Max Neutze’s research while affiliated with La Trobe University and other places

Entry costs to home ownership have been rising in Australia since the mid‐1950s but home ownership rates had not fallen by the mid‐1980s. Drawing from a national life history survey carried out in 1986–87, this paper shows that median ages for first time home buying have been declining among successive cohorts over the post‐war era. The paradox of rising entry costs and earlier home buying may be explained by rising labour force participation among women immediately after marriage and awareness of the increasing financial returns from long‐term home ownership. Among the later cohorts, early entry to home ownership appears to have been associated particularly strongly with wives' employment after marriage and husbands' incomes. The findings suggest that access to home ownership in the future may be increasingly limited to young adults having high household incomes.

Public ownership and development of land is a powerful means of controlling the development of an urban area, avoiding high speculative costs of land for housing and public purposes, and siphoning increases in land values that accompany urban growth into the public purse. In Stockholm and Canberra, the balance between these three objectives in the use of public land has differed over time. Control of development has become dominant in Canberra while financial objectives have continued to be important in Stockholm. Whereas public ownership and leasehold tenure of developed land have been used by Stockholm city council as a means of maintaining a public role in the land market following urban development, the Federal Government in Canberra have done this to a much smaller extent. The city of Stockholm has been an active ground landlord; the government in Canberra has been almost completely passive, using lease conditions solely as a means of controlling land use. The paper explores historical reasons for the difference between the two cities. Importantly, both the initiative and financial responsibility were taken locally in Stockholm but by the national government in relation to its national capital, Canberra.

The conventional wisdom holds that the tax system reduces the costs of owner‐occupied relative to rental housing. While correct when there is no inflation the paper shows that the reverse can be the case in periods of inflation, especially in Australia where mortgage payments by owner‐occupants are not tax deductible and, until recently, capital gains were not taxable. Rents, however, have not fallen as much relative to prices as the model used would predict.