Young people aren’t “restless”. They are being forced to move home

By Leith van Onselen

Following his deliberate obfuscation of housing affordability last week, Domainfax’s Peter Martin has penned another misleading article, entitled “Census 2016: Australians increasingly restless as half move home”, which misdiagnoses the reasons why Australians are moving more frequently:

Almost half the Australian population has moved house during the past five years, one in every six people in the past 12 months.

The second release of data from the 2016 census paints a picture of an incredibly mobile population, in which one third of young Australians aged 20 to 29 change address every 12 months and two thirds move every five years.

For the population as a whole, 43.4 per cent changed address in the five years before the 2016 census, up from 41.7 per cent in the five years before the 2011 census…

A quick examination of the data shows that this has little to do with restlessness and everything to do with the growth in the share of people in rented accommodation and group homes:

As well as the corresponding collapse in home ownership among younger Australians:

This view is supported by RBA assistant governor, Luci Ellis, who noted the following in her February housing speech:

A range of different data sources confirm that although young people move more often than older people, the big difference is between renters and owners (Graph 8)…

Looking just at the group of households who can be tracked through the whole life of the HILDA survey, and who didn’t switch between owning and renting at any stage, you can also see that renters were also more likely to have moved many times in that 13-year period (Graph 9).

…we know that moving house can be disruptive and costly. So I question whether all those moves by renters were desired by those households. Many renters are happy with their current home, but are required to move because the lease expired or the landlord sold the property.

It’s amazing that Peter Martin can omit such basic facts from his analysis, instead lazily blaming “restlessness”.

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