Australia's Public Housing Assets Face A Maintenance Crisis

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The affordable housing news coming in from down under is not worth sending postcards about, but opinions are flying, suggesting 'thinking big' could be the way out of the mess. 

What's With Aussie Land's Housing?

Okay, so first up, it's common knowledge that very low-income earners can afford only very low rent, and in Australia, the gap between what they can pay and the cost of decent housing is not being bridged by the government. 

This is making the maintenance of existing affordable and subsidised housing stock impossible, meaning the number of liveable low rent homes is sinking everyday. 

And with fewer suitable homes available due to the maintenance crisis, priority occupancy is being given to those in the most dire need, who naturally can’t pay much in rent. 

This catch 22 situation is further eroding the corpus available for upkeep and development of new inventory, shrinking the public housing sector further. 

How Bad Is It?

🔖 Across Australia, so many decaying housing projects need to be destroyed that the AUD10 billion being spent to build 23,000 homes over the next three years will only end up adding about 15,500 units to the available pool of public housing. 

🔖 In Tasmania (Australia's largest island State), the waiting list for affordable public housing has ballooned from 2,100 in June 2013 to 4,707 in February 2022 and the estimated wait time for “priority applicants” to be housed in Tasmania is almost five years today.

🔖 By the mid-2030s, it’s estimated 731,000 new public housing units will have to be built to house homeless and low-income Australians facing unaffordable private rents. 

And BTW, Australia has two housing crises - this one and the bigger affordable housing number. We will leave the latter for another edition of the newsletter.