Australia needs a major injection of affordable housing

Last year, one-third of the 54,000 women and children escaping family violence who came to homelessness services needing accommodation had to be turned away because no accommodation was available.

We are one of the world's wealthiest nations. Yet we treat housing - that most primal of needs - as a Darwinian selection process.

As we rebuild from the pandemic, we must use the opportunity to think more clearly about housing and homelessness.

More than 1 million Australians are in housing stress and a small blow - a rent increase, a reduction in work hours, an unexpected bill - can edge them toward homelessness. A major crisis like a serious illness, a relationship that falls apart, or a job loss would push them instantly over the line.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says 116,000 Australians are homeless. 290,500 have sought help from specialist homelessness services. Equity Economics projects that number to increase by a staggering 9 per cent this year.

We don't need to stand flat-footed. Australian governments have an established track record of stepping in to secure and expand housing during crises - to make sure Australians have a home. In the eight years after World War II, Australia built almost 100,000 public housing homes. Following the Global Financial Crisis, the Commonwealth invested $5.6 billion to build an extra 20,000 social housing units and refurbish a further 80,000.

This time, however, we seem intent on worsening the situation. We've watched outright home ownership decline from 42.8 per cent to 30 per cent over the past 25 years. As Australians hock themselves up to the eyeballs to take part in the new surge, many will find themselves in a highly precarious situation when rates inevitably go up.

Many more will simply be left behind. Forty per cent of first home buyers in Sydney and Hobart were priced out of their property market even before the latest increase in house values.

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The rental market is hardly in great shape either. According to the latest National Shelter Rental Affordability Index, there are currently no affordable dwellings in the private market for households earning $220 or less per week. And while there are some homes affordable to households that earn $355 a week, they are increasingly unavailable to those households as they are being occupied by higher income earners.

If we accept we have a moral, political, and economic imperative to find a house for every Australian, then the answer is clear: a major investment in social and affordable housing. This would balance out the market, easing pressure on both the rental and privately owned segments.

An expansion of social housing would also create many thousands of jobs. Home construction has the second-largest economic multiple of all the 114 industries that make up our economy. The National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation estimates that for every $1 million spent on residential construction, nine existing jobs are supported while three new ones are created.

Unlike other major infrastructure projects, social housing construction can be undertaken at scale within two to three years of the policy announcement, and the jobs would be widely distributed across regions with high unemployment.

An additional 30,000 units of housing would reduce the number of Australians entering homelessness each year by more than 4500.

For those who have lost jobs or encountered private trauma, a secure home is the most basic building block of rebuilding a life. And there is nothing inevitable about the stigma currently attached to social and affordable housing.

In Singapore, eight in 10 people live in housing provided by the government's housing and development board. Bricks and mortar are hard, but attitudes are malleable.