The much-promoted affordable housing centrepiece of the Minns Government’s density push has failed before it starts. A reality check is coming for the NSW Government. Michael Pascoe reports.

It’s a busy time for politicians trying to do something about housing affordability – or at least to be seen to be trying to do something. While Federal Labor is battling the opportunistic Greens-LNP coalition in the Senate over Help-to-Buy and build-to-rent schemes, the actual Coalition is sponsoring yet another Senate inquiry destined to achieve as much as all the other parliamentary housing inquiries – nada.

One of the first actions of the NSW Labor Government upon election 17 months ago was to announce it was scrapping the Greater Cities Commission (GCC), the independent body that attempted to instill some quality in urban planning. The big developers’ lobby, Urban Taskforce, wanted the GCC killed, so killed it was.

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High-priced homes do not create wealth, Alan Kohler says, they redistribute it. Now financial success is largely a function of geography, not accomplishment

My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s central business district.

I don’t know what my dad was making then, but he was a carpenter and apparently the average wage of a carpenter in 1951 was about 80 shillings a week, or £350 a year. And judging by average prices back then, they would have paid about £1,000 for the land. (By the way, the median house price had more than doubled in 1950, recovering from the big fall caused by price controls during the second world war, on which more later.)

Dad built the house himself, including making the bricks, working on weekends and at night, and Mum and Dad lived in a garage, to which I was brought home when I was born and where I spent the first three years of my life. But if they had bought a house and land package, which was rather more common than building it yourself, they would have paid about £1,250. So, like the median family at the time, they would have paid about 3.5 times household income (Mum didn’t work) for their first house, which was about average for the time.

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