Housing First: Evidence, Economics, and the Case Against Housing as Commodity

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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A Unified Thesis on Prevention-Based Homelessness Policy, Foreign Investment in Residential Property, and the Structural Production of Housing Insecurity

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

OMXUS Research Series — Paper No. 6

March 2026

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Author's Note

This paper exists because of Goal 9 (housing for living) (housing for living): No foreign investment in housing. Houses are for living in. Not speculating on. Simple rule, massive impact.

That sentence is nine words long. It should not require a paper. But here we are.

We live in a system where a person born in Sydney in 1998 has a lower probability of owning a home than a person born in Sydney in 1958 — not because there are fewer homes, but because homes became financial instruments. The median house price in Sydney was 4.1 times the median household income in 1980. By 2024, it was 13.3 times. The houses did not get 3.2 times better. The incomes did not get 3.2 times worse. What changed is who was allowed to buy them, and why.

Foreign investment in residential property does not build houses. It reprices them. When a house is purchased as an investment vehicle by someone who will never live in it, it is removed from the supply of housing and added to the supply of financial assets. The person who would have lived in it is now competing for a smaller pool at a higher price. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of transactions and you have the Australian housing market: a country with 1.04 million vacant dwellings and 122,000 homeless people on any given night.

That is not a housing shortage. That is a distribution system designed to produce exactly the outcome it produces.

This paper makes two arguments that are really one argument:

First, that