A perfectly reasonable response to someone praising a government housing reform.

The Heritage Council is intending to extend the provisional registration of the Early Kingston Shops before making a final decision, due to public consultation ~complications~.

Hoping this means they're considering our points about the serious negative impacts this listing will have on Kingston!

Cover inner canberra suburbs with these.

Build this on every inner city street.

I'm working on this for the upcoming ACT Legislative Assembly inquiry into their 2024 election with @francismarkham.work

Since self-government, Canberra has had an MLA for every 10,500 voters

By 2031, there'll only be one for every 15,000

To get back to the average, ACT will need to have 35 MLAs

My letter in yesterday’s Canberra Times.

For the entirety of my almost 15 years living in Canberra, light rail has been a dominant issue in ACT politics, being central in every election from 2012 to 2024. But the debate has been going on for much longer than that.

No setbacks, no yards, close to 100% lot coverage. And a street full of trees.

There’s a deep tension between the value Australians place on freedom and the desire of some policymakers to restrict urban growth. Governments can control housing, but they can’t control people. The only way we can stop people moving to cities is to make them unaffordable.

Not great for Australia

Some commentators seem to think that because ‘build more homes’ has become a rallying cry for a subset of policymakers, this is now the consensus on housing in Australia. Anyone engaged with local governance for more than 2s knows this is farcical. A brief example from the ACT…

Over the past year, the ACT has built more homes per person than any state bar Victoria. The result? Rental affordability has *improved*. There’s a long way to go, but it’s clear that building more homes is the key to making Canberra more affordable for all.

In this working paper that was published today, Matthew Maltman and I review some of the economic evidence on the effects of ✨upzoning✨in Auckland in 2016.

tldr: We find remarkably robust evidence that upzoning led to more housing and lower rents in Auckland. Wow!
www.motu.nz/our-research...