Sydney is no longer affordable for most, as new data reveals the number of people who own the home they live in is the lowest it has been in decades.<\/p>\n
But what if the real rate of home ownership was much lower? What if it was actually around 52 per cent?<\/p>\n
According to economist Karl Fitzgerald, from Grounded Community Land Trust Advocacy<\/a>, a not-for-profit organisation, there’s a major problem with the way we think about the home ownership rate.<\/p>\n He says if more voters knew that only half of Australia’s adults actually owned a home, rather than two-thirds as we’re led to believe, it would change the politics of housing.<\/p>\n And he says the confusion comes down to a single question in the national census.<\/p>\n A lower home ownership rate in reality<\/p>\n In the graphic below, this is what Mr Fitzgerald says Australia’s real home ownership rate looks like (copper-coloured line), compared to the usual rate (black line):<\/p>\n What explains the difference?<\/p>\n The traditional “home ownership rate,” which is the one we always talk about, is derived from a question in the census.\u00a0<\/p>\n Every five years, every household in Australia has to fill out the census, and each household is asked this question: Is the dwelling you’re living in owned or rented?<\/p>\n In last night’s census, this is what the question looked like:<\/p>\n This was the question about dwelling tenure in the 2026 national census. (Source: 2026 national census)<\/p>\n How did you answer that question last night?<\/p>\n If you own the home you’re living (and you’re paying off the mortgage) you would have ticked the circle “owned with a mortgage.”<\/p>\n But what if you’re a young adult and you’re living at home with your parents and your parents own their home with a mortgage? How did you answer the question?\u00a0<\/p>\n Think about it carefully.\u00a0<\/p>\n Waiting for Goldilocks? ‘Affordable’ homes sit vacant<\/a><\/p>\n A Four Corners investigation has found many “affordable” rental homes were unaffordable for those who needed them most, particularly single-income households.<\/p>\n The question was asking you if the dwelling you’re living in is owned outright, owned with a mortgage, rented etc. It wasn’t asking you if you own the home. It was asking you if the dwelling you’re living in is an owner-occupied home or not.<\/p>\n So, if your parents own the home with a mortgage, you should have ticked the circle “owned with a mortgage”.<\/p>\n But you’re not a home owner, right? You may be 10-15 years away from buying your first property.\u00a0<\/p>\n So why were all of the adults living in your house counted as owners? Isn’t that going to artificially inflate Australia’s home ownership rate?<\/p>\n Karl Fitzgerald said every generation has been told a better story about its level of home ownership than the numbers support. (ABC News: Gemma\u00a0Hall )<\/p>\n The politics of housing<\/p>\n Mr Fitzgerald says that’s precisely what’s going on.<\/p>\n “Half a million young Australians are living in their parents’ spare room, and not one of them appears in their own generation’s ownership figure. They are not counted as missing out. They are not counted at all,” he argued recently<\/a>.<\/p>\n He says the statistical quirk explains why Australia’s “home ownership rate” has barely moved in 60 years.<\/p>\n Australians have become housing hostages<\/a><\/p>\n While the government has framed its tax changes as modest tweaks, make no mistake that these are significant for the property market.<\/p>\n “It has sat around two thirds for a generation while the number of adults who actually own their home slid underneath it,” he says.<\/p>\n “The people locked out of ownership are propping up the very number that says the market is fine.\u00a0<\/p>\n “That is a large part of why change has been so hard to win. You cannot build political urgency on a statistic that hides the problem,” he says.<\/p>\n He says the same issue is obscuring what’s happening in different age cohorts too.<\/p>\n “Every generation has been told a better story about itself than the numbers support,” he argues.<\/p>\n In the graphic below, the traditional home ownership rates for different age groups (grey columns) are very different to the more realistic figures (copper columns).<\/p>\n Fitzgerald says the politics of housing would look very different if people were aware of those proper numbers.<\/p>\n \u201cWould voters expect more, and would politicians be more willing to demand answers, on why we are going backwards?\u201d he wonders.<\/p>\n “This makes ownership a razor sharp contest between those who have and those who do not.”<\/p>\n Similar findings in the United States<\/p>\n Fitzgerald says a recent paper<\/a> by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found a similar result in the United States.<\/p>\n “The home ownership rate in the United States is reported to be 65 per cent,” that report said.<\/p>\n Australia dealing with damage from ideas about housing<\/a><\/p>\n Do home owners ever complain when house prices rise? A former prime minister said they didn’t, but we’re now dealing with the fallout.<\/p>\n “But this commonly cited data point on home ownership is actually the owner-occupancy rate, which tells us how many housing units are occupied by an owner. While owner occupancy is an interesting measure, it doesn’t tell us how many people own their home.\u00a0<\/p>\n “As an alternative to better reflect the share of adults who are home owners, we offer the homeowners-to-population ratio, or HPOP, a measure that lends a more nuanced view for important policy considerations and context.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Using this new measure, the US home ownership rate is 53 per cent,” it found.<\/p>\n The paper included this pictograph<\/a> to show what’s going on conceptually, with the two different measures:<\/p>\n (Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, ‘New homeownership measure puts people first,’ July 2026.)<\/p>\n It shows five housing units with different family configurations.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the first property, elderly parents live with their daughter and her partner who own the home. In the second property, an adult child is living at home. In the third property, a friend is living with a mate who owns the property. In the fourth property, two young children live with their parents. And in the fifth property, three roommates live in a rented home which none of them own.<\/p>\n Then, using the “traditional” measurement, the green rows show that since 4 out of those 5 housing units are occupied by someone who owns the property, it leads to an 80 per cent home ownership rate.<\/p>\n But using the “homeowners-to-population ratio”, the blue rows show that only 7 out of 14 adults in those same five housing units are actually home owners, so it produces a 50 per cent home ownership rate.<\/p>\n What’s the difference between the two measures?<\/p>\n Fitzgerald says the figure conventionally reported as Australia’s “home ownership rate” is the traditional “owner-occupancy rate.”<\/p>\n![\"Home](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/d29f4e92173b7a9316fa8fe9bf137fff.png\")
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