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.
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.
Morrison government assistant minister Luke Howarth argues that finding jobs for people in social housing will help free up dwellings for other people on the waiting list.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Helping tenants find work supposedly creates a pathway into private rental housing, freeing up social housing for others. Private rental costs and the situations of many tenants make that unrealistic.
The missing piece of the social housing puzzle is direct public investment in construction.
Bianca de Marchi/AAP
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.
The public inquiry into Grenfell makes its first report – but those responsible for the circumstances leading up to the fire are yet to face the consequences.
Rental stress leaves hundreds of thousands of Australians struggling for years to cover all the other costs of living.
Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock
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.
The evidence shows permanent housing, like the Fitzroy housing estate, is the best and most cost-effective way to reduce homelessness.
Kate Shaw
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.
With more than 80% of Singaporeans living in state-provided housing, the city rates well for affordability compared to Sydney, where the figure is just 5.5%.
Bill Roque/Shutterstock
A coordinated mix of policies does more to keep housing affordable for a significant proportion of a city’s residents than the unbalanced approach we see in Sydney.
The costs of keeping a roof over our heads create a dependence on market growth that puts low-consumption, sustainable living out of reach for many of us.
Glenn Hunt/AAP
The cost of land and, in turn, housing forces people to buy into the rules of market capitalism, making it very hard to ‘downshift’ from consumer lifestyles. But what if we rethink public housing?
Governments have been more focused on managing waiting lists than heeding calls to invest in increasing the stock of social housing.
Josh Dye/AAP
The need to manage long waiting lists for social housing, rather than serving the best interests of tenants and prospective tenants, is a major driver of policymakers’ approach.
Having quality housing matters. What’s standing in the way of ensuring every Australian has housing that meets basic comfort and health standards? And how can we overcome these problems?
Policies focused on ownership do little to help lower-income households that are struggling to pay the rent.
Iakov Filimonov/Shutterstock
The policy focus remains on home ownership, but a new survey shows slight improvements in affordability do little to help people on low incomes. Their plight calls for better social housing policy.
Public housing in Paris (left) and Melbourne (right) has similar impacts on residents’ integration into the community.
Wissem Felah, Sandra Carrasco
Whether in Melbourne or in Paris, African immigrants face social and cultural challenges, which public housing can either add to or help overcome.
The extra $1 billion Premier Gladys Berejiklian (left) and Social Housing Minister Pru Goward say will be ‘harnessed’ for social housing is actually Commonwealth Rent Assistance for which tenants transferred to community housing providers become eligible.
Simon Bullard/AAP
For the first time a state government housing agency has effectively contracted out all its operations in some regions, but will this improve and add to the total social housing stock?
Labor leader Bill Shorten has announced a policy based on a solid principle of fairness, but with a second-best model of delivering social housing.
Julian Smith/AAP
Labor has made a substantial commitment to tackling inequality in Australia, but has taken a second-best approach to overcoming the huge shortfall of social housing.
Many tenants who lit up their apartments in the ‘We Live Here’ campaign see redevelopment of the Waterloo housing estate as a ploy to move them out of the area.
Aaron Bunch/AAP
Working-class residents of Waterloo have a history of resisting threats to their community. Many tenants see the redevelopment of public housing as state-led gentrification to squeeze them out.
The current social housing construction rate – barely 3,000 dwellings a year – does not even keep pace with rising need, let alone make inroads into today’s backlog.
Joel Carrett/AAP
A tenfold increase in building is needed to overcome the current social housing shortfall and cover projected growth in need. But it can be done, and direct public investment is the cheapest way.
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
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.
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
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.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney