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Articles on Affordable housing

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Australian cities need to sustain higher levels of construction and to provide higher-density developments to ensure growing populations have access to affordable housing. Brendan Esposito/AAP

To make housing more affordable this is what state governments need to do

Governments should stop offering false hopes and pandering to NIMBY pressures. As well as increased public and private housing supply, growing cities need well-designed higher-density development.
The Melbourne Apartments Project developed by the Barnett Foundation offered 28 units to households living within 4km of the site and willing to leave their social housing. Barnett Foundation

Affordable home-ownership scheme offers a pathway out of social housing

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.
Vancouver has scaled up delivery of affordable social housing to about 15 times as much as Melbourne over the past three years. Shutterstock

Ten lessons from cities that have risen to the affordable housing challenge

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.
Getting more out of ‘lazy’ land, such as this community housing built over a Port Phillip City Council-owned car park, is a key strategy to reduce the shortage of affordable housing. CIty of Port Phillip

Put unused and ‘lazy’ land to work to ease the affordable housing crisis

As Melbourne’s population hits 5 million, it’s a reminder that growing cities must make much better use of vacant and underused land to meet the urgent need for affordable housing.
Local councils across Australia are concerned about a shortage of affordable housing, but feel the problem is beyond local government’s capacity to solve. Dave Hunt/AAP

Local councils put affordable housing supply in the too hard basket

A national survey shows councils know much of the housing in their local areas isn’t affordable. But providing affordable housing is not a priority because they see it as being beyond their means.
If vintage city design used to trap women in suburbia, what’s the modern city looking like? from shutterstock.com

How far have we come since the ’80s vision of the ‘non-sexist city’?

In the 1970s, a young urban planning professor, Dolores Hayden, believed that city design was the key to unlocking patriarchal structures that trapped women in the home. How much has the city changed?
If you want to separate investor demand for property assets from demand for affordable housing, rent is a better indicator than property prices. James Ross/AAP

Rents, not prices, are best to assess housing supply and demand

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.
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)

Overcrowded housing looms as a challenge for our cities

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?
A For Sale sign is shown outside a house under construction in a new subdivision in Beckwith, Ont., in January 2018. Conventional wisdom suggests urban-dwelling millennials don’t want to live in the suburbs and don’t want to raise children in a two-bedroom downtown condo. Is it really true? THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Challenging the myths about millennials and housing

If it’s true millennials are being squeezed out of the housing market in some of Canada’s biggest cities, here’s what we can, and should, do about it.
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 stress affects one in nine households, but which ones are really struggling?

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.
Governments have all but abandoned the commitments made a decade ago when Kevin Rudd launched a national campaign to reduce homelessness. Dean Lewins/AAP

Homelessness: Australia’s shameful story of policy complacency and failure continues

A decade after the launch of a national campaign against homelessness, the trends are all going the wrong way. A new annual report highlights what’s gone wrong and what must be done.
Firefighters didn’t expect to find hundreds of homeless families squatting in a São Paulo building that caught fire. REUTERS/Leonardo Benassatto

Deadly highrise fire in Brazil spotlights city’s housing crisis and the squatter movement it spawned

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.

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