I am not sure if I am more amazed by this proposed bill being introduced by the Housing Minister to provide for affordable housing or by the only reaction that the media could find to report – that being the Property Council’s view that the outcome of the bill will result in higher building costs as developers, forced to take a lower margin on “affordable” housing pass on this “cost” to regular buyers.
Is everyone missing the point here?
This proposal is unworkable, how would it ever be possible to demarcate a property as “affordable” – it is a house, indistinguishable from any other house. I shudder at the thought of a highly expensive bureaucratic team established to monitor these new “affordable” houses so that some “unscrupulous” owner did not try and sell such a house on the open market and land a sizable profit.
The housing market is a private sector open-market economic model driven by supply and demand – for the government to try to intervene is naive at best. Sure there are issues with affordability of homes for young people, but trying to create an artificial market for a designated house is impossible – surely we have some intelligent advisers in our government who could look to see what they can learn from others.
Overseas there are very workable models of assistance in the area of finance to help young people buy a home (of their choosing – not some select group of properties our government want us to buy).
Additionally why not let the market demand encourage developers find new ways to build more efficient modular houses – try looking at the IKEA housing model in the UK. We are not alone in this world in having social and economic problems – how do we let politicians come up with such half baked ideas!
