how to solve the housing crisis:
In short, the answer to this crisis is supply. Of all kinds of housing. Affordable housing, social housing, apartments, townhouses, family homes, luxury homes, for renters and for owner occupiers. The bare facts are that we’ve got more people than homes and all current planning schemes and execution of the plans are not allowing for enough dwellings to house those that are already in need or for the masses that are still coming. From 2011- 2021, Queensland's population grew by almost 750k with close to 90% of that in SEQ alone.
The current government answers are not enough. More needs to be done and we’ve outlined reasonable solutions that address short term, medium and long term housing needs.
To help explain how we’ve reached these solutions, there are a few pieces of background information that will help make sense of the circumstances and constraints under which we are all trying to navigate.
How do we increase supply? Supply grows when opportunity and capability align.
In order to affect supply, we must make changes that positively impact opportunity and capability. Opportunity can be created through changes in policy, planning and incentives, whereas capability is influenced by funding, fees and charges.
Both opportunity and capability are required to make this work and so our solutions look to improve both these areas influencing the property market.
Housing supply to the market
When we look at who currently supplies housing to the market it can be categorised into non-market (provided by the government) and market properties (supplied by developers, investors and individuals). The diagram below shows the mix of properties and which portion of these are used as rentals.
From this diagram you can see that just around 10% of housing is supplied by the government and the remaining 90% relies on the private sector. When we dive deeper into the rental supply it’s a large proportion that is provided by mum and dad investors, and when we look at the percentage of the general population who provide these rental properties, just 7% of Australian households have 1 investment property, even fewer have multiple investments. It is in this sector that we believe the biggest change can occur and have a positive impact on communities across our country.
In order to bring homes to the market, a number of factors must all align:
Policy
Incentives
Planning
Funding
Building
Purchasing
Owning/renting
To show how all these factors work together it can be explained with a home build diagram. We must start with the foundations - the land upon which we can build. Policy and planning are required to prepare or approve land for development. Then a combination of factors influence a person’s capability of purchasing and building on the land including the lending policies that approve or decline a loan application, the ability of the construction industry to deliver a home on the land, and the policies, taxes and incentives that may encourage or hinder a purchase and final build outcome.
These factors influence every single dwelling and a barrier to any of those factors can reduce the speed and volume of supply to the market. This is why our range of solutions below address elements of the different factors to create real and lasting change.
the specific solutions:
