In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment, a primary mechanism for wealth creation (rather than an essential for life) for far too long. I fully agree that supply is the #1 driver for housing affordability, but like many things it's mult-factorial. Tax incentives, market forces, town planning, land use regulation, etc. all play their role.

I'm hopeful that successive governments over here show the courage of their convictions and enact enough change that my kids have a chance of getting into their own places, same as I did.

Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses? It's all very well saying "That's what the market wants" when that's also all the market supplies. How do we bootstrap the idea of smaller, denser, affordable, more-diverse housing options?

The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that.

In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments.

The "American Dream" is a single-family-home, surrounded by other single-family homes, but even with urban sprawl we simply run into the limits of a commute and prices skyrocket.

Ironically we actually solved this problem: Indefinite Telecommuting. But then decided to take our solution that reduces property prices, reduces air pollution, and improves quality of life and then just threw it away because commercial property owners were losing money.

It's a good start. Would be nice to add a gradually increasing tax on multiple home purchases, e.g. buying a third home has a 5% tax, 4th 15% tax, fifth 25%, and if you want a sixth home you have to build it yourself. Would prevent regular people from buying up dozens of homes to rent.

We have a significant number of problems related to housing; generally I would call it a demand side issue not a supply side however.

My reasoning is we have a massive construction sector compared to other nations, with a relatively high productivity in terms of dwellings built per capita. We also have pretty slack standards, with even weaker enforcement.

In addition to that, we have a very weak growth in productivity per capita; and since we are trying to rapidly grow, we have to play catch up to provide the same level of services. This needs to happen while our construction sector is stressed, so the same amount of wealth goes a shorter distance again.

You can also see this in rental prices; negative gearing should allow the capital price to decouple from the rental yield to a larger extent than without it; but we still see high rents...

>It will make very little difference in the end.

It will make very little difference if Wall Street investors hold very little property.

Putting a finger on the scale of how much real estate is individually owned definitely makes a difference though. It makes it worse.

100,000 individuals who own 100,000 properties have far more political power than 10 companies who own 100,000 properties.

>If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.

Yes. However supply is artificially restricted by government, to the approval of the average property owning voter. So more specifically, that is what needs to be changed. Everything else is window-dressing.

This is a country sliding further towards being us, with their housing being more restricted and more expensive.

As long as houses are treated as an investment, there will be all kind of incentives to make them go up in value.

China did "over" solve it by building loads of houses, so everyone's house value just crippled down like crazy.

If buying a house delivers 5–10× the ROI of the S&P 500, that’s not “smart investing” then there is a huge problem to be addressed ... (preferably by building more)

Well said. A solution so simple and obvious it’s clear why Americans haven’t gotten there yet

I've heard that japan has a system that keeps real estate dynamic with lower prices.

>>If you want housing to be cheaper and renters to be better treated, increase supply. Everything else is window-dressing.

You can also look at reducing demand due to mass migration.

> increase supply

There's a counterpart to supply in supply-demand. I wonder if we could also adjust that.

Certainly this is better than nothing though, right?

And reduce demand, by not importing 3% year on year, where we can't keep up

> increase supply.

THIS. If Supply & Demand just feels too complex, then spend a day watching kids play musical chairs.

The window-dressing is great. You get the votes from the renters because you are doing ”something”, and you get the votes from the landlords because property values remain high

Right, and the large corporations just buy up all the service companies in the area and squeeze both the landlords and renters at once. The only way to achieve fairness is straight socialism.

Don't be a coward, and talk about demand for housing, which in Australia is driven by sustained mass migration.

The inevitable outcome of this is increasing homelessness, and likely slums when homeless just start building themselves make shift shelter in such large numbers that authorities can't stamp down on it.

It will make a _small_ difference, and then also banning individuals from owning multiple homes would be a bigger difference (and then building enough supply, the biggest). We can do all three.

> It will make very little difference in the end.

I feel like there will be a difference between a handful of large corporations owning a majority of properties vs thousands of dentists and software engineers. Are you saying that all of these property owners are also soulless profit-optimizers?

I remember watching some video of tenants being priced out of their rental apartments so when they tried to contact the property owner, they found layers upon layers of managers and companies. It just seems better when there are more thousands of owners than just a handful of corporations.

Increased supply comes in majority black and/or low-income neighborhoods here and it's "luxury" units all the way down. Gentrification is the name of the game, while simultaneously reducing social services.

In that light, this move is A-OK with me.