Australia's Hidden Housing Emergency

Housing is a significant issue in Australia. We do need to address affordability through removing tax breaks around negative gearing and capital gains tax as per Greens Policy.
 
This is important for a number of reasons. It is a question of equity and of ensuring our monetary policy doesn’t widen the divide between the haves and the have-nots, between the landlords and the renters, between the young and the older members of our community.
 
It is also important to ensure that an essential service (or even a right) such as housing is taken out of the hands of those who seek to profit from it (developers, investors and bankers) and put into the hands of end-users… people who actually want a nice affordable place to live.
 
If it sounds like a pipe dream, it’s not. It’s already happening in Melbourne in an architect-driven project called Nightingale 1.0. You can read about it here.

Artist's Concept Drawing... Nightingale 1.0

This development ensures a triple bottom line… of social, financial and environmental sustainability. It delivers affordable, quality house that meets the needs of occupiers, not other rent seekers. And it is very, very popular.
 
The loser should such an initiative become more widespread would be the rent-seekers mentioned above. People do have a right to invest and to profit, but not on the misery of others and not is such a way that it 'ties up' money rather than allowing it to circulate and create wealth - which is how the current housing market is working.
 
While this is surely enough reason to drive change, there is another more compelling reason… we are in danger of returning to a situation where large numbers are living in ‘Slum Housing’… a situation we haven’t seen for more than a century.

Issues like overcrowding, houses in a poor state of repair, poor insulation, and insufficient heating and cooling are not just an issue for remote Aboriginal communities. Students and the unemployed (or under-employed) find themselves in similar situations. Not only is this unfair, it also means poorer health outcomes for these people… just as it did over a century ago.

The scale of this issue was recently revealed by researchers from South Australia and Victoria, who applied the HILDA survey and found that more than 100,000 people were living in properties regarded as very poor or derelict.
 
Many of the people living in this accommodation are already disadvantaged, and the state of their accommodation only increases their disadvantage.
 
Unless Governments take steps to ensure the supply of affordable, good quality housing we will see the re-emergence of slums, and the associated reduced life chances and shortened lives. The well-meaning architects working on the Nightingale project can’t do it on their own.

In Townsville we are suffering under an economic downturn, with high levels of youth and general unemployment. Some people have moved away, but others are still here suffering in relative silence. We have a responsibility to address these issues now.

There is more we can do. There is more we need to do. These issues are preventable, waiting for a time when we have to resort to the slum-clearing of a century ago is not an approach we should even contemplate.

by Wendy Tubman