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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

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Key topics

Building remote Indigenous homes well is hard, but they won’t cost $1.5 million each

Liam Grealy
The Conversation (No paywall)

At the remote Indigenous community of Binjari, south of Katherine in the Northern Territory last week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a landmark A$4 billion investment in remote housing across the Territory. He said the ten-year commitment by the Commonwealth and Territory governments would deliver up to an extra 270 houses per year, a total of 2,700. At the press conference, Albanese was told $4 billion for 2,700 houses worked out at about $1.5 million each. He was asked whether each house could possibly cost that much to build.

https://theconversation.com/building-remote-indigenous-homes-wel…

# Hot topic Australia, Aboriginal renters.
 

Is it the beginning of the end for rent bidding?

Andy Kollmorgen
CHOICE (No paywall)

It's a practice that works a lot like a bribe, and many feel they have no choice but to engage in it. For people desperate to secure a property, it can also be a last resort. Perhaps the most notorious form of rent bidding is when a rental agent or landlord lets prospective tenants know they should go higher than the advertised price if they really want the place. Tenants end up offering more, without knowing if others have also offered more – or how much more. With demand high and supply critically low in recent years, many prospective renters have been willing to make side deals with the people who have the power to get them into a home.

https://www.choice.com.au/money/property/renting/articles/rent-b…

# TUNSW in the media Australia, Rent.
 

Tenants face homelessness as affordable rental scheme ends, despite WA's mining boom riches

Keane Bourke
ABC (No paywall)

Deb and Bill are both part of the same rental support scheme, but that doesn't mean they've had the same experience. For the last few years, they've been among tens of thousands of Australians to benefit from the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) – set up by the Rudd government in 2008, and now coming to an end. It worked by paying incentives to developers and community housing groups to build new homes and rent them for at least 20 per cent below market rent for 10 years. But homes have been leaving the NRAS since 2018 — sending rents up and tenants out the door. It's a particular concern in Western Australia, given it has a rental market with an extraordinarily low vacancy rate and the high prices that follow.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-22/call-for-state-government…

# Hot topic Australia, Rent.
 

The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis

Nick Bano
The Guardian (No paywall)

Speaking against his own government’s renters reform bill last autumn, the Tory grandee Sir Edward Leigh told MPs: “I was able to buy my first house – although it was a bit of a struggle – for £25,000. The opportunities for young people are so difficult now”. Younger people are “overwhelmingly reliant on the rental sector”, Leigh conceded, but the problem as he saw it was one of supply: “We have to build many more houses, and we have to free up the rented sector.”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-land…

# Hot topic International, Rent.
 

Canada’s housing crisis isn’t being caused by foreign investors. It’s being caused by investors, period

Luke Savage
Ricochet Media (No paywall)

Last November, a post on Facebook marketplace offered prospective tenants one hell of a deal. At a bargain of just $900 a month, with an upfront deposit of more than twice that amount, those in need of a place to live could luxuriate in half a bed. It may sound like something out of Charles Dickens, but the posting is just one example of how completely insane and dysfunctional Canada’s housing and rental markets have really become.

https://ricochet.media/justice/housing/canadas-housing-crisis-is…

# Hot topic International, .
 

Neglected, derided and exploited more than ever: why won’t the UK protect those who rent a home?

John Harris
The Guardian (No paywall)

Last week, a news story broke about the sheer impossibility of everyday living for millions of people all over the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly rent paid by private tenants rose by 9% in the year to February, which is the largest annual increase since records began nine years ago. The average monthly rent in England is now £1,276 and £944 in Scotland. If you are unfortunate enough to be renting from a landlord in London, your monthly outgoings may well appear hopelessly unrealistic: there, average monthly rents have risen by 10.6%, to a truly eye-watering £2,035. Given that the median UK monthly wage currently sits at about £2,200, the dire affordability crisis all this points to is glaringly clear.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/24/uk-rent-ho…

# Hot topic International, Rent.
 

‘It’s either win the lottery or leave Toronto’: How these tenants are taking on Ontario’s rent-control rules

Kat Eschner
TVO Today (No paywall)

Shanice Sharpe’s small living room is carefully styled in pink and grey with pops of white and gold. Her professional equipment — shelves and drawers of cosmetics surrounding a lit vanity, above which professional certifications hang — stands across from the sink of a one-counter kitchen. Outside the sliding glass door, a GO train rushes by. She sits at a small dining table tucked in the corner, paging through her folder of receipts. Sharpe was happy when she moved into 22 John Street in the Weston area of Toronto in 2019. At $1,540, the rent was at the top end of her budget, but “basically, it was brand new, it was close to work, and it was reasonably priced,” she says. Nobody from the building’s leasing office, she says, informed her that the new building wasn’t subject to rent control because of a law passed the previous year.

https://www.tvo.org/article/its-either-win-the-lottery-or-leave-…

# International, Rent.
 

London rent protesters say Peabody 'would turn in his grave'


BBC (No paywall)

Key workers living in London have said social housing pioneer George Peabody "would be turning in his grave" over plans to raise their rents. The Peabody housing association rents homes to key workers at a discounted rate. Tenants, who could see their rents rise by up to 9%, demonstrated near the Bank of England on Saturday. A spokesperson for Peabody said its properties remain "decent value for money".

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68645037?s=31

# Hot topic International, .
 

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