For years, whenever my friends and I have despaired of the housing market and our precarious place within it, we have eventually landed on the same dark joke: there’s nothing any of us can do until our parents drop off the perch.
The median rent in Sydney – the city where I live, largely by dint of being born here – has just hit $800 a week, a sum that represents more than half of a median income, and well beyond what is defined as affordable. This is the system that we are living with, one in which housing is a commodity, an investment, a means to accrue and hold wealth, rather than a basic need and human right.
