There’s a particular kind of despair that sets in when you’re scrolling through rental listings at 11pm on a Tuesday, refreshing the page every thirty seconds because you know the halfway-decent two-bedder that just went up will have fifty applications by morning.
I’ve been there. Most Australians under 40 have been there. And increasingly, it’s not just twenty-somethings resigned to sharehousing until their knees give out. It’s families, professionals, even people who did everything “right” according to the old playbook.
The thing is, we talk about Australia’s housing crisis like it’s a property issue. Rising prices, tight supply, investment distortions. All true. But we’re only just beginning to grasp what this shortage is actually doing to us as a society. It’s not just making us poorer. It’s fundamentally reshaping how we live, who we live with, and whether we’re having kids at all.
And the data coming through now is pretty bloody grim.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even If We’d Prefer They Did)
Australia’s fertility rate has hit an all-time low of 1.5 births per woman. Well below the replacement rate of 2.1. That’s not just a statistic for demographers to fret over at conferences. That’s the sound of an entire generation quietly deciding that parenthood is too expensive, too precarious, or simply incompatible with their housing reality.
You can’t raise kids in a sharehouse. You can’t start a family when you’re paying 60% of your income on rent and moving every twelve months because the landlord wants to renovate or sell. You can’t plan for the future when you’re trapped in a perpetual state of housing insecurity.
Meanwhile, intergenerational living is making a comeback. Not because we’ve suddenly embraced multi-generational household values, but because adult children literally cannot afford to leave. The number of 25-34 year-olds still living with parents has jumped significantly in the past decade. Some are there by choice, helping ageing parents. Many aren’t.
The Mental Health Tax Nobody’s Tallying
Here’s what doesn’t show up in property price indices: the cumulative psychological cost of housing stress.
I’m talking about the couples who can’t move in together because neither can afford to lose their sharehouse rent split. The thirty-five-year-olds still living like students because home ownership is a fantasy and rental stability is a myth. The parents squeezing three kids into a two-bedroom unit because that’s all they could get approved for.
Housing insecurity doesn’t just affect your bank balance. It affects your mental health, your relationships, your sense of control over your own life. When you can’t plan more than six months ahead because you don’t know where you’ll be living, everything else becomes provisional too.
Therapists and counsellors are reporting increased anxiety specifically tied to housing stress. Relationships are breaking down under the financial strain. People are delaying or abandoning life goals. Not because they don’t want them, but because the foundation required to build them simply doesn’t exist.
The Parenthood Calculation Has Changed
Let’s be honest about what’s happening with birth rates.
Previous generations didn’t necessarily have more money than us, but they had something more valuable: stability and reasonable housing costs relative to income. You could rent affordably while saving for a modest home. You could raise kids without needing two full-time incomes just to keep a roof overhead.
Now? Having a child often means accepting you’ll never own property, or delaying homeownership by another five years, or moving two hours from work to somewhere you can afford a third bedroom.
I know people (intelligent, loving, financially responsible people) who desperately want children but have concluded they simply can’t make the maths work. Not without accepting a standard of living their parents would consider poverty. Not without sacrificing financial security so completely that one emergency would sink them.
And look, some will read this and think, “People have always found a way.” Sure. But we’re not talking about individual families making individual choices anymore. We’re talking about an entire demographic trend. When an entire generation is priced out of family formation, that’s not personal failure. That’s policy failure.
What the Hell Are We Actually Doing About This?
The policy response so far has been… let’s call it “insufficient.”
State governments are tinkering around the edges. Building a few thousand social housing units when we need hundreds of thousands, offering first-home buyer grants that mostly just inflate prices further, releasing small parcels of land in areas with no jobs or infrastructure.
The federal government talks about housing targets while simultaneously protecting investor tax advantages that actively make the problem worse. Negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions continue to funnel investment toward established housing rather than new supply, because why wouldn’t they when the incentives are structured that way?
We need radical intervention. I’m talking:
- Actually building public and social housing at scale, not token numbers
- Serious reform to investor tax treatment that currently favours speculation over occupation
- Genuine protections for renters that allow long-term stability (not the performative “reforms” that leave them one rent increase away from homelessness)
- Infrastructure investment that makes regional areas genuinely viable alternatives to capital cities
- Zoning reforms that allow medium-density housing near jobs and transport
But here’s the problem: most of these solutions hurt powerful interest groups. Property investors who vote. Construction industries that profit from scarcity. Homeowners who’ve built their retirement plans around ever-increasing values.
So we get announcements instead of action. Taskforces instead of transformation.
The Australia We’re Building By Default
If we don’t fix this (properly fix it, not just tinker) we’re locking in a very different kind of future.
Fewer children means an ageing population with fewer workers to support them. That’s a fiscal time bomb with a very obvious fuse.
Intergenerational living sounds nice in theory, but when it’s enforced by economic circumstance rather than chosen by preference, it breeds resentment and family strain.
Continued housing insecurity means a generation that never builds wealth, never feels settled, never has the foundation to take risks or invest in communities. That affects everything from entrepreneurship to civic engagement to mental health.
And the inequality just compounds. Those with property wealth protect and grow it. Those without fall further behind with every passing year. We’re not just creating a generational divide. We’re embedding permanent economic stratification.
We Know What Needs Doing
The frustrating thing? We’re not dealing with some unsolvable mystery here.
Other countries have faced housing crises and actually addressed them through policy intervention. Vienna’s social housing model. Singapore’s public housing system. Even some American cities have made progress through zoning reform and streamlined development approvals.
We have the knowledge. We have the resources. We have the land, for god’s sake. We’re one of the least densely populated developed nations on Earth.
What we lack is political courage and a willingness to tell comfortable homeowners that continuing to treat housing as an investment vehicle rather than a human necessity is destroying the social fabric.
Because that’s ultimately what this is: a choice. We’re choosing to protect property values over people’s lives. We’re choosing short-term political expediency over long-term social stability.
And every year we continue making that choice, we lock in more damage. More couples who won’t have kids. More families squeezed into inadequate housing. More mental health deterioration. More young Australians giving up on the future their parents promised them.
The housing crisis isn’t just reshaping Australia’s demographics. It’s reshaping who we are as a country. And if we don’t start treating it like the emergency it is, we’re going to wake up in twenty years and wonder where everyone went.
