A good piece on Australia’s horrendously broken housing system, which is more about capital gains, intergenerational hoarding and tax write-offs than rental income.
It also criticises the utter naïveté of YIMBYs, who play into the hands of plutocrats:
Blaming planners is not new, but it ultimately misses the point. A recent analysis suggested there were over 100,000 approved but unbuilt dwelling units in Australia between 2012 and 2000. The supply system itself is now thoroughly geared to capital flowing from investors. If developers cannot sell to them, or simply cannot make enough profit, the banks won’t lend and developers won’t build.
As Kohler notes, the politics of this is simple:
“housing is a cartel of the majority, with banks and developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them.”
