My parents bought their three-bedroom house in 1995 for $125,000. That was five times my dad's annual teaching salary.

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I'm already three years older than the age Mum was when they bought that place, in which I grew up.

In fairness, it has been extended twice since then, but even if I spent the weekends learning to lay tiles like my parents did, there's no way I would find a house like that one for five times more than I am paid now.

The median house price in Mum and Dad's suburb, at the foot of the Blue Mountains, is now $1.2 million, Cotality (previously CoreLogic) data shows.

A lot has happened in the past 30 years: less housing supply, growing construction costs, swings in interest rates, John Howard's change to capital gains taxes in 1999, and negative gearing revisions. Those last two helped plenty of home owners, but kind of screwed my generation over.

I digress. This is an article about solutions, so I'll focus on what I think is the easiest of the above to solve. Supply.

Labor and the Coalition have both made a lot of promises about housing during this campaign as cost-of-living concerns reach a red-rolling boil.

Only three promises from the former and two from the latter, in my view, have even begun to address the supply issues of Australia's housing market.

The other policies - from allowing first home buyers to access their superannuation to having the government help with loans - are highly likely to stoke demand and push up prices. That's not a new argument. Independent economist Saul Eslake has been making it for more than a decade. This election cycle, plenty of other economists have joined him.

Let me explain why that matters to me, an aspiring home owner. I'll stick with my parents' suburb as an example for the sake of clarity before I move to talk about Canberra.

When Mum and Dad bought, the suburb was relatively new. It had only been named 18 years prior and dozens of vacant lots were dotted around its centre.

Now there's very limited land available in the suburb. In official records, I couldn't find any residential land sales since 2013. It's also a tightly held market, where owners tend to remain well after all children have left, so family houses don't often become available.

My parents live near decent public........

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