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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New research finds a state of confusion when it comes to Australian government policymaking on housing, despite its huge economic and social significance.
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