housing affordability the summit we need

Good article from Michael Pascoe.

Bull or bear... there is no doubt an affordability issue in Australia. Period.

"Various cartoonists and political jokes ran misinformed lines about sundry “elephants in the room” during last week's tax forum but they all missed the biggest one: housing affordability.

That's probably because the peanut gallery wasn't listening anyway. The elephants weren't ignored. They were all addressed at one stage or another, but there wasn't much point wasting time with the pachyderms that simply weren't going anywhere.

Housing affordability was different. The forum kept coming back in different sessions to have another kick at different sides of the great grey mass that's damaging our economy and people.
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It was a major issue in the state taxation discussion, it flared as a social welfare issue during the transfers session, the negative gearing aspects were there in personal taxation, there were housing affordability ramifications in the observation that we have a tax system that favours those who borrow and speculate over those who work and save.

And this was just taxation - only part of the housing affordability problem.

Beyond the room were the state and local government failures in zoning, supply and their at-times questionable relationships with developers. While the forum was meeting, the Reserve Bank was issuing a study fingering the zoning failure, as summarised by here by BusinessDay's Clancy Yeates.

And beyond that are migration issues, both the supply of skills to build housing and the numbers of people seeking it, which all leads into the demographics of retiring baby boomers, the type of housing we build and back into taxation questions about the declining ratio of workers to non-workers."

Read more here ----->

http://www.theage.com.au/business/housing-affordability-the-summit-we-really-need-20111011-1licm.html