It is certainly a lot harder for a young person to buy a house today than it used to be and fundamentally that comes down to house prices being higher, relative to wages, than used to be the case.
In the past it was fairly straightforward. Get a job, save a deposit, buy a house and start paying the mortgages. With relatively high inflation your income would increase within a few years to the point where the mortgage becomes a relatively minor expense. It's all fairly easy when inflation erodes the real value of the debt.
Today, house prices are roughly double what they used to be relative to wages and that's a massive problem. There is also much lower inflation, meaning that you actually have to repay the debt rather than seeing your income rise rapidly thus eroding its' real value. And of course it is much harder these days to get ongoing, secure employment too.
I own my house outright but I don't doubt for a minute that it is very much harder now for someone in their mid-20's trying to buy their first home. Gone are the days when simply paying 3 times their annual wage / salary bought a modest house and when strong wages growth soon enabled moving to a better house. It's much, much harder now.
Also, there is limited option these days to earn higher income through harder work. The decline of manufacturing means that for most tradies and manual workers it is no longer a matter of simply choosing to do shift work + overtime for a few years and pay off the mortgage. You can't just turn up at the office of a large factory these days and expect to be given a job on good wages. And if you go down the uni route well then you've got a HECS debt and you're still stuck with the problem, in most professions, of relatively slow income growth in the years ahead.
In short, house prices are simply too high relative to wages and that transfers wealth from one generation to another. And so far as inter-generational conflict is concerned, it's a reality that it's Boomers, not gen Y, who made the decisions which brought us to this point. How many Gen Y's were on the boards of companies who moved manufacturing offshore? How many Gen Y's were part of the governments who privatised just about everything? Not one single Gen Y had any say in the matter due to age at the time and yet they are the ones stuck with the consequences so it's easy to understand some anger.
Solutions? Removing the barriers to land development would see a surge in supply and a fall in prices. I suggest a hefty tax on the holding of residential zoned land that is not either developed or actively in the process of being developed for housing. That ought to fix the problem there and then. Buying up huge amounts of land then sitting on it is doing nothing other than creating an artificial shortage and driving up prices.
Another problem is the ridiculous amount of red tape which stands in the way of housing construction. Each individual item might seem minor, but collectively there's a huge barrier to actually building anything these days. The various taxes are another problem too.
Another issue is the charges for water, sewage, power etc connection. In the past they were paid by the whole of society whereas today they are paid at the time of land development. Whilst I can see the point that it is fair to charge at the time of development, it is equally unfair that one generation had a free ride and another doesn't. There needs to be a compromise on this one.
Whilst there is a shortage of land in the inner city areas of Sydney and Melbourne, that certainly isn't the case in places like Adelaide, Canberra, Darwin, regional towns or the entire state of Tasmania. Something is seriously wrong when a house in a small town in Tas ends up costing $350K. Very wrong indeed as the intrinsic value of the land itself is close to zero in such places.