How Australia’s Housing Market Became So Out of Reach

Good article – always interesting to read about Australian housing policy from an non-Australian perspective.

> Opposition to development by local residents — NIMBYism (which stands for Not In My Back Yard) — is also adding to housing delays. In Australia, highly urbanized populations live in unusually high levels of detached housing, making it an outlier in the developed world. That makes Australians, generally, loath to embrace apartment development, at least in their own neighborhoods. This is despite a growing need for smaller homes to account for more, but smaller, households.

Purely anecdotal but this seems to be changing, at least in the bigger cities. [NIMBY protest are now being matched by YIMBY ones in the streets](https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/elsternwick-erupts-nimbys-v-yimbys-as-vcat-bypass-fuels-local-fury-20250330-p5lnko.html). In NSW and Victoria the state governments seem increasingly willing to take up the fight with community opposition high density housing, and they seem to have a deal of public support, probably because enough people already live in apartments in inner Melbourne and Sydney that people know it’s not the end of the world.

The only issue is that due to cost pressures, most apartments are still only being built with one or two bedrooms, because it’s so hard for developers to get an apartment building approved that they need to cram as many into one building in order to make it profitable – so for anyone who wants to start a family, owning an apartment usually isn’t a viable option. Thats the main thing which needs to change to reduce the cost of housing in Australia.