Housing News Digest
Housing News Digest
The Tenants' Union Housing News Digest compiles our pick of items from all the latest tenancy and housing media, sent once per week, on Thursdays.
Below is the Digest archive from November 2020 onwards. From time to time you will find additional items in the archive that did not make it into the weekly Digest email. Earlier archives are here, where you can also find additional digests by other organisations.
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Archive
House of pain: property pressure builds as investors get back in the game
Noel Towell The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Katrina Raynor teaches and researches housing affordability at one of Australia’s most prestigious universities, but has given up, for now, on the dream of a home of her own in Melbourne. The prospects for the academic, and for the tens of thousands of other young Australians dreaming of getting a foot on the property ladder, grew bleaker this week with news the nation’s house prices were rising faster than at any time in the past 30 years and Melbourne’s median house price was nudging $860,000. ... More ominous news for would-be owner-occupiers emerged on Thursday as the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed the firmest evidence yet that property investors are coming back in force after retreating from the market last year.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/house-of-pain-proper…
# Australia, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market, Landlords and agents.Bubble or boom? Why ultra-low interest rates mean house prices may never bust
Martin Farrer The Guardian (No paywall)It’s hard to disagree with the New Zealand government’s recent assessment that the country’s runaway housing market has moved from mere boom to a bubble that endangers the whole economy. Prices rose a staggering 23% over the past year, putting home ownership way beyond most people not already on the fabled ladder – younger, first-time buyers especially. If it walks like a bubble and talks like a bubble, then it must be a bubble, right? The only problem is that bubbles might not be what they used to be. House prices are being steadily inflated in many other developed economies such as the US and UK. In Australia, prices rose 2.8% in March, the fastest monthly growth for 33 years. But governments are in no hurry to copy Jacinda Ardern’s canary in the coalmine moment, as the renowned Société Générale economist and market sceptic Albert Edwards has dubbed it, and instruct central banks to make dampening prices part of monetary policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/apr/05/bubble-or-boom-why…
# Hot topic International, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market.The digital view
The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Go to foot of 'Letters' for online comment from one of the stories that attracted the most reader feedback yesterday on smh.com.au: 'Australia to build its own missiles with $1bn guided weapons facility' ... from MolokoPlus: 'That’s enough money to end homelessness.'
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/political-class-like-aristoc…
# Must read Australia, Homelessness.State builds missing from govt housing package
Bryce Edwards (No paywall)From New Zealand ... At the time of the housing announcement, others ... pointed to the lack of state housing. Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis-Allan asked: "So where's the big idea? Where's the boldness" - She thought that large-scale state housing should've been part of the mix: "Michael Joseph Savage had a grand idea in the 30s. He pumped out 33,000 state houses for people who didn't have homes. We're probably due the 2021 equivalent of that." Many poverty advocates were also disappointed by the omission of state housing from the announcement, with the Child Poverty Action Group saying the government housing package "ignores the elephant in the room". (RNZ)
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/439661/state-builds-mis…
# International, Public and community housing, Housing market.As we stockpile wealth, toilet paper, novelist gives voice to a ‘hoarder’
Caroline Baum The Sydney Morning Herald (No paywall)[Emily] Maguire’s sixth novel, Love Objects, centres on Nic, a 43-year-old woman with a compulsion to acquire random, often seemingly worthless possessions and who gets rid of nothing, as her niece, Lena, discovers. The novel examines the poorly understood behaviour of hoarding and the humiliation exposure causes. ... [She] undertook the novel during her 2018 residency at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/as-we-stockpile-wealth-toil…
# NSW, Health.The history of housing bubbles
Stan Correy ABC (No paywall)Housing bubbles have a tendency to burst—look no further than the experiences of Ireland, Spain and the United States in recent years—and the aftermath can be serious; the US collapse plunged the world into economic crisis. So is there a house price bubble in Australia’s capital cities? Stan Correy takes a look at the lessons from history. (ABC Rear Vision)
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/the-his…
# History Australia, Housing market.The Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing
Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal (No paywall)From the United States ... These public-private partnerships skate by on their complexity and branding, but they undermine a future where housing is a right. ... Affordable Housing is a policy paradigm encompassing a number of financing strategies, from government grants and subsidized loans to tax breaks, local bonds, density bonuses, and other incentives. To use these benefits, developers are required to temporarily restrict rents on some of what they build, producing what is called “Affordable Housing:” privately owned, publicly subsidized rental housing. ...The financing strategies of Affordable Housing constitute the government’s total effort to produce new housing specifically for those who can’t afford market rents. They account for billions in government expenditure and foregone tax revenue. Yet they’ve largely avoided public scrutiny. (The New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/161806/affordable-housing-public…
# International, Affordable housing, Federal Government, Landlords and agents, Tax.Rental scammers target desperate tenants during COVID-19 pandemic
Chelsea Heaney and Isabel Moussalli ABC (No paywall)Multiple strangers have shown up to Poppy Melas' home, ready to move in. But there is one major problem — her family home for over three decades is not for rent. Ms Melas' Darwin address has been picked up by online scammers who are preying on desperate and distressed people during the COVID-19 pandemic housing squeeze, and national statistics show the situation is getting worse. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said rental scams increased by more than 32 per cent from 2019 to 2020.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/nt-rental-scammers-target…
# Must read Australia, Rent, Coronavirus COVID-19.