Housing News Digest
Housing News Digest
The Tenants' Union Housing News Digest compiles our pick of items from all the latest tenancy and housing media, sent once per week, on Thursdays.
Below is the Digest archive from November 2020 onwards. From time to time you will find additional items in the archive that did not make it into the weekly Digest email. Earlier archives are here, where you can also find additional digests by other organisations.
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Archive
‘Computer says no’: NSW Planning Minister says rules are stifling good design
Angus Thompson The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes says urban development is suffering from a “computer says no” approach partly owing to a history of corruption, in responding to wide-ranging criticism over the flexibility of his city building overhaul. ... n a rare convergence, the NSW government is facing criticism from the development and environmental lobbies, among a list of other entities, for the lack of prescriptiveness in its watershed Design and Place state planning policy, that promotes principles rather than box-ticking when it comes to creating neighbourhoods.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/computer-says-no-nsw-plannin…
# NSW, Planning and development, State Government.Developer forced to stop work on Bellevue Hill apartments due to defects
Matt O'Sullivan The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)The developer of an apartment building in one of Sydney’s wealthiest suburbs has been ordered to immediately stop work on the complex due to serious defects, further delaying buyers of its multimillion-dollar units from moving in for at least another six months.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/developer-forced-to-stop-wor…
# NSW, Housing market, Minimum habitability standards.Where Sydney rents are getting more expensive and where they’re getting cheaper
Tawar Razaghi Domain (No paywall)Sydney’s roaring property boom has spilled over into the rental market, with asking rents for big houses in lifestyle areas rocketing to record heights, new data reveals.
Renters in coastal suburbs of the northern beaches, Sutherland Shire and the central coast are spending months desperately looking for a house, offering more than the asking rent and resorting to securing properties off-market, as they compete with would-be buyers who have been priced out of these areas and forced to rent instead.
https://www.domain.com.au/news/the-sydney-suburbs-renters-have-t…
# NSW, Rent, Housing market.The solution to underquoting? Push to publish reserve prices
Henrietta Cook The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)As concerns grow about underquoting in Australia’s booming property market, an outspoken group of real estate agents and buyers agents are calling on the Victorian government to make it compulsory to advertise reserve prices before auctions. “Underquoting is rife,” Ms Jamonts said. “The problem would be fixed overnight if there was legislation requiring reserve prices to be published.” She said disclosing this information delivered better results for vendors and buyers.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/the-solution-to-underqu…
# Australia, Housing market, Landlords and agents, State Government.WA’s housing crisis is also a health crisis
Betsy Buchanan The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Access to healthcare is fundamental to our wellbeing, and to our collective sense of social justice and the functioning of our society. So it is with housing, another basic human right denied to too many of WA’s most vulnerable families. ... [Alice is] a very sick little girl – her lungs partially collapsed by bronchial disease and chronic asthma. Alice has spent several of the last 12 months in a hospital bed at Perth Children’s Hospital. And when she’s not there, she’s often sleeping in a car with her mum. Since being evicted by the Department of Communities at the start of the COVID pandemic, Sharra says she has tried for dozens of rental properties with no success.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-s-housing-c…
# Australia, Aboriginal renters, Eviction, Public and community housing, Health, Homelessness.The cost of homelessness in WA’s public hospitals and how the state could save millions
Marta Pascual Juanola The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Taxpayers pay upwards of $18 million a year to treat the mental health of homeless people in Western Australia, with research showing rough sleepers spend a combined 11,500 days in hospital every year. But that cost could be drastically cut, saving millions of dollars, if rough sleepers were offered a place to call home, researchers from the University of Western Australia have found.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/the-cost-of-ho…
# Research alert Australia, Health, Homelessness.Aboriginal tenants face ‘wall of China’ to access WA housing as discrimination locks out rentals
Marta Pascual Juanola The Sydney Morning Herald (Paywall)Natalie Garlett has a stable fly-in, fly-out job, a clean rental record, and few demands but she can’t find a home in Perth’s saturated private rental market. After getting knockback after knockback, the mother of five is sleeping in the lounge of her daughter’s tiny two-bedroom unit with her 11-year-old son. Ms Garlett, who is Aboriginal and found herself on the streets after her landlord decided to vacate the unit she was renting in Bentley, believes she is being ruled out because of her race. ... Discrimination against Indigenous people and other ethnic minorities in the private rental market has been a widespread issue, with Equal Opportunities Commissioner John Byrne conceding in 2018 little progress had been made to address the problem in the past decade. At the time, Dr Byrne said rental applications by people with Indigenous or foreign-sounding names were rejected despite them having a steady income and good references, which he attributed to landlords’ prejudices and unconscious bias.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/aboriginal-ten…
# Hot topic Australia, Discrimination, Rent, Homelessness.‘Pressures have built up’: how can New Zealand solve its social housing crisis?
Eva Corlett The Guardian (No paywall)Once a world leader in social housing, New Zealand now faces what the UN has called a “human rights crisis”. Although the government is pouring money in, the waitlist for social housing has ballooned to 23,000 – triple that of three years ago – and there are more than 4,000 children living in motels. The government has repeatedly said it is rectifying a problem it inherited from the former National government, which saw the sell-off of state housing and underinvestment in social housing. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, told local media in January the government would leave “no stone unturned” to fix the problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/11/pressures-have-bui…
# International, Public and community housing, Homelessness.