Last week examined the social housing crisis in six diagrams. This week, in the last ever ToT, six essential diagrams explain how to fix, or at least alleviate, that crisis.

1.

We have three kinds of households, in equal thirds, which we call ternary. Owners own one house outright, often another. Purchasers who have a mortgage with a bank. Renters, the last third, have no property investment.

2.

Let’s look at the rental part of the pie chart more closely. 10% of households will rent for lifestyle. 10% have no other option but the commercial market. And 10% cannot currently afford to rent in the commercial market need social housing. This is the most difficult cohort to address.

The 10% of households needing social housing are woefully under-serviced - only 3% can live in state supplied social housing. For the remaining 7% it is a fight to meet the market rent demands by going without other life necessities; or living in sub-standard (and usually over-priced) accommodation; or worse, becoming homeless.

3.

To understand how to build more social housing, we need to understand how the feasibility of a project is assessed. Developers traditionally rely on the one third rule: the final sale price of a dwelling is made up of three roughly equal ‘parts’: the price of the land, the cost of construction and the developers’ profit.

4.

One clear way to build more affordable social housing is to cut two-thirds of the costs. The are several sectors that have land that can be contributed to a development at little to no cost. Primarily the government, at all 3 tiers. Secondly the churches, the second biggest land holders. And thirdly the philanthropists who can donate land (or money for land) at no cost to the development.

At the other end of the pipeline is the removal of profit, at least in the form of a big pay day on a sale. By holding on to the project for a long time, or forever, as a rental, a big upfront cost can be eliminated. This is the basis of build to rent or BTR projects. In the case of social housing the rental returns can enabler the project to ‘wash its face’, or it may need to be subsidised.

5.

Good social housing follows the 5 D’s: Dispersed; Diverse; Indistinguishable; Durable and Divested.

Tomorrow’s social housing needs to be everywhere: dispersed through all suburbs and towns. People with social needs should not be congregated in the annulus of inner-city areas, or aggregated in far-flung suburbs with poor amenities and transport.

Social housing should be diverse, not just one type. Family homes in the suburbs, solo apartments in high-rise towers, and a mix of all typologies in between. Our huge variety of households (less than 50% traditional families) compels a matching variety of different spatial arrangements.

Social housing should be indistinguishable from the surroundings. Residents mixed into the community rather than stigmatised into ghettos of the past. Imperceptibly built so that only its rental operation distinguishes it from the housing next door. The worst social housing shriek eyesores, the best social housing goes unnoticed.

Social housing must be durable, because it will be held in perpetuity by the providers. Costs for maintenance, upgrading and replacement must be minimised to ensure low-costs into the future. An incentive to be better built than the ‘all show and poor go’ market-based housing that plagues poor building quality identified by the NSW Building Commissioner.

Crucially, this cannot be delivered by a singular top-down state organisation. Its distribution must divested from a re-badged housing commission, to be delivered by multiple Community Housing Providers, or CHPs, that know local areas, local problems, and local issues. The centralised big stick approach should be replaced with letting thousand flowers bloom.

6.

The three-part feasibility is design agnostic. Together with the 5 D’s, it applies to all typologies:. social housing should be found in all types of dwellings although, in the larger buildings, there should be a mix of housing occupants to avoid the social ghettoes of the past.

Summary

Social housing is the extreme end of a very real housing crisis. It’s a life and death crisis. State governments and local councils need to incentivise not-for-profit organisations to build social housing; and they need to restructure their approval processes to promote increased densities within existing suburbs, to reduce infrastructure costs and increase diversity.

Title image: We have a housing crisis, at all levels, see ToT 225. The worst of the inequality is the dearth of social housing. It is an missing hole in the whole of society.

Goodbye Tone on Tuesday: This is the last ever Tone on Tuesday. With no A&D on Tuesdays, and the eponymously labelled column wearing out its welcome with the author, the time has come to retire the title. A short break and a newly titled column will appear. Same mix of design and politics.

This is Tone on Tuesday #227, 4 Sept 2024. Researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect / Adjunct Prof UNSW / President AAA. The views expressed are his. Past Tone on Tuesday columns can be found here. You can contact TW at toneontuesday@gmail.com.

Tone Wheeler

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