 
A Melbourne singer-songwriter's bitter-sweet pop song about Australia's real estate bubble has hit home for many young, disheartened house hunters.
Few people have the skill of expressing it so well, but Courtney Barnett's new song Depreston (a play on the northern Melbourne suburb Preston) encapsulates the frustrations of a generation who just want somewhere comfortable to live without taking on a million-dollar loan in a fragile economy.
Depreston is about accepting that you can't afford to buy within 10, 15 or even 20 kilometres of where you work, and that you can probably only afford a house needing urgent and expensive renovations.
Barnett - who grew up in Sydney and Hobart before settling in Melbourne - wrote the song while helping a friend look for a house.
"You say we should look out further, I guess it wouldn't hurt us. We don't have to be around all these coffee shops," she sings.
It may well become the anthem of those born after 1975 who didn't start working full time until the the late 1990s, about the same time housing affordability in capital cities starting slipping.
"I would never be in a position where I could buy a house, I don't think. I have never been in that sort of position financially at all," Barnett told Fairfax Media on Wednesday.
While songwriters for previous generations sang about reconciliation, war and freedom, Barnett says a song about the financial impossibility of buying a house was not so different.
"Feeling safe in the world relies on having somewhere to live," she explains.
The lyrics have resonated with audiences all over the world, she adds, particularly in London, which also has a suburb called Preston.
Australian home buyers are now forced to go further and further out, past the end of the train and tram lines and away from friends, family and services. This affordability ring-fencing means a quarter of Australians spend more time commuting to work than playing with their kids, according to a book released by the Grattan Institute this week.
 
In 1994 Australian households were spending 24 per cent of their income on home loan repayments, even when banks were charging 9 per cent interest, according to founder of Residex, John Edwards.
They are now spending 44 per cent of their income servicing home loans, with interest rates at record lows. With a family on a median income now able to afford a $350,000 home at best, Mr Edwards suggested Barnett look more than 25 kilometres out of town for that dream home.
"Craigieburn represents the distance you would have to go out of Melbourne to find a property which had the same affordability today as existed [in Preston] 20 years ago," Mr Edwards said.
But Barnett's song, which appears on a new album coming out in late March, is not just about the dollar cost of buying a house. Many houses up for sale are now at the end of their structural life and in terrible condition.
Depreston ends with a phrase that Barnett says gets thrown around by real estate agents who don't care about destroying a house full of sentimentality and memories: "If you've got a spare half a million you could knock it down and start rebuilding."
