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.
Our main email newsletter, Tenant News is sent once every two months. You can subscribe or update your subscription preferences for any of our email newsletters here.
See notes about the Digest and a list of other contributors here. Many thanks to those contributors for sharing links with us.
We love sharing the news and hope you find it informative! We're very happy to deliver it for free, but if you find it valuable, can you help cover the extra costs incurred by making a donation?
Archive
Remote Housing Court Hearings Strain Internet-Deprived Tenants Taking on Landlords
Claudia Irizarry Aponte (No paywall)From the United States ... For the past seven months, 40-year-old Maricela Catalán has been pleading her case against her former landlord in Bronx Housing Court from her current living room. She has tuned in online 10 times via Microsoft Teams with a hotspot and laptop lent by a tenant organizer to press a claim that landlord Sam Applegrad illegally locked her out of her prior apartment in Mott Haven last year. The city’s housing courts have largely shut in-person operations during the pandemic — freezing eviction proceedings entirely until earlier this year and moving urgent cases concerning building conditions almost wholly online. (The City) [Read on ...]
https://www.thecity.nyc/platform/amp/bronx/2021/4/13/22378833/re…
# International, Eviction, Rent, Tribunal NCAT, Coronavirus COVID-19.Warnings NSW stamp duty reforms could distort the property market
Matt Wade The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Legal and accounting professionals have criticised the Berejiklian government’s strategy to replace stamp duty with an annual land tax warning the slow transition to the new scheme may distort the property market and sap the state’s coffers.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/warnings-nsw-stamp-duty-refo…
# NSW, Housing market, State Government, Tax.High-rise owners to get government advice about safe replacement cladding
Matt O'Sullivan The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Owners of high-rise buildings in Sydney will finally receive advice from the NSW government as early as Monday about what products they should use to replace flammable cladding found on their towers. The long-awaited findings from a report by the state’s cladding product safety panel are set to be released, helping to end years of uncertainty in NSW about whether replacement products are safe or too risky.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/high-rise-owners-to-get-gove…
# NSW, Housing market, Minimum habitability standards, State Government.The Guardian view on the house price boom: the asset-rich get richer
The Guardian Editorial The Guardian (No paywall)From the United Kingdom ... Treasury measures to boost demand for property and a neglect of social housing are making a dysfunctional market worse
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/18/the-guardi…
# Hot topic International, Public and community housing, Federal Government, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market.Next month’s federal budget is the time to stop talking about aged care and start fixing it
Stephen Duckett and Anita Stobart The Conversation (No paywall)Australia’s aged-care system is in a state of a disaster. The aged care royal commission’s final report, released last month, is just the latest in a decades-long string of depressing reports and inquiries exposing horrific abuse, neglect, and systemic failures. Aged care needs a complete overhaul. Piecemeal reform will not be enough. Although the two commissioners didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on the fundamental reforms needed to throw out the old paradigm of rationed care, which has left too many older Australians with inadequate care — or none at all. In a new Grattan Institute report, we navigate the commissioners’ disagreements and identify four key criteria for transformational change.
https://theconversation.com/next-months-federal-budget-is-the-ti…
# Australia, Federal Government, Housing market, Older people.Perth’s rental prices the highest in six years as vacancy rates continue to fall
Heather McNeill The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Perth rentals are at their highest asking prices in almost six years with the median house costing $430 a week – the biggest yearly increase across the country.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/perth-s-rental…
# Australia, Rent, Housing market.Infrastructure struggling to keep pace with growth in Western Sydney's urban sprawl
Kathleen Calderwood and Lori Youmshajekian ABC (No paywall)Gurnek Singh purchased a home in the outer suburbs to find space and an affordable home for his young family. But after three years living in Austral, about an hour's drive from Sydney's CBD, there are still no local parks nearby, the public school is at capacity and a piece of land earmarked for a public high school has been sold to a private college. ... Mr Singh's experience is playing out in new suburbs across Australia, where key infrastructure is struggling to keep up with rapid housing growth. But Sydney has felt the growing pains for longer.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-18/western-sydney-urban-spra…
# NSW, Housing market, Planning and development, State Government.It’s not what you earn, but what your parents have that truly counts
Torsten Bell The Guardian (No paywall)New work from the London School of Economics shows that whether your parents were homeowners became more important between 2000 and 2015 in determining whether you managed to get on to the property ladder. Resolution Foundation research found that, in the 1990s, 30-year-olds whose parents had property were twice as likely to be homeowners as those whose parents did not, but from the mid-2000s they were three times as likely.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/18/its-not-wh…
# International, Families, Housing market.