Why your dream of owning a home in Sydney is now a nightmare

Sydney’s housing market is broken. Many say they will never achieve the great Australian dream of owning a home. Will you? Vote in our poll.

Sydney’s housing market is broken and the Australian dream of owning your own home is increasingly out of reach to many young families.

Fifty years ago half of Australians between the ages of 25 and 30 owned their own home – today that number has dropped to just over a third.

And those that have managed to scrimp and scrape or borrow from relatives to buy their own home often face big commutes to get to work.

Less young people are able to afford their own home than 50 years ago. Picture: Jeremy Piper

The housing supply shortage and the subsequent rocketing in home prices — the average home in Sydney jumped 22 per cent in value last year — can be fairly and squarely put down to a failure of planning at all levels of government over several decades.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Western Sydney.

Sydney police officer Melissa Bentley, teacher Sierra Classen and nurse Melissa Suarez are among the essential workers struggling to buy property close to their work. Picture: Richard Dobson

Planners point to zoning approvals for 60,000 new homes but fail to acknowledge two-thirds of those will never be built.

At Rossmore the approvals are on tiny, fragmented parcels of land that cannot be sensibly developed.

In the greenfields of Leppington planners have inexplicably decided people want to live in apartments.

Councils meanwhile are failing to reach their new building targets by as much as 45 per cent.

And when construction does get underway the provision of crucial infrastructure is uncoordinated or woefully non-existent.

The man with the remit to fix this is recently minted Planning and Housing Minister Anthony Roberts.

He faces an enormous task. It is not simply building more houses but bringing the myriad of agencies and departments responsible for new developments into line to get that construction underway.

Mr Roberts needs to get all layers of government and private enterprise to work together to tackle the crisis. That means taking a firm line with the Nimbyism and self interest that has bedevilled this issue for decades. It is his time to step up and sort this mess out.