Increasingly insecure pathways to home ownership are not just a problem for property markets. The fallout is likely to hit retirement incomes, the welfare base, gender equity and the broader economy.
Politics Podcast: Jacinda Ardern on her political life
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Jacinda Ardern on the toughness of Australian politics, her ambitious policy plans, and the demands of being a young high-profile female leader that everyone wants to know about.
A remote community in the Cape York region of Queensland.
Decent housing underpins the Closing the Gap goals, with a decade-long national remote housing program having made measurable progress. If the Commonwealth pulls out now, hard-won gains could be lost.
New affordable housing development in Melbourne.
Ryan van den Nouwelant
Based on research comparing projects across the country, a new assessment tool calculates cost-effective ways to fund affordable housing to meet specified needs in different markets.
Nurses who care for people in the city can’t afford a property anywhere near their place of work.
didesign021/Shutterstock
People on moderate incomes, including police and emergency workers, have been forced to seek housing on the city fringes, far from their places of work. But there are ways to reverse this trend.
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar has confirmed investments in affordable housing will be backed by a government guarantee.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
The Australian government has at last taken the lead in affordable housing policy with a package of measures that should attract institutional investors hungry for low-risk returns.
State premiers like Gladys Berejiklian need to have a much sharper policy focus on delivering social and affordable housing.
David Moir/AAP
Yet again the evidence shows supply is no cure-all for affordable housing. All levels of government in Australia need to concentrate on housing for low-income renters in particular.
Middle-class homeowners need credits, not deductions.
Konstantin L/Shutterstock.com
Rather than tinkering with the deduction, Republicans should get rid of it altogether and replace it with something that would actually help more Americans afford a home.
The Ballarat Road project in Maidstone and Footscray, Melbourne, will transform vacant land into housing for people at risk of homelessness.
Schored Architects
An innovative collaboration between government, a non-profit group and philanthropists has found a way to provide urgently needed housing on land that would otherwise be left vacant for years.
Without medium-density housing being built in the established suburbs – the ‘missing middle’ – the goals of more compact, sustainable and equitable cities won’t be achieved.
zstock/shutterstock
Residents of established middle suburbs are slowly coming round to the idea, but governments and the property sector lack the capacity to deliver compact cities that are acceptable to the community.
Older women valued a secure private space of their own with, ideally, a small garden.
Jacob Lund/shutterstock
Finding secure affordable housing is a problem for older women across Australia. But new research finds women in regional areas have different priorities from those in the cities.
Housing policymaking hasn’t gone smoothly since Tony Abbott sidelined the experts by scrapping the National Housing Supply Council in 2013.
Alan Porritt/AAP
Unaffordable housing and homelessness are burning issues. Policymaking has suffered from a critical lack of data and expert input since the National Housing Supply Council was axed in 2013.
#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.
Much of what is being built is straightforward ‘investor grade product’ – flats built to attract the burgeoning investment market.
Bill Randolph
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.
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’.
Add up all the neglected costs of downsizing and retirees have good reason to be wary of making the move.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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