Housing First is a program that offers housing to homeless drug users – regardless of whether or not they’re drug free – with a goal of social recovery.
Bryan Guilas/Flickr
Over the past decade, drug use in the US has risen dramatically, with heroin use reaching epidemic proportions. The country’s policy for combating abuse has involved incarceration, abstinence-only treatment…
Is assuming houses are like bananas making us look like apes?
Michael Lokner/Flicker
A poster in the head office of a state planning agency claims: “Highest Housing Approvals in a decade: Keeping homes more affordable”. Indeed, the latest figures show national housing approvals rose 16…
With an average 2.5 properties each, Australian politicians are living the housing dream.
Andrea Castelli/Flickr
Australian politicians are keen property owners. Data compiled by Lindsay David, Deakin University’s Philip Soos and Paul Egan from the parliamentary register of members’ interests shows the 226 members…
Tackling the largest housing shortfall starts with a single brick.
David Davies/PA
Paul Cheshire, London School of Economics and Political Science
We all know we have a crisis of housing supply and affordability. Over the past four years we have built on average 110,000 homes a year in England, less than the 150,000 homes built 110 years ago in 1904…
There’s no shortage of investors in high-rise housing, but is it occupied?
Dan Peled/AAP
It is true that the main culprits for housing prices in Australia are taxation and regulation regimes, as argued by Stephen Kirchner last week. But this is more because of their impact on demand than supply…
Mental block: Osborne has conflicting motives over housing.
κύριαsity
Britain is home to an increasingly dysfunctional housing market. The risk is that a chancellor trying to lay the foundations for a 2015 election victory will struggle to find the balance between the short…
Desolation: why are all these houses empty?
Peter Byrne/PA
London is about to experience a residential building boom the like of which the capital hasn’t experienced in decades. According to a report from New London Architecture there are more than 230 new high-rise…
Lessons to learn for housing policy.
Chris Carlson/AP
The US has wasted its “sub-prime” mortgage crisis. The story of how and why this has happened is of interest not only for its own sake, but for the broader themes it reveals. I am a theoretically trained…
Under the current tax regime, investors and cashed up owner occupiers are bidding up the cost of housing.
Dean Lewins/AAP
In an ideal (and economically efficient) world, tax policy would not influence the investment or consumption choices taxpayers make. In reality, this neutrality is rarely achieved. External factors influence…
Role reversal: a river of land in fields of water.
Tim Ireland/PA
Ministers should be applauded for recognising that there’s simply no way we could tell the thousands of key workers and low income families, desperate for a decent home, that we can’t build any more new…
Affordable housing in China is usually clustered into fenced housing estates of 1000 to 4000 dwelling units.
Rebecca L.H. Chiu
The sudden dismissal of Australia’s National Housing Supply Council last month suggests we may be entering a new housing policy vacuum. This is bad news for aspiring first home buyers, whose numbers have…
A government guarantee could attract more private investment into affordable housing.
PT Money/Flickr
First home buyers are slipping in the ranks of Australians purchasing a home, and once again negative gearing and supply issues are back in the spotlight. Even Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond has…
Many pensioners are living in homes that are too expensive for them, says the Grattan Institute’s John Daley, arguing adding the family home to the assets test for the age pension would spur on downsizing.
juicyrai/Flickr
Charis Palmer, The Conversation and Kylar Loussikian, The Conversation
The Australian Government should tighten the welfare system for older Australians, adding the family home to the assets test for the age pension and limiting tax concessions on superannuation contributions…
Professor; School of Economics, Finance and Property, and Director, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Curtin Research Centre, Curtin University
Professor of Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne