Housing News Digest
Housing News Digest
The Tenants' Union Housing News Digest compiles our pick of items from all the latest tenancy and housing media, sent once per week, on Thursdays.
Below is the Digest archive from November 2020 onwards. From time to time you will find additional items in the archive that did not make it into the weekly Digest email. Earlier archives are here, where you can also find additional digests by other organisations.
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Archive
Alex builds houses seven days a week, but isn’t making any more money
Tawar Razaghi Domain (No paywall)Builders are being forced to construct homes at a loss as consumers decline to meet in the middle on out-of-date contracts that do not reflect rising construction costs. Some industry figures warn that more businesses will go bust as a result, which could entrench the market power of remaining businesses and permanently increase the cost of building a new home. ... Materials and labour costs have soared thanks to two years of strong demand for new homes and renovations that was further stimulated by the Morrison government’s HomeBuilder initiative, in the face of ongoing limits such as supply chain bottlenecks and weather impediments. Industry figures say that as result, most builders have been forced to honour contracts that were quoted months before construction began.
https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/alex-builds-houses-seven-da…
# Australia, Housing market.Disability royal commission examines conditions inside Supported Residential Services
Elizabeth Wright and Celina Edmonds ABC (No paywall)The daughter of a woman who lay dead on the ground of a supported residential service for more than two hours has called for changes to the system that "failed" her mother. Evidence about the "neglect" of 65-year-old Kaye Wilson came on the last day of the disability royal commission hearing into homelessness and insecure housing. The woman's daughter, Georgia Wilson, gave emotional testimony about the two months her mother lived at one of Victoria's supported residential services (SRS). Kaye Wilson, who had mental health issues and schizophrenia, moved into the SRS in February 2020. She paid $490 a week, the total amount of her disability support pension (DSP), for a room with a toilet and shower. SRS are privately-owned and operated facilities that provide accommodation and support for people who require assistance with everyday living, including people with disability. After two days of evidence, commissioner John Ryan said they had heard from residents of different SRS who were "routinely hungry, cold and living in unhygienic conditions".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-03/disability-royal-commissi…
# Australia, Disability, Housing market.Six months on from the Goodna and Brisbane floods, the neighbours of Mill Street have discovered a resilience they never knew they had
Tobias Jurss-Lewis ABC (No paywall)The street has scars. Some are obvious, like the shells of cars scattered in yards, the abandoned homes or the silt marks on 3-metre-high signs that tell you the road is prone to flooding. They're still there, six months after an indiscriminating brown tide swallowed houses, possessions and cars alike. Children will tell you the floodwaters looked like chocolate milk. Adults will tell you they looked like "the worst nightmare you can dream".
Mill Street in Goodna — a 1 kilometre stretch of businesses, rental properties, homes and homeless shelters — reveals almost every conceivable type of suffering that this disaster unleashed. While the suffering is far from over, some scars are harder to see. Some are subtle. Like the loose lock on the back door, where looters kicked it in. Or the cautious way Allen Kunst walks out to the footpath every time a car drives past, wary it might be a looter.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-03/goodna-ipswich-brisbane-f…
# Australia, Families.Size matters: what Tokyo can teach us about a compact lifestyle
Jeremy Smart The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Six years ago I packed up a one-bedroom apartment in inner Melbourne, swapping it for a smaller (and twice as expensive) apartment in Hong Kong. At around 25 square metres, friends in Australia were shocked that anyone, let alone a couple, could live in such compact confines. ... In 2019, Beijing moved to quash Hong Kong’s vibrant pro-democracy movement. The harsh crackdown made the once-free city no longer viable as a base and a new home was sought. We settled on a 37-square-metre apartment in Tokyo. It even fits a small cat. Australians, meanwhile, live in some of the largest homes in the world. In the capital cities, the average new house in 2021 was more than 242 square metres. Six and a half of our apartments could fit inside the typical Australian dwelling.
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/size-mat…
# International, Home.How to create a cosy home (without buying anything new)
Sali Hughes The Guardian (No paywall)Several years ago, my boyfriend and I attended the Hay literary festival, and in an uncharacteristic fit of nostalgia I suggested we drive to the village in which I grew up, around 45 minutes away. We toured the landmarks – my grandparents’ house, where I was born, the primary school I’d attended – and, of course, my childhood home, the small end-of-terrace I shared with my two big brothers and my father, following my mother’s departure to a tiny flat a mile or so away. [Read on]
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/03/how-to-crea…
# International, Home.Older Homeless People Are At Great Risk of Dying
Laura Kurtzman (No paywall)A quarter of the participants in a long-term study of older people experiencing homelessness in Oakland died within a few years of being enrolled, University of California San Francisco researchers found. ... [and] people who first became homeless at age 50 or later were about 60 percent more likely to die than those who had become homeless earlier in life. But homelessness was a risk for everyone, and those who remained homeless were about 80 percent more likely to die than those who were able to return to housing. (UCSF)
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2022/08/423551/older-homeless-people-a…
# International, Health, Homelessness.Increased migration must be coupled with investments in housing: Clare O'Neil
ABC (No paywall)Lifting the skilled migration cap has been one of the big consensus points in the Jobs and Skills summit so far and Home Affairs Minister, Clare O'Neil will lead two panels on migration today. She says it's balancing act and that increasing the skilled migration rate has to be coupled with a discussion around housing. (ABC RN)
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/increase…
# Audio Australia, Federal Government, Housing market, Work, employment.‘I’ve lived here for 30 years’: Welsh shipping container resident faces eviction
Steven Morris The Guardian (No paywall)From Wales .... From the outside it may not look like much – a tangle of metal boxes in a remote Welsh yard weathered by salty winds next to a field of goats and sheep. Inside, though, it is extraordinary. The structure turns out to be four shipping containers ingeniously linked to create a cosy, if eccentric, home for 65-year-old Stephen Gibbons, complete with wood-burning stove, well-used sofas and a polished dining table, plus a collection of stuffed birds – and fake grass for carpet. But if the local authority, Newport city council, gets its way, Gibbons, who has lived here for 30 years and partly brought up four children in this unusual spot, will have to abandon the structure because he did not have planning permission for the dwelling.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/01/man-faces-evicti…
# International, Eviction, Local Government, Planning and development.