Read Opinion Piece by Dr Kate Shaw ‘There is a way to make homes cheaper. Building endless towers is not”, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 July 2026 HERE

Read FOKE’s summary of Dr Kate Shaw’s article below:

Dr Kate Shaw, University of Melbourne urban geographer recently wrote an article following her four week study tour in Turkey attending the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA).


The INURA invite local researchers and activists to see the ‘underbelly’ of a city – this time seeing the dark side of Turkey’s urban high-rise currently on “steroids”.

40 storey high rise apartment towers can now be seen across the landscape with the consequential loss of arable land and where basic infrastructure is now pushed to the limits. Discrete towns have merged into one massive high-rise city.

Despite the enormous increase in supply – prices and rents have not come down. Why?

Dr Kate Shaw argues ” . . . it is due partly to the new builds being firmly up-market, partly to collusion, and partly to many being financed by elites from war-torn countries who have no interest yet in releasing their parked holdings”.

Many governments around the world find it difficult to tax empty dwellings. Nor do they collect data about the number of vacant dwelligs.

Turkey is now being seen as an example of extreme hyper high rise development bringing massive economic and social problems. However, this is happening in most cities across the world. High rise apartments are being built for the high-end property market at higher prices that cement housing scarcity.

Incredulously in recent years an oversupply of apartment towers has been demolished in China due to poor and illegal construction. The apartments were too expensive for the local residents, or they were built in areas with low demand. Dr Kate Shaw says “the underlying motive for these enormously costly explosions is to keep residential prices high”.

China has addressed their housing surplus problem with demolition. Other cities around the world face similar challenges.

Over the past 20 years, Vancouver and Toronto’s ‘condo boom’ have increased the number of apartments. Despite the increase in supply they remain unaffordable.

“It was only when dramatic cuts were made to immigration two years ago, along with interest rate hikes and tighter mortgage tests in an effort to cool the market by reducing demand, that prices began to stabilise” says Dr Kate Shaw.

In June 2026 the Canadian government announced a program to deal with the problem of apartment oversupply. They bought unsold condos to provide “affordable” housing. This saved developers from having to lower their sale prices.

Property investors and developers have no interest in bringing housing prices down. Nor are governments interested in bringing housing prices down as they depend on housing construction and cranes to signal of economic growth.

Dr Kate Shaw says, “In Australia, real estate and infrastructure development and the financialisation of housing are among the best our state and federal governments have to offer our cities. To reconcile this with consequently glaring social injustices, they cling to the delusion that the market will build into surplus until prices come down, redressing housing precarity and homelessness, and leading us out of our affordable housing crisis, hallelujah”.

However, construction costs are now making the building of housing less profitable. Developers know that a government’s plans to fast-track new high-rise towers is not viable without a substantial increase in the prices of apartments.

Developers and investors in the Australian housing market, when faced with price downturns, tend to leave buildings empty and just stop building. They don’t yet follow the Chinese model of blowing them up or begging for government bailouts – yet.

The housing nightmare is about addiction to the free-market ideology. Government have abandoned their role in building public housing.

The global evidence is in. Private markets resist bringing prices down. Developers will never build affordable housing. They will build high-end product that brings them the highest profit.


Governments could solve the housing affordable crisis. They are in a unique position to having the resources and the capacity to build when and what the market cannot or will not. It costs a lot but Australia is a rich country and should be able to spare $368 billion to address the problem.

Cities around the world are facing densification and unaffordable housing as never before. Yet governments and commentators keep sprouting the propaganda that the solution is “supply, supply, supply”. It’s a dangerous time for cities and the people living in them.

For the full article by Dr Kate Shaw, University of Melbourne, read it HERE

July 2026