Bradfield 2023: Professor Andy Marks urges government, councils, developers to agree on affordable housing solution

“As a kid I remember thinking a million dollar house was a dream”, now it’s the norm, writes Andy Marks, as he urges for a consensus for a path forward for housing affordability.

Years before the internet, trashy American TV was a staple in Australian households.

Viewers during the 1980s-1990s would know the show Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.

Host Robin Leach would gush over the opulence of lavish celebrity homes.

Phrases like “romantic nights in the jacuzzi” along with “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” were used with abandon.

As a kid I remember thinking a million dollar house was a dream.

A few years ago, average house prices in NSW surpassed $1 million, with or without a jacuzzi. Like the glitzy show, things have become ridiculous.

It’s not the price tag of housing that’s the problem. It’s the relativity of cost to the real circumstances of most Australians. We’ve become a fantasy island.

Professor Andy Marks, Western Sydney University, at The Daily Telegraph's Future Western Sydney 2023 lunch, at Rosehill Gardens. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

This distorted fantasy is especially real for people in Western Sydney.

Australia’s fastest growing region is the place where affordable housing is needed most. A new report, Home Truths, by Tom Nance of the Centre for Western Sydney, details how great the challenge is.

And it is most keenly felt by those unable to even dream of home ownership.

Sydney’s west will need to accommodate nearly two-thirds of the city’s overall population growth over the next two decades.

Just building more homes won’t cut it. As the report reveals, it is the type of housing the region requires that matters most. The current stock of social and affordable housing in western Sydney meets just 44 per cent of demand. That’s an estimated shortfall of nearly 76,000 dwellings. This under supply, the report projected, will increase to over 160,000 by 2041 without action.

Action can’t happen if the state government, developers, local councils and housing providers can’t even agree on the problem.

A new report has exposed how much affordable housing we need to build.

NSW housing minister Rose Jackson admitted as much at a recent forum.

“More and more dwellings … characterised as affordable housing,” she said, are “for many people in the community … not affordable”.

Well, if the market has failed to define and maintain affordability, then the government needs to end the fantasy.

It needs to unequivocally pin down what is, and what isn’t, affordable housing.

And it needs to move fast on ensuring it is delivered because at the moment some of the biggest losers in the housing market are the families and essential workers who are the backbone of our city.

The Home Truths report projects an additional 8500 social and affordable dwellings will be needed in western Sydney per year until 2041.

Even with $244 million directed towards the task in the NSW budget, wait lists are set to grow. Social housing advocates were seeking as much as $6 billion over four years.

By the mid-1990s, the champagne ran out and Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous had run its course. Fantasy became reality.

It’s time our approach to social and affordable housing made the same transition.

Professor Andy Marks is Executive Director of the Centre for Western Sydney and a Pro Vice-Chancellor at Western Sydney University