The Daily Telegraph: Once real, now distant: The cold, hard truth confronting Sydney

Housing supply in Sydney and NSW is choked by planning delays, expensive wreaths of red and green tape, horrible NIMBYism and a general moneyed-class resistance to what we might call property egalitarianism.

This will come as a considerable shock to anyone currently seeking to buy a house in Sydney, but your quest was once a far simpler one.

And far more affordable, too.

Just as shocking is how relatively recent those now-enviable circumstances were.

As The Daily Telegraph reports, Sydney buyers 50 years ago needed just 4.2 times the average salary to buy a median priced house; 30 years ago, it was 5.8 times the average annual income.

But that figure now stands at 13 times the average annual income.

A cost that was previously affordable, if challenging, is now way beyond the means of your average aspiring house buyer.

The bleak reality facing young Sydneysiders wanting to buy their first homes has been laid bare.

Experts and pundits can point to all kinds of economic and sociological reasons for this, but all generally agree that the central cause of our housing crisis is a wicked shortage of supply.

Anecdotally, we all know this to be true.

Housing supply in Sydney and NSW is choked by planning delays, expensive wreaths of red and green tape, horrible NIMBYism and a general moneyed-class resistance to what we might call property egalitarianism.

A shortage of supply is the enemy of affordability. Former Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens correctly identified this problem in his 2017 Housing Affordability Report, commissioned by then-premier Gladys Berejiklian.

A new report that shows new buyers have been shut out of the market by unprecedented price escalations.

“We need the supply side of the market to respond to the community’s needs, and to the growth in population and income,” Stevens wrote.

“It is highly desirable that the supply side of the market meet the demand for shelter for the bulk of people efficiently and at minimum cost. Most observers agree that the supply side of the market in general has struggled to keep up with demand, probably for most of the past decade.”

And, regrettably, since then.

‘For Sale’ by Warren Brown

The word “supply” turns up more than 40 times in Stevens’ 18-page report, simply because it is the central and most overriding factor in our housing crisis.

Let Sydney’s housing market be liberated. Let demand and supply meet at an affordable level.