Research in progress

There is widespread concern about the housing market and neighbourhood impacts of short term rental accommodation (STRA) platforms such as Airbnb. This project will chart a national typology of STRA, quantifying housing impacts across metropolitan and regional case studies.

Public housing asset optimisation, including disposal and subsequent relocation, is a standard for fundraising across Australia. This is variously due to increasing cost of maintaining ageing housing assets; policy aims reducing public housing concentrations and locating housing in higher amenity areas; growing popularity of mixed-tenure schemes; and a broad lack of consistent funding for new stock. While this process creates an income stream now, it is not future focused.

This project will address the overarching policy question: What structural factors are important in driving short and longer-term changes in the incidence and geography of homelessness over the period 2001–2021? To what extent is the location of specialist homelessness services and affordable rental housing adequate to respond to this changing geography?

Over a third of Australian households are currently private or public renters, with homeownership becoming more challenging to achieve as house price growth accelerates and income growth remains sluggish. Regardless of whether or not households aspire to homeownership, the current macroeconomic environment is characterised by rising costs of living, in part due to rising housing costs. In particular, rents currently make up around 6 percent of the CPI basket, making it the second largest household expenditure class.

Homelessness imposes significant costs on individuals and society. This research will merge data from a Specialist Homelessness Service provider with unit record files from Australian government Linked Data to better understand the relationship between homelessness interventions, income support patterns and housing trajectories.