Premier Ben Carroll’s announcement to build more than 25,000 homes for first-home buyers is a welcome step towards tackling Victoria’s housing crisis. However, Prosper Australia has expressed major disappointment that homes built on public land, with public money, could be sold straight back into the private property market.
Prosper Australia Executive Director Rayna Fahey said the announcement was an excellent opportunity to fundamentally change how Victoria delivers affordable housing, but the proposed model risks squandering that opportunity.
“The Victorian Government has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a permanent stock of affordable homes. But why go to all this effort, only to sell them straight back into the private market?
“Don’t just build affordable homes. Keep them affordable with a model like community land trusts.”
“Restricting the first sale to first-home buyers is a good start, but when those buyers sell, the homes go back onto the open market, and the next generation is left facing the same affordability crisis.”
Prosper Australia said Victoria should adapt this approach, establishing a publicly owned housing portfolio designed to prevent publicly created value from being lost to private windfalls.
“We keep treating housing affordability as a problem that can be solved one buyer at a time. But every generation of first-home buyers is competing for access to land whose value has been driven up by public investment and community growth.
“The government already owns the land. It is already funding the development. Why not go one step further and make affordability permanent?
Prosper Australia has long advocated for governments to retain a greater share of the land value created by public investment, infrastructure, and planning decisions.
The organisation said the proposed development program was a welcome departure from demand-side subsidies that can inflate house prices, but urged the government to be more ambitious about the long-term public return.
“Premier Carroll deserves credit for recognising that we need to build more homes, not simply hand buyers more money to compete for existing ones.
“But public land is a precious, finite resource. Once it’s sold, getting it back is extraordinarily expensive.
“Twenty-five thousand new homes would be a tremendous achievement. Ensuring those homes remain affordable for generations would be a genuine transformation of Victoria’s housing system.”
