13 April 2007

The housing affordability plan

| johnboy
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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.

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It looks like a cunning plan to ramp up supply while maintaining price.

but loaded with so many variables I do not believe there’s any valid model of where it’s going to end up.

We’re rich according to them so not much of it really applies. I’m only interested in how it affects housing prices which will be interesting. We may need to make a much bigger effort to save that deposit if they start to rise.

Renting land but owning the house on top sounds weird to me . . . and how would this make it cheaper? I don’t get it.

I hear there are plenty of developers looking to release huge amounts of land just over the ACT’s border, but ACTEW refuses to supply them with water.

assuming a fixed supply

but they’ll really need to let go of planning and open the throttle on land release.

which it looks like they might well be doing.

VYBerlinaV8 now_with_added grunt5:32 pm 12 Apr 07

The easier to get in, the greater the demand, the higher the prices go…

They don’t seem to understand that shared equity schemes have the potential to cause house prices to rise even further.

Just more red tape on red tape.

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