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
Housing boom in New Zealand threatened by loan, tax changes. Will Australia follow?
Michael Janda ABC (No paywall)IT professional Brendon Miszka and his wife Gauri are inspecting a house in Sydney's north-western suburbs. They're looking to buy their first home but, despite good jobs and a decent deposit, they're finding it tough. "I think we're competing with a lot of people that would be happier to take a lot more risk," Brendon tells me.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-02/housing-boom-nz-and-austr…
# Hot topic Australia, Federal Government, Home ownership, Housing affordability, Housing market, International, Landlords and agents, Tax.Landlords waste no time issuing notices to vacate after eviction moratorium ends
Rachel Wells Domain (No paywall)Victorian tenancy support groups say landlords have wasted no time in trying to evict tenants from their homes, with some renters receiving notices to vacate only hours after the state’s moratorium on evictions ended on Sunday. Noel Lim, CEO of Anika Legal, which offered a free online legal service for Victorian renters, said the organisation started receiving requests for its new eviction support service on Monday. “The fact that we were contacted on day one, which was the first possible chance for landlords to provide a notice to vacate, suggests that we’re going to see a whole lot more inquiries once there has been a bit more time for landlords to prepare their paperwork,” Mr Lim said. “It is pretty clear that many landlords had been sitting and waiting for the ban to lift so they could evict their tenants.”
https://www.domain.com.au/news/landlords-waste-no-time-issuing-n…
# Hot topic Australia, Eviction, Rent, Coronavirus COVID-19, Landlords and agents.How Housing Activists Took On Philadelphia and Won In a city with thousands of vacant homes, families are still homeless. Jennifer Bennetch decided to do something about it.
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein (No paywall)From the United States ... In late June, in a video on the news site Unicorn Riot, the activist Jennifer Bennetch was standing around, waiting to announce an occupation. The video showed her in front of the headquarters for the Philadelphia Housing Authority, wearing a fanny pack and a colorful print hijab, bouncing anxiously on her heels, then glancing over her shoulder as if to make sure the coast was clear. Yet once she began, she spoke calmly and deliberately, proceeding almost without pause. The housing authority, she explained, owns hundreds of row houses in North Philadelphia. Over the past decade, some of the houses had been boarded up and some sold off to developers. She had a list. A number of the boarded-up houses, she revealed, weren’t empty: Families had been living in them since March. The video caused a sensation. [Read on] (The New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/161730/housing-activists-took-ph…
# International, Homelessness, Housing market, Squatting.Rental scammers target desperate tenants during COVID-19 pandemic
Chelsea Heaney and Isabel Moussalli ABC (No paywall)Multiple strangers have shown up to Poppy Melas' home, ready to move in. But there is one major problem — her family home for over three decades is not for rent. Ms Melas' Darwin address has been picked up by online scammers who are preying on desperate and distressed people during the COVID-19 pandemic housing squeeze, and national statistics show the situation is getting worse. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said rental scams increased by more than 32 per cent from 2019 to 2020.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/nt-rental-scammers-target…
# Must read Australia, Rent, Coronavirus COVID-19.The Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing
Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal (No paywall)From the United States ... These public-private partnerships skate by on their complexity and branding, but they undermine a future where housing is a right. ... Affordable Housing is a policy paradigm encompassing a number of financing strategies, from government grants and subsidized loans to tax breaks, local bonds, density bonuses, and other incentives. To use these benefits, developers are required to temporarily restrict rents on some of what they build, producing what is called “Affordable Housing:” privately owned, publicly subsidized rental housing. ...The financing strategies of Affordable Housing constitute the government’s total effort to produce new housing specifically for those who can’t afford market rents. They account for billions in government expenditure and foregone tax revenue. Yet they’ve largely avoided public scrutiny. (The New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/article/161806/affordable-housing-public…
# International, Affordable housing, Federal Government, Landlords and agents, Tax.The history of housing bubbles
Stan Correy ABC (No paywall)Housing bubbles have a tendency to burst—look no further than the experiences of Ireland, Spain and the United States in recent years—and the aftermath can be serious; the US collapse plunged the world into economic crisis. So is there a house price bubble in Australia’s capital cities? Stan Correy takes a look at the lessons from history. (ABC Rear Vision)
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/the-his…
# History Australia, Housing market.As we stockpile wealth, toilet paper, novelist gives voice to a ‘hoarder’
Caroline Baum The Sydney Morning Herald (No paywall)[Emily] Maguire’s sixth novel, Love Objects, centres on Nic, a 43-year-old woman with a compulsion to acquire random, often seemingly worthless possessions and who gets rid of nothing, as her niece, Lena, discovers. The novel examines the poorly understood behaviour of hoarding and the humiliation exposure causes. ... [She] undertook the novel during her 2018 residency at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney.
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/as-we-stockpile-wealth-toil…
# NSW, Health.State builds missing from govt housing package
Bryce Edwards (No paywall)From New Zealand ... At the time of the housing announcement, others ... pointed to the lack of state housing. Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis-Allan asked: "So where's the big idea? Where's the boldness" - She thought that large-scale state housing should've been part of the mix: "Michael Joseph Savage had a grand idea in the 30s. He pumped out 33,000 state houses for people who didn't have homes. We're probably due the 2021 equivalent of that." Many poverty advocates were also disappointed by the omission of state housing from the announcement, with the Child Poverty Action Group saying the government housing package "ignores the elephant in the room". (RNZ)
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/439661/state-builds-mis…
# International, Public and community housing, Housing market.