Renting a house shouldn’t mean it’s not home. Until we change our meaning of home by separating it from ownership, we will never be able to “fix” Australia’s housing crisis.
Shared equity models have a dual benefit of making home ownership affordable for people on modest incomes and freeing up scarce social housing for other households in need.
Proposed changes to NSW rental tenancy law are an improvement, but do not end the excessive rent increases and “no grounds” evictions that put renters – and older women in particular – at risk.
Residential tenancy reforms are before the NSW parliament, but a key reform is missing. In this open letter, housing academics call for an end to landlords’ power to terminate leases with ‘no grounds’.
Much of the innovation in providing social housing is coming from community housing providers around the country. And it’s desperately needed given the state of housing inequality in Australia.
Property prices have soared in the past decade, but much more modest increases in rent, with the exception of Sydney, suggest less of an imbalance of supply and demand for housing as a place to live.
Migrants have similar home ownership rates to the overall population and rely less on public housing. But housing supply shortfalls and higher prices have reduced ownership among recent migrants.
To deliver better housing for health, we must go back to what we know works, to the proven evidence-based solutions for design, construction, delivery and maintenance.
Tasmania has an estimated rental housing shortfall of 29,200 households across the state. Especially in disadvantaged rural areas, local councils have had to step in to help house residents locally.
Hundreds of squatters were living in a vacant police station in São Paulo when fire broke out on May 1, killing up to four people. The residents were part of Brazil’s nationwide homeless movement.
The administration’s proposed changes to a decades-old housing program supporting the poorest Americans would jack up rents and deepen poverty in the US.
Where people live in the US is still often influenced by racial discrimination. Is the federal government doing enough to carry out the vision of the civil rights era legislation?
The problem with most public housing ‘renewal’ programs is that the residents have the least say in what happens to the places they call home. The evidence of housing research is also being ignored.
If local government is to deliver affordable housing, state and federal governments must assist. Even councils as powerful and well resourced as the City of Sydney cannot do it by themselves.
The clichés about housing supply and regulatory restraints are distractions from the need to focus on expanding the affordable housing sector to directly meet the needs of low-income households.
Millions of older Australians live in houses that don’t safely meet their needs, but they’re not ready for a nursing home. Lack of suitable housing and the moving costs leave them with nowhere to go.
Increasingly insecure pathways to home ownership are not just a problem for property markets. The fallout is likely to hit retirement incomes, the welfare base, gender equity and the broader economy.
Politics Podcast: Jacinda Ardern on her political life
CC BY38.6 MB(download)
Jacinda Ardern on the toughness of Australian politics, her ambitious policy plans, and the demands of being a young high-profile female leader that everyone wants to know about.
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University
Professor of Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne