Solving Australia’s Housing Crisis will Take an All-In Effort

AHURI’s managing director, Dr Michael Fotheringham, discusses how important it will be for governments to work closely with the development industry to solve Australia’s housing crisis—and how industry can be part of the conversation.

As managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, what’s your take on the housing crisis?

It won’t be news to TUD readers that the key issue in housing in Australia at the moment is a profound lack of supply. There’s a lack of affordable supply, there’s a lack of supply in regional markets and there’s also a northward shift of people from NSW and Victoria heading to south-east Queensland, making the Queensland housing crisis perhaps worse than anywhere else.

What’s driving this lack of supply?

Australia has a crisis of affordability and availability, both of which are driven by the shortage of housing stock. And this in turn is driven by the fact that we’re not building as quickly as we used to—and even if we were, it wouldn’t be enough.

The number of dwellings needed has increased as more people move into smaller household units—at the last Census just over a quarter of households were single-person households—at the same time we’re losing properties as they’re removed from residential markets and put into things like short-term letting tourist markets or are damaged by natural disasters.

We’re spending a lot of resources, both in terms of human workforce resources and our already constrained supply chains, on repair and remediation of fire and flood damaged properties, particularly in Queensland and northern NSW.

How do we tackle the problems of housing everyone? 

It’s not something the federal government can just pull a lever and fix, it’s not a tap that they’ve turned off.  

What we know is, in Australia, we need to have a coordinated approach; we need to have a strategy—a national housing plan. 

To see the benefits of a national housing strategy we can look across the Pacific to the Canadian National Housing Strategy. Launched in 2017, it didn’t inject tons of new money or new programs or even new ideas necessarily, but what it did was bring people together. It got them on the same page, working towards the same goals in a more coordinated way. 

It took existing programs and made them collaborative, made them coordinate with each other, which is how you get value-add from them all. Instead of competing with each other, organisations are actually working cohesively. That’s the benefit. Now that’s what the Australian government is aiming for and it’s really clear that the development sector has a major role to play.

What are the roles of developers and the roles of governments in fixing the crisis?

The federal government, since coming in early mid-last year, has been really clear that it’s going to be a team effort. It involves all three tiers of government, the community housing sectors and, importantly, industry.

Both the preliminary work of the National Housing Accord and the development of the National Housing and Homeless plan explicitly call out the important roles that industry will need to play: it’s not just government building public housing, it’s actually private developers, private financiers channeling money into community housing. It’s not entirely a new thing and, globally, it’s a familiar way of working.

At the moment the National Housing Accord is being hammered out across the country by state, territory and federal treasurers. The accord is a negotiation, an agreement with the other treasurers in state and territory governments that will have implications for industry and all three tiers of government in terms of building-program implementation and commissioning work, from public and community housing to types of affordable housing, whether for rent or for sale. The full details are yet to emerge, possibly later this year. Nevertheless, the accord will generate opportunities for industry, that’s the whole point of it.

How can the development sector become more involved in these important conversations?

Every two years AHURI holds the National Housing Conference. The NHC is unusual in that it doesn’t just bring a single sector together—whether that’s the developer sector or the finance sector or the community sector—its entire purpose is to bring together a wide range of voices from right across our housing systems. It is about all the issues affecting housing and how we make housing better, from what policies we need to boost supply of affordable housing, through to building and design quality; financing; First Nations housing; homelessness prevention; environmental performance; and liveability—if it’s about housing, we are discussing it. 

For anyone wanting to understand the range of perspectives on the National Housing Accord and the state and federal programs that will run from that, as well as who the key players are, the AHURI National Housing Conference is probably the most efficient way to get across it.

This year’s NHC is shaping up to be our biggest yet. We’ll be hearing from political leaders, community housing sector leaders, industry leaders, financiers and senior bureaucrats, as well as practitioners and niche specialists. It will be a key platform for some of the most important and forward-thinking conversations we need to have as a sector to solve the housing crisis.

NHC23 is being held in Brisbane on October 10-12. To find out more about NHC23 and register, visit www.nhc.edu.au

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