Sydney was rated “severely
unaffordable” in the third annual Demographia survey by the US-based
property analyst Wendell Cox Consultancy, and ranked as the seventh most
unaffordable city in the world.
Even the citizens of greater London and New
York found it easier to fulfil their dream of owning
a house in their home towns, the survey found. Los Angeles
was the most out of reach, followed by several other cities on the US west coast.
“The most pervasive housing
affordability crisis is in Australia,”
says the survey, based on data for the three months to September 2006. It says
“house price inflation is costing years in additional gross income for
purchasing households in the most unaffordable markets”.
The lobby group Save Our Suburbs said that,
based on the median house price, Sydney
was going backwards. “In time the fact that new generations will not be
able to afford a family home will be bitterly resented,” said the group’s
president, Tony Recsei.
The Demographia report calls for the
governments presiding over communities with expensive housing to speed up the
land approval system, bypass the system of land releases and apply a
“presumption favouring development except where reasonable environmental
standards would be contravened”.
The NSW Minister for Planning, Frank
Sartor, dismissed the report as that of a “remote hired gun” and
quoted its co-author Wendell Cox as telling Alan Jones on 2GB last year:
“We need to begin pulling off the regulations, releasing considerable
land, taking off these crazy master-planned requirements. You can’t build a
master-planned community in Sydney
without having a child-care facility. The fact is the whole of the western
suburbs of Sydney
in the 1960s and ’70s didn’t have this master-planned stuff. There is nothing
wrong with how Sydney
developed in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Mr Sartor said: “That’s where the
problems of Sydney
came from.” He defined the problems as “inadequate
infrastructure” and pressure on public transport.
The former Reserve Bank governor Ian
Macfarlane said last August: “I think it is pretty apparent now that
reluctance to release new land, plus the new approach whereby the purchaser has
to pay for all the services upfront – the sewerage, the roads, the footpaths –
has enormously increased the price of the new entry-level home. That is a
supply-side issue, not a demand-side issue.”
The Opposition planning spokesman, Chris
Hartcher, said on average there were $160,000 in government charges on a new
block of land. He called for more public-private partnerships to reduce upfront
costs such as water and sewerage.
1 Los
Angeles, California
2 San Diego,
California
3 Honolulu, Hawaii
4. San
Francisco, California
5 Ventura, California
6 Stockton, California
7 Sydney
8 San Jose, California
9 London, Britain
10 Bournemouth, Britain
18 New
York
23 Melbourne
Source: US Based Wendell Cox Consultancy
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/owning-a-home-its-an-8year-bitch/2007/01/22/1169330827946.html