With some tinkering, a federal tax credit that encourages developers to create new units that low-income Americans can afford to rent might yield other benefits.
Fifty years ago, Jeffrey Horner watched news broadcasts of the riots that erupted just miles from his home. But he was worlds apart from the racial tensions that had been festering for decades.
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’.
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.
Individual households in Australia, on average, own 83% of all investment dwellings rented to private tenants or resold. They are people who usually have another main source of income.
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.
Most African cities are expensive, informal and non-industrial. This has produced unique socioeconomic and environmental risks that must be carefully considered in policy development.
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.
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.
A tax on empty homes will make a modest difference to housing affordability. The sheer wastefulness of our housing system calls for something much more ambitious.
Fabrice Rousselot, The Conversation; Stephan Schmidt, The Conversation; Clea Chakraverty, The Conversation, and Catesby Holmes, The Conversation
Cities have always been more than a dense collection of people. They are labs of innovation, hotbeds of crime and inequality, architectural stunners, decaying ruins and everything in between.
To create property systems that are as dynamic as the landscapes we occupy, we might need to start thinking about ourselves as belonging to and answerable to the land, not the other way around.
City dwellers are individually starting to do their bit to live sustainably. Now pioneering businesses are aiming to make ecological and social sustainability part of their bottom line.
The promotion of home ownership as a way of funding care in later life is part of a broader policy trend toward making people individually responsible for the opportunities they have.
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.
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