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
Small apartment buildings should be exempt from planning NIMBYism
Michael Smith The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)When your kids grow up, where are they going to live? Being a new dad myself, it is a question that seems particularly uncertain. If you have teenagers, it’s probably only a matter of time until your kids will want their own space. But if they choose to stay in Melbourne where exactly would they be able to afford? With Australia’s ongoing housing crisis, the answer is likely one of three possibilities: the outer suburban fringe, a small city apartment or living with you indefinitely. Virtually everything else has become too expensive for young singles and families to afford.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/small-apartment-buildin…
# Australia, Housing affordability, Planning and development.How a young couple turned a ‘crap’ old caravan into a luxury family home
Nell Card The Guardian (No paywall)In January 2021, Hannah and Dave Bullivant posted a leaflet through every letterbox along the main road in their village. The note asked the residents of Oare in east Kent if they could move their cars on a particular day to make way for a wide load that would be travelling through the village to a field behind their friends’ house. ... Hannah and Dave would buy and renovate a static caravan and live rent-free on their friends’ land, during which time they hope to save for a mortgage deposit. At the end of the two years, the Bullivants would move out and the lodge would become guest accommodation for visiting friends and family. ... “There’s enough separation and space between us, so we don’t ever feel like we’re living on top of each other,” says Hannah. “But we are able to live quite communally – we grow veg and garden together, we eat together a couple of times a week in their house or in the field. The children go to school together, so we share childcare and school lifts. In summer there are lots of kids running around in the field that overlooks the sea and the marsh. It’s idyllic, really.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jun/18/how-a-young…
# International, Land lease communities, Share houses.Poverty can happen to anyone at any time – it’s in my every waking and sleeping thought
Angela Finch The Guardian (No paywall)It started in July 2020. My relationship was over; it was brutal and public. We had no home, no school, no playgroup, and no doctor. We stayed with my parents 200kms away from all our belongings and where our life once was; I do not know what we would do without them. I am now a sole parent to three daughters. I study full-time. I want to be a social worker; but right now, that is on hold. I share mine and my children’s story because it happens in a moment. I tell it because it can happen to anyone, at any time. ... I pay the rent every second week. For the last two months I haven’t been able to pay my rent in full and I know that if I was with a real estate agent, I would have been evicted weeks ago. [Read on]
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/16/poverty-ca…
# Australia, Families, Personal stories, Welfare, Women.I bought a house in my 20s with a friend, and we’re still friends
Monique Farmer Domain (No paywall)Buying a first home can seem like an impossible challenge right now, especially when you’re in your 20s and only just earning a full-time salary. I felt the same when I was that age in the 1990s. Despite having held casual jobs since the age of 15, part-time work while at university and starting a full-time job before my 21st birthday, the task of scraping together a deposit felt unachievable at times. Like many young people then and now, I lived at home after finishing university before briefly renting in an inner-city sharehouse to get that first taste of freedom and independence. But my parents’ view that rent money was dead money was never far from my mind. My friend Pettina was in a similar position – still living with her parents, working full-time, unable to quite afford to buy a house on her own. Each of us had almost enough money to buy a tiny unit near where we grew up in the southern suburbs of Sydney, but the idea of a house was more appealing, if ambitious. Somehow, probably over a few Baileys on ice, we came up with the idea of combining our savings and buying a house together. ... Pettina still lives in our little home, although it’s no longer little ...
https://www.smh.com.au/property/living/i-bought-a-house-in-my-20…
# NSW, Share houses, Home ownership.How to tap your home equity for an income stream
George Cochrane The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Centrelink’s pension loans scheme was renamed the Home Equity Access Scheme (HEAS) at the beginning of the year... It offers a fortnightly income stream of up to 150 per cent of the maximum age pension, with an interest rate of 3.95 per cent – although that may rise.
https://www.smh.com.au/money/borrowing/how-to-tap-your-home-equi…
# Australia, Home ownership, Older people, Welfare.Perth housing blocks now the smallest in the country amid strong demand for new homes
Emma Wynne ABC (No paywall)The average block of land for new homes in Perth is just 399 square metres, the smallest in the country, but the houses are not shrinking as fast.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-18/perth-smaller-blocks-chea…
# Australia, Planning and development.Rental crisis: What the Labor Government can do to fix it
Poppy Johnston (No paywall)Housing experts are holding out hope for much-needed reforms under the recently elected Labor Government to solve the housing-affordability crisis as rental prices soar. Millions of Australians are facing rental stress, according to a recent survey by Savvy, with 2.72 million people spending as much as 30 per cent of their income on rent. ... While Labor’s policies to help first home buyers access the property market featured prominently during the election campaign, the party also floated several other ideas that may improve affordability for renters too. This included the development of a National Housing and Homelessness Plan, which was something the Tenants' Union of NSW chief executive officer, Leo Patterson Ross, was cautiously optimistic about. While Patterson Ross recognised that fixing the housing crisis was not something the Federal Government could do on its own, and that state and territory governments were responsible for tenancy legislation, he said the Commonwealth could play a more instrumental role in housing policy than it had in the past. Top of his list is reforming the funding model that underpins social housing, which has seen chronic underinvestment from both state and federal governments. [Read on] (yahoo!finance)
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/rental-crisis-what-the-labor-g…
# TUNSW in the media Australia, Public and community housing, Rent, Housing affordability, Housing market.Michael Gove promises long-awaited white paper on Section 21 this week
Tim Clark Inside Housing (Paywall)The government is set to publish its white paper outlining plans to abolish Section 21 evictions this week, Michael Gove said. Speaking to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee yesterday, the housing secretary promised that the white paper would be followed by new legislation in parliament which would make the changes law. Asked when the government would fulfil its commitment to abolish Section 21 no-fault evictions, Mr Gove said: “I hope we will publish a white paper later this week and this will be followed hot on its heels by legislation.” Mr Gove later noted that the white paper would be published on Thursday, 16 June. Measures to reform the rental sector were initially promised by Theresa May, the prime minister at the time, in April 2019. Charities have consistently stated that Section 21, known as no-fault evictions, have a detrimental impact on the rental sector and fail to give renters any form of certainty over their long-term housing options.
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/michael-gove-promises-…
# International, Rent, No-grounds evictions.