Crying poor? Count your rooms and houses, and think again

This article was published in The Sydney Morning Herald 16 December 2009

There are two ways to tell the story of what's happening to housing. One is the usual, poor-little-you story of families obliged by ever-rising house prices to take out huge mortgages, which they struggle to pay while an unfeeling central bank raises interest rates every month and the greedy banks add more on top.

The latest chapter in this story is that with high levels of immigration causing the population to grow at its fastest rate in 40 years, we're not building nearly as many homes each year as we need, and this shortage of supply is putting a lot of upward pressure on house prices, to the disadvantage of young people trying to break into home ownership.