a home in Sydney.
Sydney has a moment "right now" to avoid the mistakes of global cities like San Francisco and ensure that young people can buy a home, the NSW treasurer says.
In a housing summit focusing on intergenerational equity today, Mr Mookhey said he was questioning whether children today had the opportunity to accumulate "as much wealth as their parents and their grandparents".
"That's always been our egalitarian promise here in this state and in this nation, what distinguishes us from some of the harsher places around the world [like] America, which can reward people very well who are successful but can condemn many to the grinding lives of poverty," he said.
He pointed to San Francisco as an example of "wiping out" the middle class after tech giants moved to the west coast.
"What happened was, you had a lot of wealthy tech workers bidding up the prices which started the process of gentrification, which led to the expulsion of fundamentally working class people, and at the time particularly of people of colour," Mr Mookhey said.
However, the treasurer said Sydney still had time to prevent a similar pricing out for the next generation.
"Ten years later, what happened was that phenomena of a group of highly wealthy causing pricing to rise for all continued. It's certainly nothing that is happening here," he said.
"We have this moment in time right now where the intervention and decisions we make can change the trajectory of the city."
He pointed to stronger legislation and supportive infrastructure like public transport as the way forward.
"We have built so many other policy settings assuming that a person will own their home at the age of retirement ," Mr Mookhey said.
He said if that's no longer the case, people will rely more on pensions and affordable housing systems to cope with growing levels of housing demand.
"To some degree we are still playing catch-up when it comes to these systems, but the alternative is to do nothing," he said.
"The alternative is to allow these problems to creep up in severity and impact."
It comes as the state government revealed plans today around the 114-hectare Bradfield City Centre in Western Sydney.
The proposal includes housing, commercial spaces and green space near the Nancy-Bird Walton Airport due to open in 2026.
"Bradfield City Centre could deliver 10,000 new homes in the coming years, making a significant contribution to more, and more diverse, housing supply in Western Parkland City," Minister for Planning Paul Scully said.
Young people not to blame, minister says
A Committee for Sydney report looking into the intergenerational impacts that Sydney will have on its citizens released today showed that home ownership rates are declining by about four per cent every 10 years in equivalent generational age brackets.
It found that a 30-year-old four decades ago was 1.5 times more likely to own their home than a 30-year-old today.
If this trend continued, people born in the 90s would have home ownership rates no higher than 60 per cent at retirement.
Meanwhile, less than half of the children born today in Sydney will ever own a home.
Minister for Youth and Housing Rose Jackson said young people weren't at fault.
"It's older generations who are too lazy and careless to show up to the platforms and the forums young people inhabit to engage them in the conversations they want to have," she said.
"There are unfortunately very few people in the NSW parliament who can really understand the struggles of renting or trying to buy a home in the cost of living crisis."
Jeremy Gill from the Committee for Sydney agreed that there was a changing face of home ownership, dictated less by hard work and education than in previous generations.
"We do see that increasingly people are relying on help from family to pay for homes but also the prices are increasingly out of reach for a number of people even on a number of incomes in the city," Mr Gill said."
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