Housing
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CONNY LENNEBERG. Youth Foyer model, an education first approach to tackling homelessness
The challenge that youth homelessness represents to our community is not intractable. In Victoria, we are seeing positive outcomes – and bipartisan support – for a new solution in the Education First Youth Foyer model developed by the Brotherhood of St Laurence in partnership with Launch Housing. Not only are these foyers helping young people Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – June/July 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Continue reading »
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JESSIE BATKIN-WALKERDEN. Homelessness: Why Early Intervention Matters
Early intervention is a vital piece of the complex puzzle, that is Australia’s homelessness. Long-term, appropriate and stable housing is becoming increasingly unattainable for many people. The current state of housing unaffordability leads to many people being at risk of becoming homelessness, or indeed being homeless. Continue reading »
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MICHAEL KEATING. Urban and Regional Policy
Spatial inequality has risen dramatically over Australia in the last forty years, and our cities are in many ways becoming less liveable. This article draws on the recent CSIRO report on the Australian National Outlook to summarise the major policy shift that is required affecting urban development to enable well-connected, affordable cities that offer more Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – May/June 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Housing for use value or exchange value
In this election the Coalition and the property industry with the help of the media have obsessed on the financial value of property,property as a commodity and property for wealth creation. Surely housing policy should be about housing as a human right where in homes we raise families, entertain friends and where we can close Continue reading »
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KOBI MAGLEN. Improving the outcomes for older women at risk of homelessness
Older single women are the fastest growing cohort of people experiencing homelessness in Australia, though their plight remains for various reasons invisible to many. Designing solutions to this problem involves first understanding the root causes of the problem, including structural gender inequality, and then identifying the drivers of better outomes for such women. Not least Continue reading »
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MARK SWIVEL. ‘To be without a home. Like a complete unknown. Just like a rolling stone’. – Bob Dylan.
Having a home one of the most basic human needs. We talk about housing or shelter as a human right – as we should. But that is not what we want. Not just the bricks and mortar but the sense of place and belonging. It’s why homeless people gather. Sure there’s safety in numbers when Continue reading »
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BRENDAN COATES AND JOHN DALEY. Someone has to lose for first homebuyers to win: This is who it should be. (ABC 14.5.2109)
The one thing that would actually help home buyers the most: letting housing prices fall. Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Apr/May 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Continue reading »
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JACK DE GROOT. The hidden cost of low rent housing
Although just paying the rent is enough of a challenge for most low-income households – as Anglicare’s latest Rental Affordability Snapshot demonstrates – their housing affordability challenge is further impacted by the cost of energy and transport. For them, it obviously forms a much higher proportion of their take-home pay and therefore puts housing affordability Continue reading »
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KASY CHAMBERS. Anglicare Australia’s latest Rental Affordability Snapshot paints a grim picture
Anglicare’s just released 10thRental Affordability Snapshot provides sobering evidence of just how hard it is for those on lower incomes, including those on the most generous government benefits (the Age Pension), to be able to afford to rent a property, let alone have any hope of one day becoming a home owner. What is desperately Continue reading »
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Who owns the development rights in our cities?
Land development rights are in reality a public asset and should be capable of being exploited only where accompanied by a fair value commitment to improvement of the public realm, including for example through the delivery of more social or affordable housing. Part of the value added from increases in the value of development rights Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Mar/Apr 2019
This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Continue reading »
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ADRIAN PISARSKI. Tackling the Housing Crisis Properly Requires a National Housing Strategy
There is a plethora of well-intentioned research and opinion aimed at solving Australia’s growing housing crisis, including Labor’s proposed reforms to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. However, to be really effective, all of this must be considered in the context of a new national housing strategy. Only by taking that sort of Continue reading »
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KATHERINE McKERNAN. Sydney’s rough sleeping problem – no rest for any of us!
Sydney’s incidence of rough sleeping, just the extreme manifestation of the broader problem of homelessness, remains on the increase and has been so for a number of years. Set against the backdrop of a booming NSW economy, ironically riding the stamp duty boom of a rampant property market, it is a sad indictment on the Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – Feb/Mar 2019
This is the second monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the source. Continue reading »
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Monthly housing digest – Jan/Feb 2019
This is the first of what is intended to be a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the source material. While the focus is on Australia, the Digest may occasionally include items of significant interest from overseas jurisdictions. Continue reading »
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Housing affordability and Labor’s tax proposals (Revised)
Home ownership has become much less affordable. It is a major source of inequality both between generations and within generations. Housing cannot become more affordable without bringing down house prices relative to incomes. Labor’s tax proposals are intended to do just this. But is this the right time? House prices are allegedly falling already, and Continue reading »
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IAN McAULEY. The housing bubble, inflated by Howard and Costello, is now deflating.
Housing prices in our most overheated markets, Sydney and Melbourne, are falling. The housing bubble is a consequence of reckless economic policies pursued by the Howard-Costello Government, who, in the name of “financial dynamism”, privileged financial transactions over real economic activity. Continue reading »
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HAL PAWSON. Shorten places housing at the centre of the 2019 election
With his weekend announcement of a $6.6 billion affordable rental construction program, Bill Shorten has dramatically reinforced Labor’s emphasis on housing as central to the Party’s 2019 election policy pitch. The initiative, Labor’s first significant housing investment pledge in four federal elections, aims to help qualifying low-to-moderate income earners increasingly squeezed out of urban housing Continue reading »
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ISABELLE LANE. ‘Misleading and disingenuous’: Treasurer’s negative gearing claims slammed.
Experts have rubbished Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s claims that a proposed rollback of negative gearing will decimate the property market and send rents soaring. This article was published by The New Daily on the 8th of November 2018. Continue reading »
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CHRIS MILLS. Mobile Workers Stampede from the City to the Bush.
Remember when Australia was a nation of makers? As in: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Holdens and the Opera House? Imagine the productivity increase if Australia had a mobile army who would deploy across the country to provide skilled workers where, when and for as long is required. Fruit pickers, mobile phone Continue reading »
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BOB DOUGLAS. Homelessness, a sign of increasing Australian Inequality that we must now address.
The growing number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our cities has alerted many Australians to the fact that Australia is no longer the egalitarian society we once were, and that, as in other western democracies, inequality is on the rise. Continue reading »
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ILAN WIESEL, LISS RALSTON, WENDY STONE. How the housing boom has driven rising inequality.
The Productivity Commission – the Australian government’s highly influential economic advisory body – released a report titled Rising Inequality? last week. The question mark indicates its scepticism about other research findings on rising inequality in Australia. The commission responded to its own question in the report’s very first heading: “Over nearly three decades, inequality has Continue reading »
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DUNCAN GRAHAM. The Bush Drivers Lament.
Thousands of escapees from chilly southern cities are currently cruising northern Australia in search of warmth, wildflowers, new friends and a little adventure. The grey nomads prefer caravans, some so lavishly equipped they’re really villas on wheels with solar panels, family pets and air conditioning. The young and foreign go for small vans with a Continue reading »
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RICHARD ECCLESTON. The housing divide
House prices may have finally peaked, at least in Melbourne and Sydney. But a slight cooling in some overheated cities makes little difference to overall housing affordability in Australia, which has declined significantly over the past two decades.We need a new, nationally coordinated approach to housing policy in order to ensure that the vast majority of Australians Continue reading »
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BOB BIRRELL AND EARNEST HEALY. The Housing Affordability Crisis in Sydney and Melbourne
The housing affordability crisis in Sydney and Melbourne is close to the worst in the developed world. As of 2017, the ratio of median house prices to median household income in Sydney was 12.9 and in Melbourne 9.9. Only Vancouver and Hong Kong were as bad or worse on this metric. Continue reading »
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CHRISTINA HO, EDGAR LIU, HAZEL EASTHOPE. Higher density and diversity: apartments are Australia at its most multicultural.
Increasing numbers of city dwellers live in apartments. This is particularly the case for migrants. And that makes apartment buildings important hubs of multiculturalism in our cities. Continue reading »
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LEO PATTERSON ROSS. Renters still face unacceptably poor conditions.
Governments at both federal and state levels continue to rely on the supply of bricks and mortar to solve Australia’s housing issues. We should be focusing not only on how many buildings are supplied, but what those buildings contain – people, trying to make a home. Continue reading »
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