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
Lord Salisbury’s message for the housing ombudsman
Peter Mares Inside Story (No paywall)“Complaints have the ability to reveal the truth,” says England’s housing ombudsman Richard Blakeway. And the truth, as he sees it, is that Britain’s social housing system has lost focus, particularly on the intimate connection between housing and health. Blakeway receives a lot of complaints. More than one in six people in England live in social rentals (compared to fewer than one in twenty in Australia). That’s about four million households, and Blakeway’s office is the place to go if they have a beef with their landlords, whether those institutions are not-for profit housing associations or local councils.
https://insidestory.org.au/lord-salisburys-message-for-the-housi…
# International, Public and community housing.Renting reforms: Ministers discuss watering down no-fault eviction proposals
Harry Farley BBC (No paywall)England: Ministers are consulting backbench Tory MPs on watering down planned protections for renters in England. The BBC has seen a series of draft government amendments to a forthcoming bill which aims to ban landlords from evicting tenants without a reason. The proposed changes were circulated with Tory MPs who had expressed concerns about the bill and wanted to increase rights for landlords. The government insisted it would still ban no-fault evictions by the election.
# New policy announcement International, .‘They’re not dog boxes’: The non-profit taking on Kāinga Ora
Jonathan Killick Stuff (No paywall)Aotearoa, New Zealand: When Neha* collected up her most precious possessions in a box and hid them in a bushes, she had no idea where she was running to, she just knew she had to escape. After 35 years of marriage, the devoted mother had become the victim of family violence and was uplifted from her home by police. “He wasn’t going to let me go. I thought I was going to have to die there,” Neha said. After being placed in Women’s Refuge, Neha didn’t know how to begin her life again. She was among 25,000 Kiwis on the housing register waitlist, either homeless or scraping by.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350196365/theyre-not-dog-boxes-n…
# International, Domestic violence, Public and community housing.US Treasury eases rules on unspent COVID aid to boost affordable housing
David Lawder Reuters (No paywall)WASHINGTON: The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced new steps to boost the supply of affordable housing by unlocking billions of dollars in unspent COVID-19 aid funding to state and local governments to support a wider array of housing projects.
The initiatives are part of a Biden administration drive to address a key economic challenge facing Americans: lack of housing affordability. This is in turn [contributing to inflation](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/supply-still-matters-why-us-housing-inflation-relief-may-be-short-lived-2024-02-28/) and negative voter sentiment on President Joe Biden's handling of the economy.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-treasury-ease-rules-covid-…
# International, Public and community housing.Six months after Maui wildfire, 5,000 survivors still stranded: ‘We’re tired of broken promises’
Nina Lakhani The Guardian (No paywall)Every afternoon Diana Tevaga rushes back from work to her hotel room to feed her pitbull, Pe’a, and tabby cat, Kenzie, bracing herself for another dispiriting evening searching online for an affordable apartment in Maui. Tevaga, 41, has been living in a hotel since losing her home – a rent-controlled apartment she’d shared with her mother and pets – in the catastrophic Lahaina wildfire on 8 August. Before the fire, she spent evenings with her nephews and nieces, who lived in the same neighborhood. Now, Tevaga watches reality TV and eats Red Cross meals with other survivors who have no place else to go.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/08/maui-wildfire-si…
# International, Disasters.‘Desperation for a home’ drives fake claims on rent applications
David Byers The Times (Paywall)UK: Hundreds of would-be tenants every day are doctoring bank statements or fabricating job histories to find homes in an overheated rental market, the UK’s largest tenant referencing agency said. HomeLet, which vets prospective renters on behalf of landlords, said overworked staff had reported a fourfold increase in fraudulent tenancy applications over the past two years. Ninety per cent of the doctored documents it found were edited bank statements that exaggerated income; the rest were found to have a fake job or criminal record.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/desperation-for-a-home-drives…
# Hot topic International, .Tell decision makers to end unfair evictions for all renters now!
Tenants' Union of NSW (No paywall)We need the NSW Government to get this right. We know that NSW Government decision-makers are currently considering rental reforms – can you email them and tell them to end no-grounds evictions for all renters? It’s been almost a year since NSW Labor formed government, and we haven’t yet seen real progress (such as a Bill in Parliament) to end unfair evictions. A renter in NSW gets a no-grounds eviction every 18 minutes in NSW. And 2 out 3 renters who get no-grounds evictions are on fixed-term agreements. The government needs to end no-grounds now, for all renters – including those on fixed-terms.
# Must read, Legal significance NSW, .NSW reform on ‘No Grounds’ evictions: why changes can’t come soon enough
Leo Patterson Ross news.com.au (No paywall)Did we do something wrong? Should we not have said anything at all? Imagine being told to leave your home without ever being told why. This is what renters in NSW face. This creates fear. It reduces trust in renting and in providers of an essential service even those trying to do the right thing. Transparent and genuine dealings should not be something to be scared of. As we approach a year on from the election, NSW Labor is finalising their plans to reform the state’s eviction laws.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/sydney-nsw/nsw-refor…
# Must read, Hot topic, TUNSW in the media, New policy announcement NSW, .