Our two big questions that will frame the event are:
- What’s the housing we want?
- How will get it?
We’ve got a brilliant lineup of panellists assembled for our Surround Sound on 26 of this month. There’ll be 80+ people, open mics and a big range of panellists x 2 to challenge, engage and question on how to get the housing we want.
Here’s your chance to submit the questions you might want to ask the panellists whether you’re in the audience in person on Thursday 26 of this month or not.
The timing is spot on
At a time when the housing crisis seems to be going from bad to extreme, there couldn’t be a better time to focus on solutions.
Pressure is ramping up around the nation.
The NSW Productivity Commission
On Wednesday, the Minns state government in New South Wales demonstrated it was in panic mode on housing and had caved to the free marketeers with its Productivity Commission releasing a dangerous plan to ditch regulation on apartments in favour of quantity and speed.
The document resembles the attitude taken by South Australia, which will relegate people from the lowest socio-economic band to the worst quality housing by freezing the national construction code that applies to their potential housing choices for 10 years.
The commission proposes higher towers, less or no sunlight and fewer amenities such as storage.
Forget provisions for solar panels. In fact, it strips away most of the benefits we’ve gained in recent years, according to Philip Oldfield, head of the School of the Built Environment, who we spoke to around midday on Wednesday.
“Do we really need sunlight in apartments? I’m going to say we do,” he said.
His peers were still digesting the potential impact. Asked how much influence it would have on the state government’s decision making, he replied that it was the NSW Premier who had commissioned the report.
Could this make apartments cheaper? “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a solution.”
There could be an argument for updating the Apartment Design Guidelines that were now 10 years old and perhaps for increasing densities around transport nodes, he said. But taking away sunlight and daylight would have long term impacts on people’s health, wellbeing, mental health and satisfaction.
The proposals place the market at the centre of responsibility for delivering on housing needs, and we know how well the market has done that: the evidence of our housing crisis is all around us.
And yet the furphies continue.
QandA
On Monday night, QandA on ABC television focused on housing, and on Tuesday came news that a survey of candidates for local government elections in New South Wales this Saturday found that protecting local heritage was “the number one priority” for many of those surveyed. But housing was also marked as the “single most important issue” for their area.
Some people might think there’s a conflict there.
In the QandA session, there were four experts on the panel, but a litany of misconceptions that we think went mostly unchallenged.
Plus, a few – almost incidental – home truths and an almost complete failure to poke the bear of the current paradigm that many people think is needed to find solutions that work.
Because the current system has clearly failed us.
It’s myth busting time. And we’re calling on you to do it!
Send us your questions by jotting your questions on the form attached.
You might also want to address questions to the audience because it will include some very highly skilled people.
Busting the myths
Here are just some furphies that we noticed on the QandA program:
- Supply: the growing furious agreement that planning is the problem and that supply is the answer
- Immigration – the elephant in the room: Cutting immigration seems like a simple solution but it could have big impacts on the economy with fewer people to work in low skilled or care professions, Grattan Institute CEO Aruna Sathanapally said. Add in high tech specialists.
- Build to rent: Michael Sukaar, the Shadow Minister for Social Services, NDIS, Housing & Homelessness,doesn’t want overseas institutional investors to enjoy the tax incentives on offer, and that’s why his party is holding up the federal government’s bill to create 1.2 million more homes; the Greens want BTR to be affordable [It’s currently around 20 per cent above market]
- Mum and dad investors: while institutional investors can offer secure rental for decades if you want, mum and dad investors tend to fail at property maintenance and might sell a property at short notice when interest rates rise
- Low density leads to higher prices: Alan Kohler noted that housing prices had come off in Melbourne and Sydney due to being densified. But in Perth and Adelaide, which had not densified, prices had risen. [But perhaps people are moving there because they can no longer afford Melbourne and Sydney – even with the market cooling,(ever so slightly]
- Demand/supply: Kohler was bang on with housing being a very inelastic market – unlike the market for products where strong prices lead to more production. Property takes several years to come to market, hence the notorious cyclical gyrations because developers, rationally, won’t build when they can’t make a profit
- Homeownership – In the past 40 years, the number of young people owning housing has fallen from 60 per cent to 20 per cent. Hello!
- The Auckland Myth: The Grattan Institute’s Sathanapally referred again to what’s quickly become the so-called Auckland miracle. This refers to the 2016 decision to upzone the balance of the New Zealand city’s metropolitan area not already upzoned to enable much more development. It was called the Auckland unitary plan, and it roughly tripled the development capacity across the city.
Yes, Auckland has more housing. Was it cheaper? No, says Dr Tim Helm, Kiwi housing expert and research and policy director of Prosper Australia.
On Tuesday, he told us that there are few other salient factors left out of the Auckland “miracle” story based on work he’s done with academic Cameron Murray, which unpacks errors in a peer reviewed analysis of the experiment.
The short version is that there were other factors in play that have been ignored in the analysis.
And that there was no discernible change in housing prices as a share of income.
However, the price of land rose significantly, producing a windfall gain for property owners that the government entirely failed to capitalise on with a value capture tax, leaving infrastructure struggling to keep up with the new housing density.
There was also evidence that rents fell somewhat but he says that the miracle believers say rents would have been one third higher without the unitary plan. Not true, Helm says, because Kiwis move quite freely between the major cities. “People don’t hang around when the prices deviate by one third,” he said.
- Building our way to lower prices
Another myth is that we can build our way to lower prices. John Brockhoff, national planning officer for the Planning Institute of Australia, has said that we don’t have the capacity to build enough houses so that prices come down. At her recent National Press Club Address, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, chair of the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, Hurwitz said: “It’s abundantly clear that even if we solved all the other problems in the system, we don’t actually have enough construction capacity to deliver the homes we need.” [Which would bring down prices if the demand/supply curve holds.]
There are so many more myths to bust, but for now, please go to this form that will link to the list of panellists and ask your questions.