Dwelling on it Housing crises in the English- speaking world

This first report looks at the nature of the ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and its similarities to what is happening in the rest of the English speaking world. [...] In the UK, the average first-time buyer is now 34, up from 31 in 2002 and 29 in the 1990s.23 It is a similar story in Canada, where it has gone from 29 being the typical age of someone making their first steps on the housing ladder in the 1980s, to 33 years old now.24 Elsewhere the change is far more drastic. [...] She acknowledges that more work is needed to explore the extent to which the “rise in sharing…is an active choice” but the conclusion that the family metric is more useful than the household metric in the supply and demand debate is compelling.41 27 SOCIAL MARKET FOUNDATION If there is a supply shortage, it is not the only driver of changes in house prices – levels of interest rates are also criti. [...] In Australia, they fell from over 15% at the start of the 1990s to around 7% in 2004 and towards 4% by the dawn of the pandemic.42 Canadian mortgage rates declined from an average of 13.6% in the 1980s to 9.1% in the 1990s and 5.1% by the 2010s.43 The story is the same in New Zealand and Ireland. [...] The bursting of the property bubble in the financial crisis was followed by the tightening of lending conditions on the demand side and a stark reduction in building.