When we started looking to buy our first home, my partner and I knew it would not be a roomy, four-bedder with two living rooms, an entertainment area and a backyard.

If the prospect of cleaning it wasn’t deterrent enough, (neither of us is partial to domestic labour) we also knew we couldn’t comfortably afford it. After pooling our savings and borrowing some money from my parents – conditional upon repayment – we scraped together 17 per cent for a two-bedroom apartment in St Kilda.

Australia has a long-running ideology about housing.Credit: Rhett Wyman

To the confusion of many of our friends, six years later we’re still happily living there along with our daughter and cat.

“It’s a beautiful place, but don’t you need more room?” a friend invariably comments. “How can you raise a family in an apartment? You know apartments don’t appreciate in value like houses, right?”

It is these statements that perhaps give most insight into the Australian psyche around housing. Houses are no longer homes to live in; they are real estate, an asset class that, for many Australians, is the best and most secure way of growing wealth.

“For the past 40 years, the home has become a mechanism for wealth creation,” says Professor Philip Oldfield, the head of UNSW Build Environment School. “The........

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