Thinking big helped Australia solve a housing crisis in the 1940s. We can do it again

‘There are two housing crises. One is a shameful decline in the availability and quality of public housing. The other is housing affordability.’ Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

On 14 March 1977, a Rolls-Royce carrying the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh swept through the working-class Sydney suburb of Waterloo to visit a new inner-city high-rise housing commission development.

Reports from the day note the royal couple were “quickly whisked up to the 29th floor to the one-bedroom home of 83-year-old Mr Vyvyan Smith, [where] the Duke gazed out over Botany Bay and the west to the Blue Mountains. ‘Absolutely splendid,’ he said.”