alt Hacker NewsPopulation growth from international students has ruined Australian housing.
The government handed universities free reign to hand out as many visa as they liked, and they handed out millions.
And the unspoken deal is that you're not buying an education, you're buying residency in Australia because a large percentage of these students never go home again.
And the government has staunchly - ridiculously - stated for years that international students do not impact housing. Yeah right - they don't live anywhere.
It's just a vast population growth program under the guise of international education with immigrants required to pay their $50K to universities for the nod and a wink right to live here.
Australia, which already had a housing crisis, now has a housing nuclear inferno.
Absolutely out of control population growth. The governments do it because more people equals "growing economy" - the only thing they care about.
And they don't invest in the infrastructure to support the millions of people added to the population so the quality of life goes down for everyone, there's budget cuts in government services, the inequality gap widens.
Growth - through population growth, through "international students" - governments absolutely love it because it hides their bad economic management, and the rich people declare how wonderful massive population growth is because those rich people own at least 3 houses.
The entire game is rigged for rich people to get rich and everyone else to shove over and make room because there's a lot more people coming.
Replies
Your children per women is 1.4 are you really complaining that you can supplement with highly educated youth? If housing is an issue blame your government for shit policy.
At least in North America the issue is federal and even state governments have divorced interests from municipal governments.
They are setting immigration allowances with respect to growth and financial planning.
Municipalities generally over the last 50 years decided they like their neighborhoods how they are, thank you very much.
Local governments needed to be building for this all along. Now we play catch-up.
Though, also, immigrant students are very desirable due to how much they general pay for school (and this subsidize the rest of the budget), and how little any municipal, state, or federal governments had to pay to produce a productive adult taxpayer.
International students make up about 5% of the total rental housing demand but their impact tends to be felt most in capital cities where the universities are.
Removing them won't improve things as much as you might think.
The housing crisis is a supply and demand problem so they've got to increase housing supply.
The problem there is these is a shortage of construction workers. So the workforce simply isn't there to build more houses. Current construction workforce is 110% maxxed out.
I reckon they should be handing out visas to qualified construction workers left and right to solve that problem, then get the homes built. Dubai and Singapore do this and have no such shortage of construction workers. I can't see why we can't do the same.
Removing international students will also have big flow on negative effects for the rest of the economy.
1. Ensure that existing housing stock is used efficiently (no empty second homes, empty apartments being treated was an asset).
2. Build more _affordable_ housing stock.
Doesn't seem like that hard.
> Population growth from international students has ruined Australian housing.
If that is so, why is Australia's housing problem Australia wide and not isolated to high student population locations?
Australia's problem with housing is Australia hasn't/doesn't treat housing as housing, they have treated it as a tax efficient investment vehicle with negative gearing.