Sydney’s housing crisis has a new number: 86 years. That’s how long it would take for the median home in Australia’s largest city to become affordable—even with optimistic projections—according to financial analyst Tarric Brooker.
Brooker, writing on Burnout Economics, models a best-case scenario: house prices rising at just 2% annually, income growth at 3%, and mortgage rates falling by another 1.35%. Under those conditions, it would still take until 2111—nearly nine decades—for a typical Sydney household to afford a median-priced home based on a 35% gross income repayment threshold.
If that number feels impossible, Brooker has another scenario. Say prices didn’t rise at all—zero growth, permanently. Affordability would still not arrive until 2054, 29 years from now.
“It’s not a typo,” Brooker writes. “Even with the deck stacked in favour of a positive outcome, housing would only be affordable in 2111. And that’s still less affordable than 1999 at a national level.”
The year 1999 holds weight in this story. That was when tax policy changes—particularly around capital gains—shifted the structure of Australia’s property market. Investor demand took off, fuelling the boom that hasn’t meaningfully slowed since. Today, annual price growth in Sydney sits around 9.6%. Wages are not even close to keeping up.
Brooker’s analysis puts into sharp focus what many working families already know: the housing market is structurally tilted away from them. Even when applying the most hopeful of economic scenarios, the gap between incomes and house prices remains stubbornly wide.
Affordability, as defined by repayments at or below 35% of gross household income, was once a reasonable benchmark. But in Sydney, that line has been out of reach for years, and now, even fantasy economics don’t get us back to it any time soon.
While politicians talk supply, migration caps, and planning reform, Brooker’s data highlights how deep the problem runs—and how slowly it would unwind, even with favourable winds. His work adds to a growing chorus suggesting that without addressing investor incentives, tax policy, and the imbalance between wages and asset growth, the housing crisis will remain a multi-generational challenge.
The full report is expected to be published shortly on Burnout Economics, with some analysis made available to all subscribers. For now, one thing is clear: waiting for Sydney to become affordable may take longer than anyone’s lifetime.
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