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.
Cities have always been more than a dense collection of people. They are labs of innovation, hotbeds of crime and inequality, architectural stunners, decaying ruins and everything in between.
Property is under threat, physically and conceptually, from climate change.
.Martin./flickr
To create property systems that are as dynamic as the landscapes we occupy, we might need to start thinking about ourselves as belonging to and answerable to the land, not the other way around.
Soft Landing recycles the materials of mattresses that otherwise get dumped in landfill.
Alan Stanton/flickr
City dwellers are individually starting to do their bit to live sustainably. Now pioneering businesses are aiming to make ecological and social sustainability part of their bottom line.
The promotion of home ownership as a way of funding care in later life is part of a broader policy trend toward making people individually responsible for the opportunities they have.
A couple of months isn’t enough to say the housing market is cooling.
AAP/ Tracey Nearmy
The housing market is too volatile to look at prices alone. If you want to understand the housing market you need to look at the wider economy.
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.
Unexpected increases in housing prices could have caused buyers considering home ownership to borrow more in order to buy a house, and encouraged homeowners to spend more through withdrawing the equity from their homes.
Dan Peled/AAP
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.
Slow but steady decline in home ownership continues as 23.6% of all Australian households now rent privately.
David Gray/Reuters
The latest 2016 Census data assesses what the national home ownership and rental rates are and how these vary location. It also gives us a picture of mortgage and rental costs.
Public housing tenants are much more likely than renters in other sectors to struggle to get repair and maintenance done.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Grenfell Tower residents tragically got the world’s attention only after a disastrous fire. So what would public housing residents in Australia say about their living conditions?
How much of co-housing is shared space is up to residents.
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.
Müge Ozman, Institut Mines-Télécom Business School e Cédric Gossart, Institut Mines-Télécom Business School
Digital social innovations are often associated with positive meanings, like openness and collaboration. But to better define the concept, it’s essential to disentangle it from its positive aura.
Residents near the burnt-out Grenfell Tower display a sign that expresses their anger at being marginalised and ignored.
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
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.
The last 24 public housing tenants holding out against eviction from Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Sirius Building still hope the government may show some compassion.
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