The government is leaving low-cost medium-density housing to developers and should take a lead from The Netherlands’ model, a Melbourne architect has said, as research shows teachers, nurses and fire fighters are priced out of seven of eight Australian capital cities.
The research today reveals that owning a home in the city remains an unattainable dream for Australian emergency workers and teachers, with seven out of eight capital cities being unaffordable.
The Second Annual Bankwest Key Worker Housing Affordability Report reveals that, despite housing affordability improving marginally over the past year, with house prices falling two per cent nationally, key workers continue to face significant hurdles in climbing onto the property ladder.
The situation has deteriorated over the past five years with nearly 80 per cent of capital city council areas too expensive for key workers to buy a house in 2009, compared with less than 70 per cent in 2004.
An area is classified as unaffordable if median house prices are more than five times a key worker’s annual earnings.
“These are the essential workers Australians rely on every day to provide important services and most continue to be priced out of housing in the communities in which they serve,” Bankwest Retail chief executive Ian Corfield said.
“Even more worrying is that affordability has declined over the past five years, despite a minor improvement in housing affordability last year,” Corfield said.
The problem of housing affordability is something the government should not be leaving to commercial developers, a Melbourne architect told Architecture & Design.
The government doesn’t get enough involved in building public or low-cost medium density developments, Chris Idle, director at Idle Architects, said.
“The government should develop more housing, not public housing, but medium cost, inner city housing. In Australia the government sees fit to leave it to developers, which is a mistake because it’s too commercially driven. [The government] is asking the private sector to do something that maybe the public sector should be doing.”
Idle points to places in Europe, such as The Netherlands where in many cities, such as Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, the percentage of social housing approaches or even passes 50 per cent. This is accomplished by non-profit (but non-governmental) housing societies sub-contracting to corporations run purely for profit.
Releasing more land on the outskirts of cities is “idiotic policy”, Idle said.
“Releasing more land is just the most idiotic policy, they build big houses that are still the same price, people have got to drive. The result is more of the same,” he said.
