The housing affordability plan

Our Brave Leader has announced his grand plan to fix housing affordability without dropping the home-owners into a negative equity hole.

Key points are:

— new house and land packages priced between $200,000 and $300,000;

— regular englobo land sales;

— over-the-counter sales of affordable housing blocks;

— a major expansion of community housing that will deliver an additional 480 affordable dwellings over five years;

— an initiative to increase the supply of private rental dwellings by 200- 400 homes in the first instance;

— land rental and shared equity schemes, including for public and community housing tenants;

— targeted stamp duty concessions.

He’s created a whole new website (intriguingly not in the act.gov.au domain, someone in IntACT not trusted?) http://www.actaffordablehousing.com.au/ to sell the plan.

There’s also a whole media kit’s worth of releases on:

— the team to deliver the plan,

— money going into community housing,

— house and land packages,

— a land rent scheme (on land that’s only leasehold in the first place),

— more affordable housing land (slums),

— PPP rental properties (industrialised slums),

— shared equity plans (giving the banks the lion’s share of your capital gains), and

— stamp duty deferrals (to let you over-commit yourself more completely).

It’s going to be a wild ride for the real estate market when all of this hits the fan.

Your thoughts?

UPDATED: The Greens’ Deb Foskey is broadly supportive but would like more public housing in the plan.

Bill Stefaniak is grudgingly supportive.

Another update: The Canberra Times is all over this with an overview, an analysis which lacks a byline, and some background.