Submitted 6 months ago by zero_gravitas@aussie.zone to australia@aussie.zone
https://www.instagram.com/p/DN69TN5EhOE/
As always with people trying to say “immigration isn’t the/an issue”, completely misses the point.
No one is saying immigration caused the housing affordability and availability crisis. No one. What we are saying is that we are in these crises now, and maintaining the current levels of immigration is making them worse and worse every single day.
Again for those that still don’t get it:
Immigration no cause problem. Problem happen. Situation terrible. Immigration now make situation much worse.
Semantics.Your point - that immigration excerbates existing underlying problems - specifically ignores the underlying problem, which in OPs post, describes that housing is a locked / controlled asset (due to it being a speculative asset) , which has itself created an artificial shortage.
Maybe spend less time railing against those pesky immigrants, and take up a pitchfork against speculative home ownership.
It’s not semantics though, it’s a completely different argument to what you’re claiming is being made.
Ok so if the number of dwellings has increased at the same rate as the population has grown, why is it so hard to find somewhere to rent?
I’m not saying the numbers are wrong, I just don’t understand why there’s a shortage.
Numbers can lie, or at the very least obfuscate the truth. Consider the following, as an example:
Families are having fewer children, so the average number of people per home has dropped (eg. from 4/home to 3/home). That would mean we need 33% more homes just to account for the same population.
New housing stock may not meet needs; a tonne of studio, 1 bedroom inner city apartments may not be suitable for the above families, so demand for existing stock just increases.
Covid made a lot of people realise they couldn’t stand their housemates, airbnb slices, dwelling availability (empty places that no one wants to buy or want to landbank) , population shifts eg: one house of two people divorce, now need two houses etc… lots of reasons.
This is the correct answer. Fewer average occupants per house, for a variety of reasons.
How many of these dwellings are available to rent long-term? The ABS definition is very broad:
A dwelling is a structure which is intended to have people live in it, that is it was established for short-stay or long-stay accommodation.
So AirBnB/Stayz/etc is a contributing problem.
Same as every other place I assume. Rich fucks buying up property as investments.
This shit is happening everywhere. Even in India housing prices are astronomical. Some places in Mumbai are as expensive as New York while the median income is nowhere near that.
That doesn’t create a shortage of rentals though.
Speculation has outpaced supply
That’s the TL;DR. Not that we didn’t already know, but nice to see it confirmed (yet again).
Average income is not a useful metric. The higher the average gets, the further it drifts from the median.
Median is an average. It would be helpful if they specified whether they are using mean or median, but median is the average usually talked about with respect to income, precisely because it’s much more useful.
Now do actual number of people per dwelling over the same time period
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 6 months ago
Since our borders opened up post covid, our population has been growing at an average of 150k per quarter (www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/…/dec-2024), while we’ve only been building ~40k dwellings per quarter in that time (www.abs.gov.au/statistics/…/latest-release ).
Total dwelling builds completed show around 200k per year, down to about 180k/year since 2019 up until now. The “we build more homes than our population demands” is not true, at least not since Covid, and our population growth has absolutely exploded in that time almost entirely due to immigration (see table “Components of quarterly population change” in first link).