The pandemic has brought to a head deep-rooted problems with how housing is provided in Australia. Fortunately, the solutions can play a central role in the national recovery process.
Construction employs one in ten Australians, with a broad range of skills, using mostly locally made materials. Building social housing would meet urgent social needs as well as creating jobs.
The system isn’t working to prevent young Australians becoming homeless and to house them when they need it. New research finds a shift to proven community-based approaches can end decades of failure.
Reducing crowding and repairing social housing can decrease the risk of COVID-19 in remote Indigenous communities. It will bring other long-term benefits, too.
Government action to control rents isn’t unprecedented. Menzies did it in the second world and subsequent state measures kept rents in check for decades. Now extreme circumstances justify it again.
A scholar of the American safety net explains how, through her own brother, she’s getting a personal window into what it means to face COVID-19 as a worker in the gig economy.
A home, a springboard, or a safety net? New research finds a surprisingly large number of Australians have lived in social housing since 2000, using it in several very different ways.
Long before a fire season that destroyed 3,500 homes, more than 100,000 Australians were homeless. If only we showed the same urgency and innovation in housing them as we did for bushfire victims.
More older Australians are carrying housing debt later in life, or not owning homes at all, but lack suitable alternatives to the family home. The result is lower incomes in retirement.
Millions of Australians are struggling with unaffordable housing. It’s a systemic problem that’s been decades in the making, and only concerted system-wide reforms will fix it.
While a majority of householders over 55 have thought about downsizing, only one in four have done it. What’s stopping them? Most simply can’t find a home in the right place that meets their needs.
Tracing politicians’ use of the term ‘housing crisis’ reveals it came into common use only in recent years, and then only by opposition MPs. Governments prefer to frame the issues differently.
The government-backed body set up to help finance social housing providers is providing longer-term, cheaper loans. What’s still missing in Australia is direct public investment in new housing.
After paying rent, more than half of low-income tenants don’t have enough left over for other essentials. And the latest evidence shows nearly half of them are stuck in this situation for years.
It’s time to tackle the shortage of public housing head-on, rather than skirt around the problem. Public housing is the single most cost-effective way to turn around the rise in homelessness.
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