A job guarantee would go a long way toward helping people afford housing by locating living wage jobs in communities with cheaper housing. However, for the Job Guarantee to deliver the stability and prosperity we hope to see in a people’s economy, it should be paired with a guarantee of homes to everyone. Without a Homes Guarantee, real estate developers, mortgage brokers, and landlords will do everything in their power to capture the increased Job Guarantee earnings. Speculators who treat housing as an investment vehicle leave properties vacant to manipulate prices, systematically pushing people into homelessness. Lacking an alternative due to chronically underfunded public housing and a federal government legally barred from building new housing, many people have no choice but to rely on the private sector. Because the private sector has near total control over the housing stock, and housing is so fundamental to life, it is easy for speculators to bully people into paying more and more of their income. If we want our people’s economy to include quality, stable, community-controlled housing for all, we need the Homes Guarantee to provide an alternative to the speculative housing system.
Housing
The rise of short-term rental of entire homes is taking away much needed homes for British Columbians. Data shows that more than 16,000 entire homes are being used as short-term rentals for the majority of the year in B.C. This is making it more challenging to find affordable long-term rentals.
Many local governments have taken action to regulate short-term rentals, but enforcement of bylaws is a challenge, and they have asked the Province for more tools and resources.
The purpose of the Act is to:
- Give local governments stronger tools to enforce short-term rental bylaws
- Return short-term rental units to the long-term housing market
- Establish a new Provincial role in the regulation of short-term rentals
The Act applies to short-term rentals being offered to the public including:
- Offers hosted by a platform, where people reserve and pay for the rental service (which may include for example, Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, and FlipKey)
- Offers on other web listing forums (which may include for example, Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, and Craigslist)
- Listings in classified ads in newspapers
This is just staggering.
Council to Homeless Persons chief executive Deborah Di Natale says homelessness has changed dramatically across the country, and families living rough like this in Bendigo are not uncommon.
“What we used to see before was mainly single people,” she says.
“But the trend that is emerging is that we’re seeing families setting up tents in the bush because there is simply nowhere left for them to go.”
As the weather warms up, there’s another pressing concern for these families.
Fire.
“It’s really alarming that some Victorians find themselves sleeping rough in bushland during what’s tipped to be a hot, dry summer,” Sarah Toohey, from the Community Housing Industry Association Victoria, says.
A Jeff Bezos-backed real estate investing startup is launching a new fund to make it even easier for everyday Americans to speculate on the rental homes of other everyday Americans.
Arrived, which first launched in 2021, snatches up single-family homes and turns them into rental properties that anyone can invest in for as little as $100. Until now, Arrived customers could only purchase shares of individual homes and receive dividends from the rental profits, effectively creating a distributed network of landlords.
Now, the company plans to allow customers to easily invest in a broad portfolio of its rental housing, further financializing the housing market for a growing consortium of fractional mini-landlords. The company’s newly launched “Single Family Residential Fund” lets investors put their money in a fund that invests in single-family homes across the company’s holdings, similar to a Real Estate Investment Trust. The fund also has a minimum $100 investment.
In a webinar touting the new fund last week, the company explained it is betting on single-family home rentals because fewer people can afford to buy homes and more people are stuck renting.
Eliminating single-family zoning was part of a broader package of reforms deliberated by Alexandria’s city council known as the Zoning for Housing/Housing for All initiative. While most council members welcomed the reforms, lawns across the city have been littered with “anti-zoning” signs for months in anticipation of the vote. Some residents assumed that by eliminating the codes that restrict what can be built how and where, the city would lose its charm.
Others point out, however, that the pride of the city, Old Town, would not be able to exist within the restrictive zoning that has defined Alexandria for the last half-century. Originally laid out in 1749, Old Town follows a grid pattern and is beloved for its multi-story brick buildings housing a mixture of commercial uses as well as medium-, low-, and high-density residential opportunities. By contrast, the majority of Alexandria is zoned exclusively for low-density, single-family residential housing. In fact, it’d be illegal to replicate Old Town in most of Alexandria under the current zoning regime.
In 1990s Berlin, baugruppen (building groups) came to the fore in response to the German city’s housing crisis. Building groups are DIY collectives of future resident-owners who come together to develop their new homes. Households become producers rather than consumers, so they save on the developer’s profit margin and have more control over building design and quality.
At its peak, about 17% of new homes in Berlin were baugruppen projects. By 2017 more than 600 projects had been completed. The current master plan for redeveloping Berlin’s former Tegel airport calls for baugruppen to produce 2,000 homes – 40% of the project’s housing.
The success of baugruppen has inspired building groups in Australia. Data from one development and advisory service that assists building group members show members have on average saved around 10% on their new home building costs since 2010.
As well, they save on transfer taxes/stamp duties and mortgage interest payments. So in Victoria, for example, total savings could be as much as 16.5% on a A$1 million house.
Many offices are sitting empty following the rise of working from home, while cities around the world face housing crises. Building new housing is extremely carbon intensive. Could converting unused offices into housing help solve both problems?
Victoria should commit to build 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, end the first home owners grant and lobby the federal government to examine tax concessions for investment properties, the state inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis has recommended in its final report.
The report stopped short of making any recommendations on rental price regulation, which is a contentious issue between the Greens, who have been campaigning for rent caps, and the government, which has resisted calls.
The 34 recommendations included a call for the government to commit to building 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, with 40,000 of them completed by 2028.
Given that for most Australians their largest asset is their home – or, for some, a portfolio of investment properties – and it is often tied to long‑term financial plans, measures that are even vaguely thought to threaten property values are treated with ‘extreme caution by our politicians’.
It is also difficult to overstate the importance of continually rising house prices to the Australian economy. In 2022, Australia’s ‘big four’ banks – ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac — held around $1.87 trillion in home loans. No other country’s banks are as heavily dependent on residential property with housing in Australia having been referred to as ‘the cash cow of the banking sector’.
Also of interest to the Committee throughout this Inquiry was the way in which property is discussed in the media. Outlets such The Age, for example, flipped daily between stories lamenting housing unaffordability and those celebrating strong growth in property prices. Auctions are reported as if they are exciting sporting contests with results celebrated when they ‘soar’ past reserve prices. Similarly, when the Housing Statement was announced in September, the Australian Financial Review warned that the policies risked dampening house prices, valuing rapid growth in house prices over increased affordability. Housing is a human right, and that fact lies at the heart of Inquiries such as this. All Victorians should be able to access safe, secure, quality and affordable housing. The housing choices that people can make are inevitably shaped by their own circumstances, the broader nature of the housing system, and our social and economic priorities. One question that this Inquiry has faced is whether we want a home ownership society or a landlord society.9 Victoria, along with the rest of the country, is trending towards the latter. As rates of renting increase, so must security of tenure, liveable rental homes and greater consumer protections. But the goal of home ownership should never be out of reach for Victorians.
When we replaced our traditional pattern of development with the Suburban Experiment, there were some unforeseen consequences. Why did we do it, and how can we fix it?