The evil Nine is spruiking the Dan Andrews dwelling construction fantasy target:
Government land that is “surplus” will be rezoned across 45 sites across the state and is expected to deliver at least 9000 new homes.
Planning processes will also be streamlined for significant housing developments, worth at least $50 million in Melbourne and $15 million in regional Victoria, if they deliver at least 10 per cent affordable housing, including build-to-rent projects.
The government estimates this would bring 13,200 homes to market that would have been delayed.
The Department of Transport and Planning will lead the delivery of “priority precincts” focused on building communities around major transport and services hubs.
Small second homes, such as granny flats, will not need a planning permit if they are below 60 square metres and neither will single dwellings on lots bigger than 300 square metres if they do not have a planning overlay covering them.
The Property Council of Australia has identified nearly 80 office buildings that are underused and the government will work with them to convert these into residential and mixed-use properties, creating up to 12,000 homes.
To deliver 80,000 new homes every year for the next 10 years, the government will speed up approval times for developers that commit to delivering social and affordable homes.
The best-ever target managed by Victoria was one year in 2017 when it completed 67k dwellings. The net increase will be roughly 15% below this after demolitions.
So, to reach 80K, for ten straight years, will be unprecedented:
But wait, there’s more. Andrews has also pledged 2.24m homes by 2050, when he presumably will die and be preserved in aspic at a dedicated memorial. That’s an ongoing 72k dwellings per annum every year past the 80k ten-year pledge.
What could possibly go wrong as VIC is handed over to blood-sucking developers to double Melbourne’s dwelling stock in twenty-seven years versus the 188 years it took to build the first 2m?
VIC has ramped up building with each successive wave of immigration, so it may be possible to reach the 80k target for a year or two. But VIC has never managed a ten-year boom at anything like the proposed scale. Nor has it managed to keep pace with quantitative peopling anyway.
The 2017 target was only reached by having interest rates at zero, wildly out-of-control property prices, wage growth crushed, and a tsunami of Chinese investment. Today, we have high inflation, especially in construction, barely rising house prices, tradie shortages and no Chinese investment.
The bankrupt VIC government has also raised taxes on property investment and added the short-term stay levy—an obvious deterrence to investment.
Moreover, the material and labour shortages write themselves, requiring more migrants to build the dwellings, ensuring that the shortage will persist regardless.
Ironically, VIC’s best and only chance of reaching its targets for a year or two is a crash in the Chinese economy, delivering a deflationary shock to Australia and making all of Tim Gurner’s wildest dreams come true at once.
This is the truth of what is being proposed. A never-ending housing crisis will push housing ownership and renting further beyond reach while wrecking the environment and crush-loading all public services.
It will deliver meek GDP growth for Dan Andrews to trumpet and higher stamp duties to kick the budget can, amid perpetually falling living standards for most.
This entire conception is ludicrous. That it passes for public policy equally so.
