Housing

Ooh. This is really nice.

The annual rental affordability index (RAI) report is an easy-to-understand indicator of rental affordability relative to household incomes. Since its establishment in 2015, it has become a crucial tool for policymakers. It helps track rental affordability trends and informs evidence-based policy decisions – highlighting nuances between places and the experiences of disadvantaged households. To produce the Index each year, we work closely with our partners: National Shelter and Beyond Bank. 

Pissweak:

The study authors said the effects of decades of underinvestment in the social housing sector were gradually being reversed as state and federal governments looked to ease the housing crisis.

Dr Martin said the renewed focus on the sector posed an opportunity to deliver housing support differently.

“It may not always be about the golden ticket of a social housing tenancy, even though that’s what a lot of people will rightly want and need,” he said.

His examples included additional assistance to very low-income households in the private market and a bigger focus on individual housing needs.

Queensland recently reported an average wait time of about 21 months for high-needs households moving into government-owned social housing.

In Victoria, priority households face a wait of about 18 months. The wait for a two-bedroom property in inner-city Sydney is 10 years or more.

“We do need a more person-centred approach,” Ms Toohey said.

“We can integrate choice-based letting where people can search for their own social housing properties, or have a system whereby we check in on people on the list and see if there’s any other housing assistance you can provide.”

This report provides data and insights about social housing need across Victoria and models social housing growth targets required to meet expressed demand and total demand. These growth targets are based on a set of housing scenarios, policy scenarios and distribution scenarios. The method is detailed in the body of this report.

All data, insights and analysis, and modelling in this report has been produced by SGS Economics and Planning for the Victorian Housing Peaks Alliance.

While the government has housing targets for the private market, there are no strictly defined social housing targets.

"In Victoria, the current proportion of social housing is 3.1 per cent. After the Big Housing Build, it will be about 3.5 per cent — still well under the national average of 4.5 per cent (which itself isn't enough to meet demand)," the report notes.

"In order to catch up to the national average of 4.5 per cent social housing stock, Victoria needs to build 7,990 new social housing dwellings a year for the next 10 years."

Without building 7,990 new social dwellings each year for the next decade, Victoria's proportion of social housing would drop to about 2 per cent by 2051, the report forecasts.

The report also notes its target is "modest", with modelling showing the state would need to build 10,700 social housing dwellings a year for the next decade to meet "expressed demand" for social housing — enough to house those on the social housing waitlist as well as those currently receiving social housing assistance.

To meet the total demand for social housing — enough for all Victorians who need assistance, including those who haven't formally requested it — the state would need to build 27,900 social dwellings a year.

WTF? I don't get it.

Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

[…]

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

[…]

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

Each financial crisis — Savings & Loan in the 1980s, the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 — led to even greater centralization of housing finance, as short-term fixes reinforced the dominance of national lenders and government-sponsored entities. The repeated cycle of risk, collapse and bailout has made housing a primary vehicle for financial speculation rather than a stable, accessible market for homebuyers.

Today, the product isn’t a home; it’s the promise to pay contained in the mortgage note. The buyer isn’t an individual or a family; it’s a financial institution acquiring that mortgage note and the decades of promised payments.

The innovations and efficiencies of scale we see in the housing market today are innovations in finance, not in home construction. These financial innovations have not been good for homebuyers or for affordability.

[…]

Ironically, the one-dimensional efficiency of financialization has created a massive gap in the real market for homes. Large financial institutions are eager to fund single-family homes in bulk or large apartment complexes that fit their investment models, but they have no interest in small-scale, entry-level housing. A so-called "efficient" housing finance system has, in reality, left little to no capital available for small, incremental projects — like converting single-family homes into duplexes, adding backyard cottages, or financing small starter homes. This is despite the overwhelming demand for entry-level housing.

Giant White Houses are white, with jet-black accents: the shutters, the gutters, the rooves. They are giant—Hulk houses—swollen to the very limits of the legally allowed property setback, and unnaturally tall. They feature a mishmash of architectural features, combining, say, the peaked roof of a farmhouse with squared-off sections reminiscent of city townhomes. They mix horizontal siding, vertical paneling, and painted brick willy-nilly.

Like the giant White House just down the road from us in Washington, D.C., the Giant White House may be occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, but whoever they are, they are rich. Once the house next door was finished, it went on the market for $2.5 million. The house has five bedrooms and six baths and is 5,600 square feet.

[…]

Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell argued that this architectural incoherence stems, in fact, from the modern homebuyer’s saturation in Zillow and Redfin. “Design magazines, HGTV, even Instagram—those are really media empires of the past,” she said. “Overwhelmingly, by sheer monthly users, the way people interact with architecture now is through real estate listings. We’re always Zillow browsing.”

And what do you see on Zillow? If you’re one of the lucky Americans who can afford to buy your first home, and you want to live in a neighborhood like our part of Arlington, you may find that the “starter house,” as you once knew it, is awfully hard to find. Because land is worth so much and old houses, comparatively, are worth so little, when families sell small houses here, they sell them to developers, not to other families. And those developers, driven by fear and money, knock the small houses down to build GWHs. The more GWHs they build, the more the neighborhood is made up of GWHs. The more you scan Zillow, the more it starts to make sense: Like nearly a million Americans a year, you’re better off just buying a brand-new house, too.

After all, in an era when a home purchase is likely the most secure, lucrative investment you will ever make, a house really no longer is a house. It is no longer simply the place where you live. It is your future in building form. It is the way you’ll pay for college, the way you might afford retirement. “I don’t think we think of the dream home anymore,” Wagner said. “We now see houses primarily as vehicles for investment. The best way to do that is if everything looks the same.”

The rental vacancy rate across Melbourne rose to 1.7 per cent, up from just one per cent in March 2023 when overseas migration was peaking.

That put rental vacancy rates almost back to the pre-pandemic five year average rate of 1.9 per cent.

Mr Lawless said the rental property sell-off was likely due to a combination of high taxes, low yields, poor capital gains and serviceability challenges from high interest rates.

He said investors tended to chase capital gains rather than rental returns.

"With Melbourne home values down 3 per cent over the calendar year and 6.4 per cent below the market peak in March 2022, it seems that investors have been attracted to the better capital growth opportunities in markets like WA and Queensland."

[…]

Property Investors Council of Australia chair Ben Kingsley said the fall was driven by four main factors — investors selling up due to high interest rates, increased land taxes put in place by the state government to help fund the COVID recovery, tenancy reforms that ended no-fault evictions, and investors who had been in the market for a long time who were now cashing out.

He said the fall in rental bonds was "further evidence that the Labor government has made the lives of tenants in Victoria a lot harder" by causing an "exodus of investors providing private rental accommodation in Victoria".

Mr Kingsley said Victorian renters had only been spared rent rises because of the government's capping of international student numbers.

However, if that cap was removed post-election, he expected rents to rapidly rise.

"I would be very, very worried as a tenant that I'm going to be paying higher rent in Victoria over the near-term," he said.

On the 14 December 2024, housing advocates and people experiencing homelessness occupied three adjoining empty properties in Brunswick, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Australia, which have cumulatively been empty for almost 25 years.

[…]

Government reforms since colonisation have created a landscape where housing in Australia is now treated as a commodity rather than a basic necessity for living. When the area now known as Brunswick was first colonised and the land privatised, only 1 out of the 10 allotments sold for speculation at a Sydney auction was actually lived on by the purchaser, a legacy that continues today.

In 2023, nearly 100,000 homes in metropolitan Melbourne, or 5.2% of all dwellings, were found to be either empty or underused. This number exceeds the 48,620 households currently on the Victorian social housing wait-list, suggesting vacant homes could house everyone on the list twice over.

With 540,000 rental properties in Melbourne, utilising vacant homes would increase rental stock by nearly 20%. The number of vacant homes also equals more than two and a half years’ worth of new construction, based on the annual average of 37,000 new homes built.

This action is not without historical precedent. Dr. Iain McIntyre, Historian and research fellow at The University of Melbourne has written extensively on the historical role of squatting in the housing crisis following the end of World War 2. According to Iain, squatters “had the most impact in Victoria where three days after the house in Hawthorn was squatted the Premier announced that the state government would introduce its own legislation to give councils and municipal shires the power to install tenants in disused houses, with the state government to guarantee the payment of rent”.

The so-called ‘miracle cure’ solution gives people homes when they need them without conditions attached, and has brought down homelessness by 70 per cent in Finland and eradicated poverty-based homelessness completely.

Burnham has worked tirelessly to bring homeless numbers down since he was first elected in 2017, and has even been donating 15 per cent of his salary to a homeless charity every month he’s been in the job.

Now, after a successful pilot of a similar housing first scheme in Greater Manchester, which has supported 430 people with complex experiences of homelessness, Burnham is bidding for government funding to extend it beyond the current deadline of March 2025.

“I kept hearing people talking about Finland and housing first, so I just thought, well, I better get over there and have a look. So I went, and it was sort of life-changing, actually”, the Manchester Mayor said when he was first elected.

He has since worked hard to PR the initiatives to the public, saying it financially makes sense.

“It actually saves public money to do this,” he said. “It’s not as if we’re just asking for something, and it’s another pressure. The bigger you do housing first, the more you’ll save.”