The Boomers Who Want the Housing Market to Crash (and Mean It)

There’s a piece doing the rounds about older Australians who say they’d be happy to see house prices fall, for their kids’ sake. Not the usual “back in my day a Chiko Roll cost ten cents” grumbling. Actual homeowners, sitting on actual equity, saying they’d take the hit. I read it twice because it felt like spotting a parking spot right out the front of the shops: nice, but suspicious.

The comments underneath were the interesting part, more than the article itself. One bloke in his sixties said he’d just bought his first home and would be happy to watch its value halve, because he bought it for shelter, not for wealth. A woman said something similar: paid off her mortgage using her super, wants her kids to have it easier than she did. And then, right alongside that, the standard pile-on about millennials buying units instead of houses and getting told they’ve done something wrong by not wanting a Hills Hoist and a quarter acre in a suburb forty minutes from anything.

Both things are true at once, and that’s the bit worth sitting with. There are plenty of older Australians who get it, who watch their kids and their kids’ friends grind through share houses into their thirties and feel something between guilt and grief about it. And there are plenty who still think the problem is that young people want smashed avo and inner-city cafes instead of a fibro place in Frankston. Both groups exist. Both showed up in that comment thread within about four replies of each other.

I’m 51, own a house in the outer southeast, and I bought at a point in the market that now looks almost quaint. I didn’t do anything clever. I turned up at the right decade. That’s it. There’s no lesson in my story, no bootstraps, just timing. Every time I hear someone my age explain how they “sacrificed” to buy their first place, back when the median Melbourne house price was something you could save a deposit for on an average wage in a few years, I want to gently remind them that sacrifice and luck aren’t the same thing, even if they feel the same from the inside.

My daughter’s not old enough to be thinking about any of this yet, but I already know the conversation is coming, and I already know I won’t have a good answer. Do I tell her to buy a unit and cop the “why didn’t you get a house” comments from people who bought theirs for four times her future salary? Do I tell her the market will crash eventually, knowing full well that if it does, it’ll take my own equity down with it, and possibly my retirement plans along with it? That’s the actual tension, not an abstract one. Wanting prices to fall for the next generation and needing them to hold for your own super balance are not compatible desires, and pretending otherwise is where a lot of these conversations go wrong. Nobody’s untangled that one, including me.

What I don’t buy is the framing that this is a clean generational war, boomers versus everyone else. It’s more like a fault line that runs through every generation, between people who see housing as shelter and people who see it as the retirement plan they were told to build because successive governments made bugger-all effort to fund retirement any other way. Negative gearing, capital gains discounts, the whole scaffold, that’s not something one generation invented out of spite. It’s policy that’s been convenient for whoever’s currently on the ladder, for about thirty years running, under governments of both stripes.

I don’t have a tidy fix. Nobody commenting on that thread did either, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you they do. What I did notice, though, is that the people in that comment section who’d actually let go of the idea that their house was a lottery ticket seemed happier about it. Lighter, somehow. Owning a home because you live in it, not because it’s your super fund with a roof, sounds like a genuinely nicer way to exist. Whether we ever build a system that lets more people feel that way is a different question, and one I don’t know the answer to. But it’s worth wanting.