To be clear, I don’t think the housing crisis has been caused by one generation screwing over another. The problem is structural, political and cultural
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Read more from The Age of Inheritance series here
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.