This is a no win situation...Neither party can fix this. You spend money for affordable housing in a city...Federal with some state and local funding. Each family gets a small (1,000 sq foot, 92.1m2) (3 bedroom 2 bath home)...Very small back yard. Have some type of community park/playground (trees) within walking distance. Where ever you build, you will have gangs vying to control the park and the subdivision. Many shootings and deaths...So what started out as a good/great idea has become a disaster!! No real answers... Maybe AU can nationalize housing...Let's see how that works out!! Then come back and tell us what to do...
That's seems pretty extreme. You make it sound like Nino Brown & his gang in New Jack City is going to take over the Carter Project. At least here in the US, in the post WWII period the US government had huge infrastructure projects to build new communities in the areas where it wasn't populous. This would definitely work in Australia & Canada. I'm not sure about NZ since I've never been there. In the US midwest & southeast there is plenty of space to build out. It would take Federal investment & local cooperation but it can be achieved. The problem currently in the US is all the good jobs are in a few urban areas so real estate prices are out of whack. The tech sector needs to be scattered about the US and not just in a few cities. The founder of AOL is a VC that is trying to get tech jobs to the midwest US. He has been somewhat successful.
I'm going to take a swing at RE affordability in Australia and the US with out of the box considerations. I choose both countries because they are very similar, with huge swathes of empty land, a cultural obsession with owning a home as proof of achievement and affordability problems. I just got back from 2 weeks in Melbourne where my kid is now attending university there. During that time I looked at properties to buy, rental and Airbnb rates, distance from the universities corridor, etc... As I wrote earlier, the market is clearly divided between 2 different visions of what living means to various cultures. I just watched and highly recommend the documentary American Factory on Netflix which addresses the same stark cultural differences from an employment perspective. Asians in general (East, Southeast, West) are perfectly content living in apartments. Their sense of achievement/success is based on floor level and unit size. The highest the level, the greatest the view and perspective of the world below. Prices can vary from $400k+ on low floors to $3M+ on high floors. Construction efficiency and environmental foot print is much better building towers than suburban subdivisions so price per sqm is much lower (or margins much greater). The towers compete with one another to entice buyers to their corner of paradise with ample supplies of units and fill rates are the road to RE success and the motivation to build another tower down the road. That bubble has no affordability issues because no supply issues. On the other hand is the typical anglo mindset, owning as large a house that money can buy on a lot with garden (pool?) and garage. In a 15 km radius of Melbourne there's probably nothing resembling that for under $2M and wealthy neighborhoods can easily hit the $10M mark. The affordability crisis is high, pushing basic ownership (sub $1M) well over an hour's train ride from downtown Melbourne. The sense of entitlement to cultural and historical house ownership is such that none would ever consider for a minute to buy an apartment instead. That disparity in expectations also impacts relations between cultures. Asians are used to high density while anglos demand space. Asians live in the downtown area while anglos commute to it. While Melbourne is the most culturally diversified city I've ever seen (and I've been a few places), there's enough unspoken tension between whites and non whites to pop up from time to time. In an age of pressing environmental concerns, there's a clear understanding in governments that the cost of sprawling infrastructures is both prohibitively expensive and significantly detrimental to the environment. The challenge is to modify mindsets to consider apartment living as a perfectly acceptable option, knowing that Anglos have always associated apartments with government run poverty traps when, in fact, today's apartment towers can be as luxurious as upper middle class houses. As subdivisions move further away from urban centers the cost and thus taxes required to bring urban amenities to them becomes unaffordable to property buyers, thus the crisis.
not in a real world. if you can’t afford a house in a good economy, you can’t afford a house a bad economy. in a real world, lending and financing will shut, banks will have to auction off the deeds, simply the top 1% will get everything back to their pockets again. they maybe poor a little but they are still the 1%.
significantly for whom? market stops trading houses, all the distressed debts/properties/lands end up where these days.
For anyone with enough money to buy a house. Like the stock market, you take advantage of the bargains.
Guess I didn't understand the question. When you can buy a house for less than the price of the lot I'd say the price dropped significantly