Durban one of South Africa’s third largest cities, by population has reported that the number of people living in informal dwellings has remained stubbornly high.
The Grocon-built 77-apartment Greenwich Fairfield development in Melbourne includes ten apartments for people with disability.
Artist's impression, Grocon
The NDIS has the resources and mandate to develop a mature market that delivers suitable housing for people with high disability needs, including the more than 6,200 young people now in aged care.
#WeLiveHere2017 aims to turn inanimate buildings into metaphorical sentient structures, with ‘mood lights’ expressing the feelings of Matavai and Turanga Tower residents about their neighbourhood’s redevelopment.
Nic Walker courtesy of #WeLiveHere2017
Residents of two high-rise public housing blocks are being given ‘mood lights’ to express how they feel based on their experience of the process of redeveloping their neighbourhood.
‘Build to rent’ means developers build housing with the intent of retaining the building and renting it out to lower-income families.
shutterstock
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.
Much of what is being built is straightforward ‘investor grade product’ – flats built to attract the burgeoning investment market.
Bill Randolph
The inexorable logic of the market will create suburban concentrations of lower-income households on a scale hitherto only experienced in the legacy inner-city high-rise public housing estates.
Nearly 60% of all South Africans, live on land or in dwellings outside of the land titling system.
Filckr/Icrisat
The conventional view is that insecurity of land tenure results from the lack of a registered title deed which records the property rights of occupants of land or housing.
The homeless camp in Martin Place, Sydney, is an uncomfortable reminder of a deeper systemic crisis.
Brendan Esposito/AAP
With some tinkering, a federal tax credit that encourages developers to create new units that low-income Americans can afford to rent might yield other benefits.
Melbourne’s ambitions to be a ‘20-minute city’ aren’t likely to be achieved by its recently updated planning strategy.
Nils Versemann / shutterstock.com
While many talk about 30-minute cities, some aim for residents to be able to get to most services within 20 minutes. But cities like Melbourne have an awful lot of work to do to achieve their goal.
Forty years on, there is still resistance to mixing with the ‘sort of people’ who were segregated in social housing tower blocks.
David Jackmanson/flickr
Even where communities are mixed, many inner-city families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from ‘the flats’.
Around one in seven Australia households either cannot get into housing at market rates or are struggling to pay the rent.
shutterstock
One in seven Australian households is in a state of housing need. A shortfall in social housing supply means some are locked out of the market and others pay much more for rent than they can afford.
Add up all the neglected costs of downsizing and retirees have good reason to be wary of making the move.
wavebreakmedia from www.shutterstock.com
Retirees are often urged to downsize to free up suburban properties for the next generation and for higher-density development. What’s being ignored is the costs of moving into a unit or apartment.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle explains the revised Queen Victoria Market redevelopment, flanked by Planning Minister Richard Wynne and Premier Daniel Andrews.
Joe Castro/AAP
Mixing public and private housing in urban renewal projects can be a contentious business. But public good and optimal use of public resources, not developer interests, should guide such decisions.
Vacant and unlit ‘ghost’ apartments are a source of public outrage in major cities around the world.
leniners/flickr
A tax on empty homes will make a modest difference to housing affordability. The sheer wastefulness of our housing system calls for something much more ambitious.
It is not well appreciated that the requirements of affordable housing are related to – but not the same as – those for housing affordability.
AAP/Sam Mooy
New research reveals outdated concepts and thinking are shaping Australia’s troubled housing system.
At the Ashwood-Chadstone estate, Port Phillip Housing Association has built high-quality homes, with no visible difference between the 72 private and 206 community housing dwellings.
PPHA
Concerns about the privatisation of public housing estates should not blind us to the benefits of the transfer of public housing to the not-for-profit community housing sector.
Interest rate adjustments are crude and fail to target the problems within the housing market.
Shutterstock
A variable special rate on new residential housing developments in selected centres could be used to create a local incentive to supply more affordable dwellings at higher density.
How much of co-housing is shared space is up to residents.
Chris Riedy, University of Technology Sydney; Kylie McKenna, University of Technology Sydney; Laura Wynne, University of Technology Sydney, and Matthew Daly, University of Technology Sydney
Older Australians are keenly aware of the housing challenges they face, but most are wary of co-housing due to the negative associations of shared living spaces.
The Australian government has plenty of ministers, but not one of them oversees the whole $6 trillion housing sector.
Andrew Taylor/AAP
New research finds a state of confusion when it comes to Australian government policymaking on housing, despite its huge economic and social significance.
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.
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University