Survival sex can be a viable option for women managing homelessness. It ranged from staying with men for a night or a woman remaining in a sexual relationship to avoid becoming homeless again.
Only in the past couple of years has housing construction got close to matching population growth in Sydney and other big cities.
Brendan Esposito/AAP
Migrants have similar home ownership rates to the overall population and rely less on public housing. But housing supply shortfalls and higher prices have reduced ownership among recent migrants.
A first glimpse of the low-income housing scheme, designed in collaboration with West, raises red flags.
Hobart is facing a rental accommodation shortfall of about 5,000 households, but the statewide shortage totals more than 29,000 households.
Dave Hunt/AAP
Tasmania has an estimated rental housing shortfall of 29,200 households across the state. Especially in disadvantaged rural areas, local councils have had to step in to help house residents locally.
A homeless man sleeps on a tram shelter bench on Batman Avenue, Melbourne, 1990s.
William Bowers/Museums Victoria
When the city centre was revitalised in the 1990s, homeless people were pushed out. With homelessness rising today, it’s important to recognise the links between urban development and displacement.
Will Gwynne walks through one of the nine Melbourne estates that is being sold in the public housing ‘renewal’ program.
David Kelly
The problem with most public housing ‘renewal’ programs is that the residents have the least say in what happens to the places they call home. The evidence of housing research is also being ignored.
The research shows that barring people with a history of drug offences from public housing won’t reduce the risks of harm as NSW minister Pru Goward argues.
Chris Pavlich/AAP
The evidence is clear on the sort of support that is needed to reduce the harms of drug use. A punitive approach that denies people a second chance makes it more likely they will reoffend.
Signs of homelessness are becoming more visible.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
A decade after the launch of a national campaign to reduce homelessness, the latest figures show Australia is going backwards. Research points to problems in the public housing system as a key factor.
Prime inner-city land, such as the Flemington estate, is being sold to developers to build new housing, but the public lacks basic details about these deals.
Artist's impression, Victorian government
The Victorian government isn’t alone in seeking private partners to renew public housing. What is notable is its lack of transparency by comparison with such arrangements elsewhere.
In Los Angeles, the architecture firm KTGY is repurposing shipping containers to build a transitional apartment complex for the homeless.
KTGY
Slashing government spending on housing and scrapping a key financing option for new units would make it harder than ever for low-income Americans to keep a roof over their heads.
Maya Demetriou, 90, pictured after the court ruling that the minister did not properly consider a heritage listing recommendation, will be the last tenant left in the Sirius building.
Perry Duffin/AAP
All but a handful of the former public housing tenants are gone. But despite the government again rejecting the recommended heritage listing of the Sirius building, the fight to save it isn’t over.
The Living Space development in Cockburn, Western Australia, has won praise as an innovative mixed-use social housing project.
Courtesy of HHA Projects
The states that are delivering more affordable housing have sophisticated, multi-pronged strategies to serve the full range of needs.
#WeLiveHere2017 aims to turn inanimate buildings into metaphorical sentient structures, with ‘mood lights’ expressing the feelings of Matavai and Turanga Tower residents about their neighbourhood’s redevelopment.
Nic Walker courtesy of #WeLiveHere2017
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.
‘Build to rent’ means developers build housing with the intent of retaining the building and renting it out to lower-income families.
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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.
Nearly 60% of all South Africans, live on land or in dwellings outside of the land titling system.
Filckr/Icrisat
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.
Forty years on, there is still resistance to mixing with the ‘sort of people’ who were segregated in social housing tower blocks.
David Jackmanson/flickr
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’.
Around one in seven Australia households either cannot get into housing at market rates or are struggling to pay the rent.
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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.
The Sirius building and the Heritage Act are both products of a significant part of Sydney’s history: the Green Bans movement.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Social housing can certainly have heritage significance. Over more than 100 years, it has been shaped by contemporary architectural and political ideas, sometimes in an exemplary way.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle explains the revised Queen Victoria Market redevelopment, flanked by Planning Minister Richard Wynne and Premier Daniel Andrews.
Joe Castro/AAP
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.
PhD Candidate, School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, and Senior Research Consultant, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney