this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Building in the same old ways won't end the housing crisis. (lens.monash.edu)
submitted 2 years ago by Treevan@aussie.zone to c/australia@aussie.zone
8 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Is the key to ending our housing woes really just "Supply"? And will the Albanese government's new $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund solve that problem?

The federal government says its new fund will provide $500 million a year to build much-needed social housing.

To meet our housing targets, we need to find new ways of building more with less.

Reusing existing and obsolete buildings for new housing - adaptive reuse - is another way to provide more housing.

A final challenge to government: As we prepare to spend billions on building housing across the country, is it too outlandish to imagine we could invest a mere 1% of those vast sums in innovation programs? Innovation can deliver the increases in building productivity and capacity that Australia so badly needs.

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[–] LineNoise@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The problem with higher density is that our structures governing such properties are awful. Body corporates and stratas are enormous risks for those on the margins because of their potential to become debt traps. Particularly if only a minority of owners are residents rather than investors.

Higher density needs to be looked at certainly, but realistically it also needs to be structured and built very differently with an active exclusion of investor needs. And that also means housing where even the residents don't expect to accumulate a capital gain on.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 2 years ago

Yup, a definitely fair problem.

Personally, I actually think the best housing option is row houses, for reasons that I think are very well explained in this recent podcast episode (YouTube link for convenience). And these have the added advantage of not needing a strata.

It can be a little complicated if you build true row houses with a shared wall, but it need not be more than the same kind of thing you get in separated houses with garden fence rules. Alternatively, you can do what I've seen a bit of recently and sacrifice a tiny bit of the advantages of row houses to make them technically separated houses, by putting a tiny (50–100 mm) gap between each house. The density is basically not sacrificed at all, and you remove any possible boundary disputes.

Also for what it's worth, my experience with a small, aging apartment body corporate has been pretty good. A majority of owners are investors, but the body corporate committee and active voters in my experience are much more evenly split, with probably about 3/5ths being owner-occupiers. That may not be the universal experience though, especially in larger buildings. I think there's probably a place for the law to be amended in such a way that tenants get a voice on the committee too, somehow, though that would be politically quite difficult.