Governments should stop offering false hopes and pandering to NIMBY pressures. As well as increased public and private housing supply, growing cities need well-designed higher-density development.
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.
Cities overseas that have been able to overcome the affordable housing challenges facing cities like Melbourne have adopted a coordinated and systemic approach to scaling up solutions that work.
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.
A national survey shows councils know much of the housing in their local areas isn’t affordable. But providing affordable housing is not a priority because they see it as being beyond their means.
In the 1970s, a young urban planning professor, Dolores Hayden, believed that city design was the key to unlocking patriarchal structures that trapped women in the home. How much has the city changed?
Property prices have soared in the past decade, but much more modest increases in rent, with the exception of Sydney, suggest less of an imbalance of supply and demand for housing as a place to live.
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.
Another affordable housing pact between the Commonwealth, states and territories came into effect this month. But with no new funding, the agreement may be different from predecessors in name only.
The government’s £163m fund would provide much-needed boost for community-led housing organisations – but it might also take away their control over new developments.
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?
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.
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.
Hundreds of squatters were living in a vacant police station in São Paulo when fire broke out on May 1, killing up to four people. The residents were part of Brazil’s nationwide homeless movement.
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University