The return of the historic problem of overcrowded dwellings points to a need in Australia for better understanding of the causes and regulatory responses.
Jacob Riis (1889)
The standards we use today were designed to help avoid the overcrowded housing that blighted cities in the past. But severe overcrowding is again on the rise, so what needs to be done?
Chalcots Estate in Camden is covered in the same cladding as Grenfell Tower was.
mattbuck/Wikimedia Commons.
Grenfell was a ‘catastrophic regulatory failure’, and reform is still needed – but above all, tenants must be empowered to make their homes safe.
Women with children in their arms protested the separation of families seeking protection at U.S. borders, as DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen addressed a Senate subcommittee.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
One problem with Airbnb is that it isn’t transparent about how many properties are truly ‘shared’ and how many are just part of a letting business. Regulators need to know that to manage the impacts.
A For Sale sign is shown outside a house under construction in a new subdivision in Beckwith, Ont., in January 2018.
Conventional wisdom suggests urban-dwelling millennials don’t want to live in the suburbs and don’t want to raise children in a two-bedroom downtown condo. Is it really true?
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
Facebook will build a village with housing and amenities in Silicon Valley, a new version of old, unsuccessful ideas of company towns and utopian communities. Will Facebook’s town face the same fate?
A house at Little Paradise on Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land.
Kieran Wong
To deliver better housing for health, we must go back to what we know works, to the proven evidence-based solutions for design, construction, delivery and maintenance.
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.
South Africa needs to review its four years decision to exclusively deliver housing through megaprojects.
Housing is just one of the essentials in household budgets and it’s when there’s no way to manage all these costs that financial stress really sets in.
Emma Baker
Housing affordability is one of Australia’s great unsolved problems. Some households can make adjustments to cover high housing costs, but the ones deprived of essentials are under real stress.
Highly inflated house prices are more concerning to people wishing to move from renting to purchasing a house (mostly potential first home buyers).
Dan Peled/AAP
Even though house prices have risen substantially over recent decades, housing affordability for those with mortgages or own their houses outright hasn’t worsened
Solar panels being installed in new housing under construction in Sacramento, Calif.
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
Environmentalists and climate hawks are cheering, but many experts aren’t excited about the state making rooftop solar panels mandatory on most new homes beginning in 2020.
People are alarmed about Airbnb’s impacts, but these are far from uniform across the city.
Justin Lane/EPA
The patterns of Airbnb listings in Australia’s biggest cities suggest impacts on rental housing are likely to be biggest in high-end areas that appeal to tourists. Low-income areas are less affected.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during the post-budget debate.
New Zealand’s coalition government in its first budget has treated public policies as investments, with the goal of improving social and environmental outcomes.
Finance minister Grant Robertson delivering his first budget.
Health, housing and education get funding boosts in the fiscally conservative first budget delivered by New Zealand’s coalition government.
The RBA argues that it needs to balance financial stability risks against the need to stimulate the economy through lower interest rates. But this has left inflation running below its target range.
DARREN ENGLAND/AAP
If the RBA continues to sacrifice its inflation target on the altar of financial stability risks, inflation expectations and our wages growth will continue to languish.
Middle-class houses in the US have grown ever larger. The average single-family home is almost twice the size of a home in the 1960s. It’s time to consider the downsides of sizing up.
Governments have all but abandoned the commitments made a decade ago when Kevin Rudd launched a national campaign to reduce homelessness.
Dean Lewins/AAP
A decade after the launch of a national campaign against homelessness, the trends are all going the wrong way. A new annual report highlights what’s gone wrong and what must be done.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson argues his housing reforms would increase self-sufficiency.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
The administration’s proposed changes to a decades-old housing program supporting the poorest Americans would jack up rents and deepen poverty in the US.
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