A-Infos (en) Australia, Ancomfed: Picket Line - Housing crisis or crisis of capital? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The idea that Australia's housing system is broken seems obvious. 
Politicians from both major parties have spent years promising fixes, 
but the situation only seems to get worse. ---- Maybe it's time to stop 
thinking about housing as something that's broken for all of us and 
start thinking about who it is working for. ---- What if the housing 
crisis isn't a crisis? ---- Language shapes understanding. Calling this 
a "housing crisis" implies a temporary disruption, as if the normal 
functioning of capitalism would provide enough homes if only a few 
things were adjusted. Maybe someone just forgot to build enough houses? 
We've been hearing excuses for decades.

Australia is especially aggressive in turning housing into a wealth 
accumulation machine. Shelter is treated not as a basic need, but as a 
commodity, homes as investment vehicles, rents as guaranteed income streams.

Public housing is fucked. Every part of the system is built to protect 
and expand the wealth of those who already own property. They tell us 
rising house prices are a win for everyone. Property speculation is a 
retirement plan.

The housing crisis isn't an accident. This is a system that functions to 
enrich one class at the expense of another. Exploitation through rents, 
mortgages, and speculative capital do exactly that.

If we shift the language from a housing crisis to a tenant's crisis, a 
different picture comes into view. It becomes clear that the people who 
are worst affected are not experiencing an unfortunate side effect of 
bad economic policy, but a direct and predictable outcome of a system 
that treats shelter as a commodity rather than a need.

It also helps explain why so many proposed "solutions" fall short. 
Public subsidies flow straight to landlords and developers. 
"Build-to-rent" just scales up landlordism with corporate branding. 
"Affordable housing" is a scam.

Meanwhile we are told to wait patiently, or compete harder, or give up 
coffee, or just stop being precious. Or, failing all that, to inherit a 
house.

Class conflict
Landlords want rent. Tenants want homes. These are not reconcilable 
interests.

When the average investor owns multiple properties and the average 
renter struggles to secure one, we're looking at class struggle. It only 
feels like a crisis if you're on the losing end.

Class struggle is about reshaping the terrain of society. This terrain 
usually isn't clear cut, its full of contradictions that shape how 
people act and how they see each other. Some workers own investment 
properties. Others rely on rising house prices for retirement. Union 
super funds pour investment money into the same property markets pricing 
out their members.

This means some workers extract rent; others are crushed by it. Ignoring 
this doesn't make it disappear, it just makes us unprepared.

Confronting it means being clear-eyed about how housing functions under 
capitalism, and organising accordingly. Because ultimately housing is a 
struggle, and in every struggle there are sides. We have to pick: do we 
see each other as sources of rent, or as fellow workers with shared 
struggles?

Precarity is the point
Homes are where the working class is disciplined, and reproduced. It's 
where we rest after work, raise children, recover from illness, care for 
others. Capitalism doesn't just depend on your labour. It depends on 
your continued ability to show up and do it. That means the home is a 
political site. Where we live isn't separate from "the economy".

The threat of eviction, the weight of debt, the instability of visa 
conditions, the anxiety of insecure housing shape what people are 
willing to risk. They limit the ability to speak out or to leave a bad 
job or relationship. Housing is part of how capitalism maintains order.

Fight, don't fix
If you've ever blamed yourself for struggling to find a home- you're not 
the problem. If it feels like everything is out of your hands, that's 
because the system is designed to make you feel that way. Bureaucrats 
wrap housing policy in technical, polite language. That politeness 
conceals who wins and who loses. They rely on us treating housing as a 
market to be regulated rather than a political battleground.

Rent increases aren't polite. Evictions aren't polite. So why are 
tenants expected to be?

Don't ask, "How do we fix the housing market?"

Ask, "Why should anyone have the right to profit from another person's 
need for shelter?"

Then ask, "How do we build the power to take that right away?"

The market can't answer that. We won't fix it by voting harder or 
publishing better reports. Good intentions don't redistribute power, 
power does. At the moment landlords have more of it than we do.

We're already in conflict with capital. Every rent payment, every 
eviction notice, every panic attack about where you'll be living next 
month is part of that conflict. If we want to change this, we'll have to 
fight back.

https://ancomfed.org/2025/09/housing-crisis-or-crisis-of-capital/
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