Airbnb’s likely impacts on people and their responses to it are related to their status as property owners, investors, prospective buyers or tenants.
Justin Lane/EPA
Short-term letting via digital platforms benefits some in the market at the expense of others. Closer regulation might be needed in Melbourne and Sydney, where a permissive approach prevails.
People should be able to feel at home regardless of whether they own the place they live in.
Halfpoint/Shutterstock
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.
Vancouver has scaled up delivery of affordable social housing to about 15 times as much as Melbourne over the past three years.
Shutterstock
Cities overseas that have been able to overcome the affordable housing challenges facing cities like Melbourne have adopted a coordinated and systemic approach to scaling up solutions that work.
The return of the historic problem of overcrowded dwellings points to a need in Australia for better understanding of the causes and regulatory responses.
Jacob Riis (1889)
The standards we use today were designed to help avoid the overcrowded housing that blighted cities in the past. But severe overcrowding is again on the rise, so what needs to be done?
Housing is just one of the essentials in household budgets and it’s when there’s no way to manage all these costs that financial stress really sets in.
Emma Baker
Housing affordability is one of Australia’s great unsolved problems. Some households can make adjustments to cover high housing costs, but the ones deprived of essentials are under real stress.
Exordium Apartments at Zetland, built by City West Housing, provide affordable, high-quality housing to key workers within the City of Sydney.
Alan Morris
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.
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar has confirmed investments in affordable housing will be backed by a government guarantee.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Australian government has at last taken the lead in affordable housing policy with a package of measures that should attract institutional investors hungry for low-risk returns.
Housing policymaking hasn’t gone smoothly since Tony Abbott sidelined the experts by scrapping the National Housing Supply Council in 2013.
Alan Porritt/AAP
Unaffordable housing and homelessness are burning issues. Policymaking has suffered from a critical lack of data and expert input since the National Housing Supply Council was axed in 2013.
‘Build to rent’ means developers build housing with the intent of retaining the building and renting it out to lower-income families.
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A modest rebalancing of federal tax policy toward build-to-rent housing could fill affordable housing funding gaps. Australian funds are already investing in such a scheme in the US.
The secure private garden on the redeveloped Carlton estate.
Kate Shaw
Why can’t the state fund an ongoing program of upgrading, replacing and building public housing? On the evidence to date, private developers aren’t doing a better job of it.
Households are not competing on equal terms in the private rental market – their perceptions of insecurity vary according to their means, location and reasons for renting.
April Fonti/AAP
Private renters’ security of tenure in Australia has less legal protection than in other countries with high private rental rates. A new study reveals mixed responses to this state of uncertainty.
The Rental Vulnerability Index for Queensland shows the cumulative impact of factors affecting renters across the state.
City Futures Research Centre
Almost nowhere in our capital cities can low-income households – and those on average incomes in Sydney – afford the median rent. Mapping rental vulnerability finds it in regional areas too.
More competition between renters won’t help affordability.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
In a market already tilted in favour of landlords, these apps could further push up prices.
When public investment in a development like Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital boosts land values, who should reap those gains: the community or individual owners?
NSW Premier's Office/AAP
Who is entitled to the increase in value created by planning approvals, new infrastructure, population growth or urban development? For John Stuart Mill, the answer would have been the community.
Are the millennials doomed to be nomads, locked out of the home-ownership market forever?
sharon_k/flickr
Owning a home has deep cultural and economic connotations. A home owner is a member of a street, a community. They are a successful adult human. They own a piece of the pie, the dream.
Even properties at the lower end of the market are beyond the means of most people on low fixed incomes.
Tom Rabe/AAP
Only a small proportion of housing is affordable for low-income earners, while people on Newstart or Youth Allowance don’t have any affordable options at all.
Treasurer Scott Morrison is eyeing bond aggregation as a way to finance social housing, but government funding is still needed under that model.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
In the second part of our review of what The Conversation experts have to say about housing, we focus on affordability, social housing and what government can do about a growing crisis.
The increasing proportion of children living in housing-related poverty confronts us with the question: what will we do about it?
Ollyy/shutterstock.com
Many children are living in low-income families that struggle to pay the rent to keep a roof over their heads. Unaffordable housing is fuelling childhood poverty, so where is the policy response?
Only Tasmania and South Australia have introduced legislation that provides for minimum standards in rental properties.
Huguette Roe from www.shutterstock.com
With tenancy laws under review, a ruling that landlords must maintain residential premises in good repair even if dilapidated is hailed as a ‘landmark’ decision. That tells us reform is needed.
A national housing policy is needed that recognises how all the sectors – buying, renting, investing, social housing or homeless – are connected.
AAP/Paul Miller
A decent national housing policy is not just about the million or so Australians who are in housing need, marginal housing or homeless. In reality, all the housing sectors are connected.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney