This research investigated housing outcomes during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluated the complex interrelated impacts it is having on Australian households with a range of vulnerabilities.

COVID-19 has exacerbated vulnerabilities such as poor housing quality and location; housing affordability; energy poverty and a range of social, mental and physical health conditions. Set against this were a range of policy interventions, ranging from financial payments and guidelines around housing costs relief, to policing of the restrictions on movement and social distancing, to cleaning and sanitising. These brought significant challenges and responses inside homes and also had significant knock-on effects upon relationships and mental and physical health.

Housing provides a key hub for control measures instituted to control the COVID-19 pandemic. However, housing is not currently organised in a way that provides for universal sanctity, security, health and liveability. Instead, already existing inequalities, together with sensitivities, make for unequal vulnerability.

People who lived in lower-density and detached housing, had some income security and use of a car had advantages, with hobbies such as gardening taking off. On the other hand, for those in poorer quality, poorly situated dwellings with few local services, the lived experience of low-rise was more about spending additional time in cold, uninsulated or poorly heated homes, or needing to use public transport to access essential work—alongside well-founded anxieties about contamination.