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Comment by ProjectArcturis | Hacker News Reader

The problem in Australia in particular is that you're running out of land. The four major cities are surrounded by water and nature preserves. As population increases, demand runs up against a very inelastic supply. The only policy solution would be to strongly emphasize dense high-rise development.

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Australia is definitely not running out of land. Sydney continues to grow further and further west, and there are now multiple Sydney cities including CBD, North Sydney, Chatswood, Paramatta is undergoing huge development, and Penrith is next on the cards. I fully expect to see Woolongong and further south continue to boom as well as central coast and Newcastle over the next 20 years.

My understanding is Melbourne is seeing a similar result with people and companies continuing to move out toward Geelong, but I'm not there, so don't know.

I was in Brisbane last week, and that is an amazing city, and it also seems to have lots of room to grow.

Perth is quite a small city, and I believe could easily grow.

I'm not sure Australia has a land problem in general, population density is quite low (I understand that a lot of the land doesn't support high density living). They have an issue in that their major cities have some constraints on perpetual outwards growth. Maybe this will help encourage remote work and relocation of offices to places that aren't the core downtown area of Melbourne and Sydney?

There is very limited land in places where you want to be. There is endless land in the middle of nowhere but that isn’t very useful for most people.

This comes up often in these discussions but, barring any indigenous lands, there's nothing especially inhospitable about central aus. Las Vegas is in the middle of a damn desert, and Arizona/New Mexico are both extreme climates compared to much of the US but they are still livable and many people actually prefer it. I can't see why this would be any different in Australia...

It’s not about how possible it is to live, it’s about places people actually want to live. There is virtually unlimited land with good climate. But people don’t want to live there because it’s far from everything. Most people have picked paying more to live closer to events, jobs, stores and friends.

Australia doesn’t have the population to start a new major city in the center. There are still multiple cities like Adelaide which could grow instead.

> The only policy solution would be to strongly emphasize dense high-rise development.

We don't need more high rises, we need more medium density 3-6 story buildings, that gets you more density far cheaper than high rises. Melbourne in particular has a lot of areas that are still single family houses with good public transport walking distance from the CBD, unfortunatley NIMBY's across the full political spectrum don't want this increased density.

At the federal level they want high immigration, but at the local level they don't want immigrants to have anywhere to live in their suburb. Until local and federal policies align one way or the other housing prices will continue to increase.

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