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
‘Data breach waiting to happen’: Warning for real estate agents and renters on personal info requests
Tawar Razaghi Domain (No paywall)Years of work and rental history, bank statements, self-funded background checks, social media profiles and pet resumes are just some details that prospective renters have to provide to secure a property. Experts have raised concerns about the potential risk of an Optus-style data breach waiting to happen in the real estate industry as it amasses more and more sensitive information on rental applicants. Real estate agents have almost free rein on what they can ask to collect – beyond protection against basic discrimination based on background or disability – and some ask for applications just to view a property. In a tight rental market, prospective tenants feel obliged to provide as much information as they’re asked for, said Leo Patterson Ross, chief executive of Tenants Union NSW. ... The Real Estate Institute of Australia’s president Hayden Groves said renter privacy and the risk of a data breach were of deep concern to the Institute. “It is on our radar, and we’ll be looking to ensure our state institute members who are dealing with this sort of sensitive data have the correct tools that they’re following due process and best practice principles,” Groves said.
https://www.smh.com.au/property/news/data-breach-waiting-to-happ…
# TUNSW in the media Australia, Privacy and access, Rent, Landlords and agents.Australia’s housing crisis is self-inflicted. We need four reforms to reverse it
Matt Grudnoff The Guardian (No paywall)Public housing underinvestment and huge tax concessions to landlords have wreaked havoc on our rental market. ... How is it that in Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, we have a housing crisis where hundreds of thousands of renters can’t afford a roof over their head? To figure out why rents are soaring, we need to look at the broader political problem: we have spent about two decades trying to screw up the housing market and we have, catastrophically, succeeded. The Australian housing market is broken. ... The best long-term solution to the structural problems of the rental crisis is to build more public housing. ... That’s why the second solution to fixing the rental crisis could be to reform incentives that give an advantage to investors over owner occupiers. ... In immediate terms, the third reform is to renters’ rights: that means we need a ban on “no cause” evictions, where landlords can kick tenants out for no reason. ... The final thing we need to do is make renting more affordable by either increasing rent assistance or looking at rental caps, similar to many countries in Europe and some US states.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/22/australias…
# Australia, Public and community housing, Rent, Affordable housing, Landlords and agents, Tax, Welfare.The impact of the pandemic on the Australian rental sector
Emma Baker, Lyrian Daniel, Andrew Beer, Steven Rowley, Wendy Stone, Rebecca Bentley, Rachel Caines and Gemma Sansom AHURI (No paywall)AHURI Report: This research investigates the Australian rental sector during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and considers priorities for governments; tenant experiences and reflections on the effectiveness of assistance and interventions; changing tenant aspirations; and the priorities for emerging responses. The research highlights how ‘nimble’ the Australian policy community had been in response to COVID-19, and the success of many of their rapid interventions. The challenge is how to sustain assistance as Australia moves from the health emergency to maintaining (perhaps very long-term) assistance.
# Research alert Australia, Rent, Coronavirus COVID-19, Housing market.We can build enough homes for everyone in England. So why don’t we?
John Boughton The Guardian (No paywall)From the United Kingdom ... As a country, we have produced sufficient affordable housing at pace and scale in the past when the political will was there ... hichever new prime minister emerges, current Conservative politics makes it unlikely we’ll see a significant new expansion of social rented housing any time soon. But not so long ago another Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, talked of the need for “a new generation of council homes to help fix our broken housing market”. Opposition parties and the UK’s devolved governments remain committed to a large increase in public housing. Meanwhile, there are still an estimated 1.6m households in England with unmet housing needs best provided by social renting. As we plan for the future, now is a good time to ask what we can learn from past social housing schemes.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/21/build-home…
# International, Public and community housing, Affordable housing, History, Housing market, Local Government.To Airbnb or not to Airbnb: is it ethical to rent property to holidaymakers during a housing crisis?
Dwayne Grant The Guardian (No paywall)Karla Costello has seen the headlines. More than 50,000 Queenslanders waiting on the social housing register. A Brisbane real estate agency urging landlords to increase rents by more than double the inflation rate. The state’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, hosting a housing summit in a bid to solve a residential property shortage that shows no signs of abating. Costello appreciates how fortunate she is to have a roof over her head. She also sleeps better at night knowing her Gold Coast investment property is no longer a transit lounge for holidaymakers. ... After returning their property to the long-term rental market, she has been spared the internal conflict she knows would have come from hearing the Queensland government this week announce it would launch an investigation into how the short-term letting market is affecting the state’s housing crisis.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/23/to-airbnb…
# Australia, Rent, Housing market, Short-term holiday letting.Housing, Indigenous and domestic violence services to receive extra $560m in federal budget
Paul Karp The Guardian (No paywall)Community organisations such as housing, Indigenous and domestic violence services will receive an extra $560m over four years in Labor’s first budget since its re-election. The partial indexation of funding revealed by the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, aims to help community services keep up with rising costs. The Australian Council of Social Service (Acoss) and Australian Services Union had both called for a 5.5% increase in payments to community organisations, as surging inflation puts services already under strain from high demand during Covid at risk.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/23/housing-i…
# Australia, Domestic violence, Public and community housing, Race and ethnicity.Beneath the streets of Seoul are hidden semi-basement flats known as banjiha. But these homes can be deadly
James Oaten and Yeni Seo ABC (No paywall)As you take your first step into Jung Won-young's home in Seoul, the floor sinks. Sticky tape has been plastered over the laminate in an attempt to hold it together, weeks after record flooding left it bubbled and cracked. Further inside the 71-year-old's underground flat, the water damage is much worse. Black mould scars the ceilings and walls of the two dimly lit rooms that make up his small home. "It smelled really bad," Jung Won-young said. "I couldn't cook. I couldn't enter the kitchen. I only had one or two meals a day almost for a month. "My mental health was devastated." Mr Jung's semi-basement home is one of about 200,000 in the South Korean capital, known locally as a banjiha. The homes are tucked under apartment buildings, often with the smallest of windows peering out to the street to provide a narrow stream of natural light. Parts of these homes are often windowless. Banjiha were never designed to be lived in, but over the years they ended up housing some of the city's most disadvantaged people. They have become a symbol of rampant inequality in one of the world's richest cities.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-22/seoul-banjiha-the-deadly-…
# International, Health, Homelessness, Housing market, Minimum habitability standards, Mould.The Making Of Co-op City, America’s Biggest Housing Co-op
(No paywall)Co-op City in the Bronx is the size of a small city — as well as a decades old housing co-op and an island of comparative affordability. How did it come about? Annemarie Sammartino, author of "Freedomland," explains in her new book.
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/the-making-of-co-op-city-amer…
# History International, Public and community housing, Affordable housing.