Australia

The problem is that if you own a home and you’ve paid off the mortgage or paid it down over 20 years already then there’s no reason to sell, meaning prices likely won’t fall that much as people will prefer to sit on their asset than to sell at a loss, or at a perceived loss relative to what they were previously told the market would pay for it.

The only mechanism for prices to actually return to earth and make housing affordable again is wage growth and inflation, and the hope that housing prices don’t simply rise alongside wage growth. The only way out of this catastrophe is for inflation to reduce the value of money while house prices remain static in nominal terms. And even the “left” government of Australia see “tackling inflation” and “constraining wage growth to prevent inflation” as critical policy priorities.

Inflation driven by wage growth is actually the medicine needed. But this would hurt the already very wealthy minority so the cure is verboten and branded economic heresy by technocrats and the spineless neoliberals serving the interests of the wealthy that dare to call themselves the Labor Party.

Even if you conquer the mountain of ending negative gearing and the insanely generous tax subsidies that investors get, even then you need to wait a decade just to see prices enter a sane range relative to income again.

Millennials are doomed. Half of them will be renting until they die. The only way out of this trap is to making own 3-10 homes a bad investment. But can you imagine any Australian government decommodifying housing? It’s not going to happen which means a generation of renters and a poverty time bomb when the millennials want to retire.

For people stuck in the renting trap already in their 40s, they’re doomed now and the best idea the intelligentsia have is “maybe just live with your rich parents who sent you to a private school a bit longer and ask them for a loan.”

What’s needed is (1) a sudden and total end to the enormous subsidy given to the already wealthy in the form of tax incentives for property investment and speculation, (2) inflation driven driven by wage growth to reduce the real value of housing to bring it back to an affordable level.

Neither of the major political parties are unwilling to do (1) and even the “left” of politics view wage growth and inflation as the key evils that hurt “the economy”.

So we’re fucked. Time to read Mao.