No chance: one million social homes needed by 2041

Research conducted for the Community Housing Industry Association reveals that there will be 940,000 households in housing stress by 2041, up nearly 50% from 640,000 in the 2021 census.

The number of Sydney households in housing stress is tipped to rise by 56% to 225,000, while the number of Melbourne households in housing stress is forecast to increase by 61% to 177,000.

Commenting on the results, Community Housing Industry Association chief executive Wendy Hayhurst said “we will need to muster additional investment from all levels of government and superannuation funds to meet this challenge. It is hard to think of a higher priority than giving all Australians a stable and secure home”.

Yet, under the Housing Accord, the federal government has pledged to spend $350 million to deliver 10,000 additional affordable homes by mid-2029, whereas states and territories have agreed to contribute support for 10,000 more. Both are hopelessly inadequate.

Australia’s social housing has been on a “starvation diet” decades, meaning it has failed to keep pace with Australia’s ballooning immigration-led population. This was illustrated clearly by Dr Chris Martin, a senior research fellow at UNSW:

“[Social housing] hasn’t grown, and it has fallen behind the housing needs of a growing community, whether by immigration or natural population growth. We have a growing population and part of that population needs low-cost rental housing. And we have a private rental sector that just doesn’t do it either.”

There was just a 9% growth in social housing stock between 2006 and 2020, according to a recent working paper from the UNSW City Futures Research Centre. This is despite a much larger increase in population (and homelessness) over that time.

Consider the next table from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare:

The total number of social housing dwellings increased by only 12,612 between 2014 and 2021 against a population increase of 2.1 million, driven by mass immigration.

Surely the chronic lack of social housing, and its enormous economic and social costs, is just another reason for the Albanese Government not to run the biggest immigration program in this nation’s history? Because importing 235,000 migrants a year and swelling Australia’s population by 13.1 million people to 38.8 million by 2062 (as projected in the federal budget and the Intergenerational Report), will make the social housing situation impossible to solve.

IGR: Extreme immigration forever….

Even if 500,000 new social homes could miraculously be delivered, Australia would still be left with a massive social housing deficit given the rapid growth of the population.

As always, the many costs of extreme immigration are ignored by policy makers, lobbyists, and the media. They always accentuate the positives of immigration and eliminate any negatives from the discussion.