By Hal Pawson, City Futures Research Centre In Australia and in other countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted extraordinary housing policy innovation and emergency spending. Since March an estimated 5,000 people have been rescued into temporary shelter across Australia. Alongside this, panicked by the vision of abrupt mass unemployment triggering a national rent arrears crisis, […]
Homelessness policy: summary of CFRC submission to Senate Inquiry
June 1st, 2020 · No Comments · Government
Tags:Social housing
Coronavirus lays bare 5 big housing system flaws to be fixed
May 12th, 2020 · No Comments · Affordability, Construction, Economy, Government, Guest appearance, Housing, Housing supply, Pandemic, Tenancy, urban renewal
By Hal Pawson, City Futures Research Centre UNSW, and Peter Mares, Monash University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Australians had become used to walking past rough sleepers. Policymakers too, seemed unmoved by the people huddled in doorways or sheltering in parks under plastic sheets. […]
Far-reaching housing tax reform could be back on the agenda
May 10th, 2020 · No Comments · Uncategorized
By Hal Pawson, Associate Director, CFRC The pitch to replace stamp duty with a broad-based land tax has recently seen a new surge of advocacy. Just in the past couple of weeks the Reserve Bank Governor together with state Treasurers in both NSW and Victoria have all weighed into this debate once again, arguing that […]
Why City Futures backs social housing stimulus plan
May 5th, 2020 · No Comments · Economy, Government, Housing supply, Pandemic
By Bill Randolph, Director, City Futures Research Centre With Australia’s economy taking a record-breaking pandemic hit, governments now face the huge challenge of reviving employment as the health crisis subsides. It’s widely agreed that a stimulus spending program should be a central plank of the recovery plan. Construction is an obvious stimulus target, since, […]
Tags:Affordable housing
We must act on homelessness before COVID-19 winter
April 26th, 2020 · No Comments · homelessness, Housing, Pandemic
By Anne O’Brien and Hal Pawson The homeless need to be in housing before winter sets in and while the renewed spread of COVID-19 remains a threat. Without this, people could be dying without any support. And because rough sleepers often live in close proximity to each other, unable to keep clean or wash their […]
Tags:COVID-19
Siloed construction industry reform will fail: We need systems thinking
October 11th, 2019 · No Comments · Uncategorized
By Prof Martin Loosemore, UNSW First published in the Fifth Estate. Read the original article here. What is interesting about Dame Judith Hackitt’s final report that was commissioned by the UK government following the Grenfell Tower disaster is that it didn’t pin the blame on the cladding, but identified a wider systemic problem in the […]
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Does NSW really need to double its social housing output?
June 23rd, 2018 · No Comments · Uncategorized
By: Hal Pawson, Associate Director, CFRC ‘Homelessness: NSW government ‘must double public housing’ soberly declared the Daily Telegraph’s Saturday headline. This, above a story warning that ‘The NSW government needs to double the amount of social and affordable housing it aims to build to prevent a huge leap in homelessness’ according to ‘experts’. Further, ‘the […]
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Public housing transfers move to a new level
January 23rd, 2017 · 1 Comment · Government, Housing supply
By Hal Pawson, Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre With the New South Wales Government’s recently announced tranche of public housing transfers to not-for-profit providers, Australia’s community housing sector is set for a new growth spurt. The addition of the 14,700 former Housing NSW properties – the largest transfer program yet – will expand existing […]
Too little…but not too late?
November 29th, 2016 · No Comments · Cities, Housing supply, Planning reform, urban renewal
by Judy Stubbs, Judith Stubbs Associates Like most public policy announcements, the Greater Sydney Commission’s recent release of its six Draft District Plans has some good news, and some news that housing researchers and public interest bodies would likely regard as not so good. GSC District Plans – two steps forward In many ways, the […]
The Greater Sydney Commission could deliver a step-change policy advance on affordable housing
November 2nd, 2016 · No Comments · Planning reform
The latest CityWest Housing affordable rental block, Portman Street, Zetland, under construction in 2015 Make no mistake; in the ranking of Australian urban governance innovations, the founding of the Greater Sydney Commission looks set to prove a major league event. Established by the NSW Government at the start of 2016, the GSC’s role is to […]