April 18th, 2023One million homes target not looking so good

The federal government is set to fall well short of its goal of building one
million homes over five years according a report from the National Housing
Finance and Investment Corporation, says Tim Reardon, Housing Industry
Association’s chief economist.
“Every state and territory needs to take action to attract more investment in the
housing sector to improve the supply of new homes,” Mr Reardon said. “Over the
decade, this will see an expected 79,300 shortfall in the supply of new homes. This
will see the acute rental shortage worsening and unnecessarily high increases in home
prices.

With urban sprawl and the ongoing destruction of remnant bushland habitat and valuable agricultural land becoming an increasing problem, one solution may be to instead focus more on redeveloping disused buildings in the centres of towns and cities, some trends analysts say.

“Done well, this could not only bring life and social connectivity to the centre of towns once again, creating affordable housing for today’s smaller households, but could also go far to help slow the alarming degradation of our remaining wild spaces and assist with preventing species loss.”