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
It's never been harder for Australians to find a rental under $400. Here's why
Jessica Bahr SBS (No paywall)With Australia's housing prices stubbornly high and the cash rate continuing to rise,
the number of affordable rentals has hit a record low, according to a new report. A market insight report from PropTrack found the share of properties listed for rent on realestate.com.au for less than $400 per week fell to a record low of 19.3 per cent of listings in September 2022. This represents a decline from 41.8 per cent in March 2020. Experts say they expect the supply of affordable rental listings to keep dropping over coming months due to lower vacancy rates, low levels of first-home buyers purchasing and increasing migration. Here's what you need to know.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/its-never-been-harder-for-au…
# Australia, Rent, Affordable housing, Housing market.With Queensland renters desperate, calls for compassion from landlords are no substitute for housing policy
Ben Smee The Guardian (No paywall)The Queensland housing minister, Leeanne Enoch, this week urged “compassion” from real estate agents, after revelations some had advised landlords to hike rents by more than 20%. ... [But] Governments are reluctant to intervene in the property market due to political risk but runaway prices mean the calculation is changing. ... “Housing policy is a Janus-faced thing,” Hal Pawson, the associate director of the City Futures Research Centre at the University of NSW, told the Guardian last month. “It wants to do two things at the same time. It wants to make housing affordable for everybody. It also wants to enable people who own properties to accumulate wealth. “The two things are in tension. We have a raft of policy settings that are, in my opinion, not in balance between those two objectives – they’re strongly weighted in favour of wealth accumulation, against housing being more affordable. And there’s a need to reset the balance.” Meanwhile, check out the article by Rebecca Levingston and Antonia O'Flaherty entitled: 'Homeless women say Queensland's housing summit must consider real solutions to crisis as families grow desperate' on the ABC at: [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-19/qld-homeless-women-people-living-under-bridge-housing/101550808]. Read Joe Hinchliffe's article entitled: 'Proposal for motels to house homeless people to be brought to Queensland summit' in 'The Guardian' at: [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/20/proposal-for-motels-to-house-homeless-people-to-be-brought-to-queensland-summit]. Read Eden Gillespie's article entitled: 'Pressure mounts on Queensland’s domestic violence refuges as housing crisis bites' in 'The Guardian' at: [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/19/pressure-mounts-on-queenslands-domestic-violence-refuges-as-housing-crisis-bites].
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/19/with-rent…
# Australia, Domestic violence, Rent, Federal Government, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market, State Government, Tax.I was given a house for free – but it already belonged to someone else
Anne Elizabeth Moore The Guardian (No paywall)Miraculously, Tomeka Langford is willing to talk to me. The 47-year-old Black woman is a long-standing Detroiter. A career pharm tech with four kids and six grandkids, her family has lived in the city ever since her grandparents came up from the south. I am white, single and childless. In 2016, I was given a house by Write a House, a short-lived Detroit-based organization founded in 2011 to award homes to low-income scribes. The gift was meant to support writers with some of the city’s plentiful housing stock – and thus change the stories that get told about Detroit. It was, on paper, a great idea. But the house I was given already belonged to someone: Tomeka Langford. I didn’t know it at the time. Neither did Tomeka.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/18/detroit-house-fr…
# International, Home ownership, Housing market, Local Government, Personal stories, Race and ethnicity.How much it would cost to fix homelessness
Michal Koziol The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Both sides of politics have been challenged to find $1.2 billion a year for social housing to address a growing homelessness crisis, in a long-term plan that would also impose a 1 per cent social housing levy and zoning rules on developers. The new campaign from the state’s peak homelessness body, ahead of the March election, details a specific program to make social housing equate for 10 per cent of all NSW residential dwellings by 2050. It is currently 4.7 per cent, below the OECD average of 7.1 per cent, Homelessness NSW said. ... Homelessness NSW will also call for a social housing levy of 1 per cent on the total development value of any project or subdivision of land with more than three dwellings, to start in 2027. While the group concedes such levies are rare, it argues the state already has a similar scheme to raise money from developers for infrastructure.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/how-much-it-would-cost-to-fi…
# NSW, Public and community housing, Affordable housing, Homelessness, Local Government, State Government.JobSeeker has kept recipients below the poverty line for years, but advocates say they've never been worse off
Evan Young and Norman Hermant ABC (No paywall)Some experts argue the cost-of-living crisis and inflation is actually hitting those on low incomes harder than those on higher incomes. CPI tracks increases in a basket of goods and weighs them all equally. But it doesn't account for the fact that low-income households spend a greater percentage of income on essentials such as food and housing — expenses that are now rising the fastest. ... The Henderson poverty line, one of the most commonly used metrics, had the poverty line, as of June 2022, for a single adult at $616 per week. The base JobSeeker rate for a single adult with no children is currently $334 per week. Also, read James Bryan-Hancock's article entitled: 'Welfare saved my life. If payments are raised to the poverty line more Australians will survive' in 'The Guardian' at: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/17/welfare-saved-my-life-if-payments-are-raised-to-the-poverty-line-more-australians-will-survive] Read two articles by Luke Henriques-Gomes in 'The Guardian'. His first article is entitled: 'Inflation and inadequate welfare fuelling Australia’s food insecurity crisis, Foodbank finds' at: [https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/17/inflation-and-inadequate-welfare-fuelling-australias-food-insecurity-crisis-foodbank-finds]. His second article is entitled: 'A third of single mothers in financial hardship due to welfare policies, analysis finds' at: [ https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/18/a-third-of-single-mothers-in-financial-hardship-due-to-welfare-policies-analysis-finds] Read Jewel Topsfield's article entitled: 'Report shows 540,000 Victorian households went hungry in the last year' in 'The Sydney Morning Herald' at: [https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/report-shows-540-000-victorian-households-went-hungry-in-the-last-year-20221016-p5bq32.html].
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/jobseeker-centrelink-belo…
# Australia, Families, Federal Government, Welfare, Women, Work, employment.Charity calls for government funding as NSW South Coast homeless shelter shuts its doors
Jessica Clifford and Nick McLaren ABC (No paywall)Last night, 12 homeless people in Nowra on the NSW South Coast had a warm bed and a meal at Safe Shelter Shoalhaven, but tonight they will be on the streets, with the shelter to close immediately. Peter Dover, the chief executive of Salt Care, a local church-led charity that has run the shelter for the past five years, said funding for the service had run dry.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-17/shoalhaven-homeless-shelt…
# NSW, Homelessness, Regional NSW.House prices are falling and unlikely to rebound. Bring it on...
Jessica Irvine The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)There’s an adage that something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. When it comes to Australian home values, I would add “and able to pay”. And the importance of that addition is about to become abundantly clear to home owners as borrowing costs continue to climb. Not many have noticed it yet, but I suspect we’ve just passed an historic turning point in the prospects for property price growth, in which future gains will be much lower than in recent decades. I also happen to think that is a very good thing. ... Today, Australian housing debts sit at record highs compared with income. Why? Because every time the central bank made it cheaper to borrow, we went out and leveraged to the max to feed our property desires. And literally no policymaker saw fit to stop us. As a result, the Baby Boomer cohort now finds itself sitting on large gold mines, which their kids will inherit. But not all kids will be so lucky. And it’s likely to be a very different story for future generations.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/house-prices-are-fal…
# Australia, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market, Tax, Young people.Queensland housing minister urges compassion after ‘appalling’ call to raise rents by 20%
Eden Gillespie The Guardian (No paywall)Queensland’s housing minister says it’s “appalling” that landlords have been advised to raise rents amid a rental crisis after a Brisbane real estate agent encouraged increases of more than 20%. Leeanne Enoch’s comments come after Guardian Australia reported that Ray White West End had sent an email to landlords urging them to increase rents by more than double the inflation rate.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/17/queenslan…
# Australia, Public and community housing, Rent, Affordable housing, Housing market, Landlords and agents, State Government.