A social housing fund is bad policy

A social housing fund is a policy idea gaining traction. The ALP has proposed a $10 billion one in their election platform. The Grattan Institute has proposed a $20 billion one.

The basic idea is to sell bonds to the market and use the cash from that sale to buy a range of higher-yielding assets. Because there will be a differential return between the low cost of borrowing and the higher return on assets, this creates a net return from the fund to pay for building new public housing.

It sounds so bland and innocuous that it is easy to miss how economically backwards the policy really is.

...

Read the rest of this post at my new substack page and please subscribe there to get new posts to your email.

Housing stock per capita mostly measures demographics

I don’t like this chart. 

Not only is there an unjustified implication of direct causality (X causes Y, and planning regulations cause X), the pattern in the chart rests on choices about

1. countries,
2. time periods,
3. measures of the housing stock, and 
4. measures of the price of housing.

I want to focus here on how comparing countries with different demographic trends, particularly ageing, has implications for interpreting housing stock per person measures.

...

Read the rest of this post at my new substack page and please subscribe there to get new posts to your email.