more young people stay at home

More young people stay at home as housing affordability worsens

by: Annabel Hepworth
From:The Australian
October 20, 201112:00AM

MORE young people in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia are staying in the family home or joining share houses, reversing a trend of almost 20 years, as housing affordability worsens.

The federal State of Australian Cities 2011 report, to be released by Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese today, shows there has been a national trend since 1994 for houses to have more bedrooms but fewer people living in them.

And in a stark turnaround over the past year, the number of people per dwelling in the mining states and Victoria has increased. Houses there continue to have an increase in the number of bedrooms per house.

NSW has bucked the trend, with the number of bedrooms falling along with the number of people in a typical home.

While is still cheaper to build a home on the city fringes in most cities, in Sydney it is becoming cheaper to live in in-fill developments closer to town because land and infrastructure charges on the outskirts are so high.

Nationwide, the report finds there is a shortfall of 200,000 new homes and that the gap between housing supply and demand is most severe in Sydney.

The finding is likely to fuel concerns that the lack of housing supply in some regions is driving up house prices in the major cities.

Stockland chief executive Matthew Quinn said last week property developers were being forced to jump through "multiple hoops of fire" to get projects approved, and that this had stoked the housing affordability crisis. Mr Albanese will today put the states on notice that from January, future federal infrastructure funding for the states and territories will be tied to the strategic planning systems for their capital cities.

"The fact is our cities have become too important to ignore," Mr Albanese will say in a speech he will give in Brisbane today.

"While our country is famous for its agricultural and mineral production, it is our cities that produce 80 per cent of our national wealth.

"We need better cities for the people who live in them, for the people who work in them and for the people who depend on them."

Mr Albanese will warn that productivity growth has declined since 1998. "As our population ages, large numbers of people will leave the workforce," he says in the speech.

"It is therefore critical that we become more productive."

While Australian workforce participation is high by international standards -- mostly because the number of women in paid work has increased -- it has stabilised over the past year, and in the NSW industrial city of Wollongong it has fallen.

Many of the new jobs -- between 50 and 70 per cent -- are being created in the outer suburbs, which may explain the fall in commuters switching from driving to public transport as well as walking and cycling.

Foreign migrants are tending to settle in Sydney and Melbourne, while older people are moving to Perth and Brisbane.

On sustainability, the report found electricity use had fallen by 1.2 per cent over the past year.

The report finds the biggest natural disaster threat to Australian cities is heatwaves, which can have a bigger impact than cyclones, severe storms, floods and bushfires.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/property/more-young-people-stay-at-home-as-housing-affordability-worsens/story-fn9656lz-1226171152501