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The housing crisis is not really about getting into the market or staying off the streets - the problem is more systemic

Housing policy in Australia has a split personality: we are either shaking our heads at how hard it is for wealthy millennials to buy their first home or we are wringing our hands at the plight of the homeless.
Policymakers have responded in a piecemeal and often counterproductive fashion to these individual and seemingly isolated issues, providing financial incentives to first homebuyers and crisis support for those on the streets.
This view of the world sees housing as a game of winners and losers, where the role of government is to set people on the road to a secure financial future while giving a helping hand to those who fall through the gaps. If there is a crisis in the housing market, this story goes, then it affects the nearly well-off and the very, very poor.
But if this were true housing would be a niche political issue – felt deeply by specific demographic groups but really not affecting others. Instead, housing affordability has consistently rated among the top-tier political issues in recent years and continues to do so, even as there is a reported fall in housing prices.
What’s going on? Surely, Australia hasn’t suddenly become swamped by empathy for their fellow citizens; after all the one rule of politics that seldom shifts is that self-interest is the key driver of most worldviews.
That’s where new research that Essential is releasing for the Everybody’s Home campaign to mark Homelessness Week today, is illuminating: the spectre of homelessness is a mainstream issue.
The findings suggest more than half of all Australians feel stretched to meet their current housing commitments, be they mortgage or rent. Forty-two per cent fear they could become homeless if their circumstances change. The market no longer provides a buffer to middle Australia.
Of particular concern are the high numbers of young people who feel themselves under housing stress. And its not some hypothetical or unfounded fear: one third of all respondents know someone who has experienced homelessness, with the numbers again skewed towards younger people.
The simple takeout from these findings is that the housing crisis facing Australia is not really about getting into the market or staying off the streets; it’s more systemic: there just aren’t enough affordable homes to rent.
That’s reinforced with the responses to another set of propositions, which show widespread support for government intervention.
Two points stand out in the findings. Firstly, support for government market intervention is strong across the political divide. Secondly, opposition to the proposition is close to negligible: the proposition the market should be left to its own devices clearly doesn’t apply when it comes to the housing market.
The big question is not whether the government should do something, but what should it do?
Housing policy is a bit like the housing market itself: totally fragmented and subject to the vagaries of the moment. As the value of a property is determined by a range of subjective factors, from the quality of the dwelling, to the position on the street, to the suburb, to the weather on the day of sale, so too housing policy is complex and interrelated.
The stress on rents is being driven by a web of decisions being made at all three levels of government. From local zoning rules, state planning decisions, to the way the federal government sets taxes, rent stress is affected by both the capacity to pay and the availability of affordable rental properties.
But one of the more obvious, albeit less glamorous, drivers has been the federal government’s gradual withdrawal from directly building low-cost rentals. In social housing, this has been gradual creeping away, so public and community housing is now as scarce as hen’s teeth, and almost impossible to access.
In affordable housing the withdrawal was more sudden, with the 2014 budget decision to scrap the National Rent Affordability Scheme that provided investment support for rental properties for moderate-income earners.
This was a deliberate attempt to distort the housing market – to actually make it more attractive for investors to build affordable rental properties and accept a more moderate short-term return while building an asset with long-term value.As government has walked away from social and affordable housing, more renters have been left to compete for the few relatively cheap private rentals on the market, pushing rent prices up and making it harder for renters to save for a deposit. Alternatively the lack of affordable rent forces people further down the housing chain into short-term accommodation, on to couches or worse, the street.
So if housing affordability is a middle Australia issue, it makes perfect sense to attack it at the middle with pragmatic measures to change the market, rather than disposing largesse on those who don’t need it or sympathy on those for whom something more tangible is really required.
Because here’s the unspoken truth of the housing debate: it’s not about the transaction, it is about the homes and the responsibility of a decent society to ensure that everyone has one.

• Peter Lewis is the executive director of Essential and a Guardian Australia columnist