Like many parents, I wonder whether my children will ever be able to get a toehold in the housing market.
Thirty years ago I was a social worker and, with my schoolteacher wife, we bought our first house within 10 kilometres of the Melbourne CBD. Mortgage interest rates were higher than today and our incomes were relatively modest, yet we could afford the $73,000 price tag for a three-bedroom detached house in the inner west.
We still live in that house, but I worry about the housing prospects of the children we raised there. Now young adults, they are making their own way with all the advantages of higher education. But what are their generation's chances of buying into the home-ownership aspiration that sustained my baby-boomer cohort?
The tragedy of our increasingly sprawling city is that the situation is far worse for low-income earners who have no prospect of raising a home deposit and no choice but to rent. Homes in the inner and middle-ring suburbs - both to rent and buy - are increasingly beyond the reach of all but the well-off.
The median weekly rent in Melbourne's private rental market is now $365, according to Victorian government data. A household's after-tax income would need to be more than $57,000 a year to sustain such a rent.
This is bad enough, but the situation for low-income earners is worse. A single, unemployed person dependent on a Centrelink income last year could afford less than 0.5 percent of all private rentals.
Thirty years ago a household would spend four times the median yearly income to buy a typical median-priced house. Now, it's about eight times the median income - unaffordable for many more people.
For those who can scrape together a deposit, or a bond, almost all affordable housing is on the fringes – in growth suburbs such as Cranbourne, Whittlesea, Melton and Werribee. But people living in these areas, where there is little or no public transport, constantly battle long commutes and lack of easy access to health and community services and other facilities.
Alarmingly, these new areas are a long way from most jobs.
This paucity of jobs will intensify, with expert predictions that areas on the outskirts of the city will have fewer than 20 per cent of the new jobs the Victorian economy will create.
Essential workers such as nurses, teachers, police officers, paramedics and cleaners will find it even more difficult to live within a reasonable distance of the jobs a flourishing economy needs them to fill.
It's not by chance that youth unemployment is 15 per cent in the outer north and west, and the fastest-growing rates are in the outer eastern suburbs. And it's not by chance that our city's outskirts have the highest rates of social problems such as family violence and child protection reports.
Another revealing measure of the tensions at play is the aptly named "VAMPIRE" index - or Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgage, Petroleum, and Inflation Risks and Expenditure index - which takes into account factors such as car dependence and economic stress points. By this measure, a high concentration of Melburnians facing mortgage stress and high fuel costs live in Melbourne's outer growth corridors.
If the young are comfortable living in apartments or units, they should be comforted by the supply surge in those types of dwellings:
Indeed, apartments and units really are the future for our young:
The irony of melbournes coming apartment glut will be an opportunity for young people, as well as a second chance for veterans who have made a mess of their finances. We all know the game is rigged but the regulators aren't entirely evil.
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