When Renting Costs More Than Buying, Something Has Gone Very Wrong, By Tom North
According to new real estate data, renters in hundreds of Australian suburbs now pay more per month in rent than they would on a mortgage for the same property — assuming they could somehow conjure a deposit while already being financially strangled. This is not a quirky market anomaly. It is a structural failure. And like most structural failures in modern Australia, it is being managed with denial, euphemism, and slogans instead of arithmetic:
This used to be the logic of housing: renting was cheaper but insecure; buying was expensive but stabilising. Now we have achieved something genuinely innovative — renting is more expensive and still insecure, while buying is mathematically cheaper but practically impossible. It is the worst of both worlds, which is, increasingly, the Australian policy signature.
And all of this is happening amid a severe housing shortage, collapsing vacancy rates, and record homelessness, while policymakers speak in soothing tones about "supply pipelines," "medium-term adjustments," and "migration settings," as if housing were an abstract concept rather than the physical fact of where people sleep.
The situation is simple enough for a Year 8 maths student:
If demand rises faster than supply, prices explode.
If you import people faster than you build houses, rents skyrocket.
If wages stagnate while housing inflates, families disintegrate.
But apparently this logic becomes mysterious once you enter Parliament House.
Immigration Without Housing is Not Compassion — It's Crowding
Australia is currently running one of the highest per-capita migration intakes in the developed world, at precisely the moment when construction approvals are collapsing, labour shortages are choking housing builds, and infrastructure is already stretched beyond breaking point.
ABC data visualisations show population growth — driven overwhelmingly by net overseas migration — far outpacing housing completions and vacancy availability, especially in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-07/effect-of-migration-on-housing-in-several-starts/105980904)
This is not xenophobia. It is arithmetic.
Yet any attempt to connect immigration volumes with housing stress is instantly treated as moral contamination — as though pointing out that five million people require five million dwellings is some kind of ideological heresy.
We have reached a strange point where population growth is celebrated in speeches but denied in spreadsheets, and where compassion rhetoric replaces capacity planning.
The result is predictable: rents surge, families delay children, young adults remain trapped in childhood bedrooms into their thirties, homelessness grows, and the middle class quietly realises it no longer has a future in the country it built.
The Curious Discovery That Houses Are Finite Objects
Australia's housing crisis is often framed as a "market failure," which is a polite way of avoiding the word government failure. The state controls zoning, planning, infrastructure approvals, taxation incentives, migration intakes, and social housing budgets — and yet somehow no one seems responsible when supply collapses under demand.
Instead, we get press releases.
Yes, construction costs rose.
Yes, interest rates increased.
Yes, supply chains tightened.
But none of that explains why population growth surged while housing completions fell, unless one accepts that policymaking has become a vibes-based activity.
And then comes the real insult: we are told the solution is "density," "micro-apartments," "shared living," and "housing innovation" — which is bureaucratic language for cramming more people into fewer rooms while calling it sustainability.
Once upon a time, progress meant more space per person. Now it means learning to love roommates at forty.
Renting More Than Buying: A Civilisational Warning Light
When rent exceeds mortgage costs, something deeply pathological has occurred in the housing system. Rent is supposed to reflect use-value; mortgages reflect capital ownership. When renters pay more to temporarily occupy housing than buyers pay to permanently acquire it, the market has ceased to perform its most basic social function: sheltering people.
It also means that renters are no longer "saving for a deposit." They are being liquidated by the system that requires one.
This isn't a housing ladder. It's a hamster wheel with a bank attached.
And the people most affected — young workers, families, essential service staff, regional migrants, single parents — are precisely those governments claim to care about, usually while announcing record population intakes that guarantee housing scarcity for another decade.
The Moral Inversion: "Growth" Without Ground
Mass immigration is now framed as economic salvation, demographic rescue, humanitarian virtue, and GDP growth engine — but conspicuously absent from the conversation is the small technical detail that human beings require physical dwellings.
You cannot import people into a housing shortage and call it compassion.
You cannot celebrate growth while refusing to build homes.
You cannot treat shelter as optional infrastructure.
Yet Australia does all three — enthusiastically.
The result is not diversity or vibrancy or productivity. It is overcrowding, stress, declining fertility, collapsing home ownership, and rising resentment — not against migrants, but against institutions that seem incapable of performing basic civilisational arithmetic.
What citizens increasingly feel — correctly — is that their government is running a population Ponzi scheme without bothering to supply the housing layer.
Australia once offered something rare: space, security, ownership, stability, and the plausible expectation that work would eventually buy shelter. That promise is dying.
When renting costs more than buying, but buying is unreachable, the social contract snaps. People stop forming families. They stop settling. They stop investing. They stop trusting. This isn't merely a housing crisis. It's a legitimacy crisis.
And no amount of branding campaigns, urban density slogans, or moral scolding about immigration compassion will reverse that. You cannot guilt people into accepting homelessness as progress.
The Solution No One Wants to Say Aloud
The solution is not mysterious.
Build houses faster than population grows.
Slow migration to match construction capacity.
Free up zoning.
Build infrastructure before importing demand.
Restore ownership pathways.
Treat housing as civilisation, not speculation.
None of this is radical. None of this is cruel. None of this is ideological. It is what functioning societies do automatically.
But Australia no longer runs on logistics. It runs on narratives. And the narrative currently dominating politics is this: everything is fine, anyone who complains is immoral, and any shortage is imaginary until it becomes unbearable.
We are now well past that stage.
When renting costs more than buying, when vacancy rates collapse, when homelessness rises, when young Australians give up on families, when professionals can't live near their jobs, and when governments respond by importing more people into fewer houses — something fundamental has broken.
This is not market failure.
This is not private greed.
This is not capitalism.
This is policy malpractice.
And unless it changes, Australia will quietly transform from a nation of homeowners into a nation of permanent tenants — paying more for less, owning nothing, and being told this is progress.
