Melbourne Assembly live: Ex-New York mayor, PM share visions to improve liveability

Melbourne has one of the lowest shares of public housing of any Australian city, at less than three per cent.

Professor Dan Hill, director at the University of Melbourne’s School of Design, says the city needs to “ease off the accelerator, if not slam the brake on private housing”.

“Cooperative housing in somewhere like Zurich [has] actually made a referendum, and they want to increase it to 30 per cent of the housing stock to be cooperative as an anti-financialisation measure. And Zurich is not exactly a bunch of hippies,” Hill said.

“We’ve oversupplied unsustainable, unaffordable housing. It’s off the charts. So we have produced something like a 39 per cent increase in dwellings in the last 20 years.

“The problem is we’ve seen a 500 per cent roughly increase in house prices, at least more in other areas, and only about 15 per cent increase in real wage growth.”