Shocking Number of Vacant Melbourne Homes Exacerbates Housing Crisis
Melbourne: The Surprising Fact About Aussie Housing That'll Make You Go, "Wait, What?"
So, apparently, there's a bit of a whopper of a problem with housing in Australia, especially in Melbourne. It turns out that this massive city could have a whopping 100,000 homes just sitting there doing nothing, while folks are desperately trying to find a decent place to live with prices shooting up like rockets. Crazy, right?
Some folks from a group called Prosper Australia looked into it and found out that in 2023, a cool 5.2% of the homes in Melbourne were just chilling empty. And get this, 27,000 of those homes were like ghost towns for the whole year. That's a pretty sad sight when you think about how many people are out there trying to find a roof to put over their heads.
Prosper's big brain, Dr. Tim Helm, said, "We figured out that over 27,000 homes, which is like 1.5% of all the homes in the city, were totally empty in 2023." But it doesn't stop there. When they included homes that weren't used much, like those using less than a quarter of the water a single person would in a year, the number jumped to almost 100,000. That's enough to build homes for everyone on the Victorian public housing waitlist not once, but twice!
This is kind of a big deal because while these houses are collecting dust, people are dealing with a real tough time trying to rent. The whole country's rental vacancy rate is at 1.42%, and in Melbourne, it's a bit higher at 1.5%. It's like, come on, guys, we can totally do better than this.
Dr. Helm called it a "shocking waste" and said it's a pretty clear sign of some serious inequality going on when you've got so many empty homes and so many people in need. It's like having a fridge full of food while your neighbor's is empty, you know? It just feels wrong. And these numbers? They keep climbing, which is definitely not the direction we want to go in.