Australia’s housing stock is growing more slowly than its population, and for the first time in decades, we are failing to build enough homes in the places people want to live. The result is a median home price in Sydney that is more than 10 times the median household income.
In this episode, Brendan Coates, the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at the Grattan Institute, outlines the findings of their latest report, “More homes, better cities”, arguing that the root cause of the crisis isn’t immigration, tax settings, or banking—it’s that our planning systems say “no” by default.
Brendan and Jonathan discuss how 80% of residential land near Sydney’s CBD is restricted to three stories or less, and how removing these bans could unlock hundreds of thousands of new homes. Brendan explains why “gentle density”—allowing three-story townhouses as-of-right—is the key to affordability, better streetscapes, and economic productivity.
Read Brendan Coates’ “Planning is the Bottleneck to New Housing” here.
Read Grattan Institute’s full report here.
Brendan is the Housing and Economic Security Program Director at Grattan Institute.
