this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Those are some key quotes, IMO. It's becoming increasingly clear that the private market is not going to solve this problem under the current conditions. They don't want to build large quantities of new homes, because that doesn't maximise profit relative to slowly releasing a large apartment building here and there. We need incentives for large amounts of housing to be built at once, and we need the government to be far more involved in that process.
No argument there, BUT it's not just as simple as building more houses. It's no use building a bunch of affordable houses out at Toowoomba if all the jobs are still in Brisbane, as people still need to live near where they work. There are already plenty of affordable places to live, they are just too far for most people to commute. And nobody really likes the idea of knocking down houses close to Brisbane and replacing them with towering apartment blocks - the traffic is already bad enough as-is.
With more companies pushing for employees to come back to the office, I do wonder whether some sort of tax incentive to encourage remote work would be better. If a company received a financial incentive for each employee who lived more than 100 km from their base of operations, not only would that make it easier for people who cannot work remotely (e.g. peak hour traffic wouldn't be so bad) but it might help revitalise some of these country towns that are suffering from dwindling populations.