What is social housing?

Governments or philanthropic organisations provide social housing for people who cannot afford to rent at market rates. It has different names: public housing in Australia, state housing in NZ, and council housing in the UK. Different labels; same purpose.

Social housing is not affordable housing, though the two are routinely conflated. Affordable housing sets rent at a percentage discount to market rates. Social housing sets rent according to the tenant’s capacity to pay. Two entirely different things. The distinction matters, because conflating them lets governments claim credit for one while quietly abandoning the other.

Why do we need social housing?

Australia will always need social housing. Whilst we aim to have as many people owning a home as possible (see point 1), ownership will never be universal. There will always be some households whose income is insufficient to buy no matter how subsidised the pathway or who are ill-suited to the responsibilities of ownership.

Whilst some households choose to rent (see point 2), there are many who cannot afford to rent in an open market that offers nothing at the price they can afford. They are not a small or marginal group. They include the elderly on fixed incomes, people with disabilities, those leaving institutions, survivors of domestic violence and households that have never earned enough to save a deposit.

Unlike built-to-own or built-to-rent, social housing cannot pay for itself. Rents set by capacity to pay will not cover land, construction or financing costs. Rents require subsidies, and only governments or philanthropic organisations can provide them at the scale needed. It is not a design problem or a planning problem. It is a funding problem, and the funding has to come from somewhere.

How do we achieve social housing?

Australia has housed its poorest citizens before, and it can do so again. The question is whether it has the will. At its peak, public housing accounted for around 7% of Australia’s housing stock. Working families, migrants, single parents, and older people: social housing was a normal part of the system, not a tenure of shame.

Today that figure sits below 3% for a population twice the size. The waiting lists are long, the stock is ageing, and the political appetite to ramp up our subsidised housing is close to zero. As a form of welfare, only governments can do that at scale.

In Australia, the states have carried that responsibility for most of the past century, with councils doing so before them. There is no agreed-upon federal programme to reverse that decline, and no state has a credible plan to reach the 10% that would actually make a dent in waiting lists.

The best path forward now is direct federal funding to organisations best placed to build and manage social housing at the local level. Not state bureaucracies, but smaller bodies with the capacity to know their communities and to provide the support services that housing alone cannot. Government should provide the subsidy; local community groups do the work.

What form should social housing take?

Social housing should follow the 5 D's.

Dispersed: 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 (the high-rise towers in Sydney's Waterloo and South Melbourne) or aggregated in far-flung suburbs with poor amenities and transport (Sydney’s Green Valley). We must resist the temptation to solve a big problem with a big stick.

Diverse: Social housing should be diverse, not one type. Social households mirror our varied and multicultural society, which compels a matching variety of spatial arrangements. Suburban family homes and high-rise solo apartments, with a mix of all typologies in between. When you combine dispersed and diverse, you design mixed social housing everywhere, ending uniformity and resisting monoculture.

Indistinguishable: Social housing should be indistinguishable from owned or market rental housing. Good social housing looks like the street it sits in. Social tenants should be mixed into the community with equity and equanimity, the housing imperceptibly built so that only its rental operation distinguishes it from the housing next door. People in housing stress don’t need their address to announce it. We must resist the temptation for experimentation on the poor.

Durable: Social housing must be well built, because it will be held in perpetuity. Costs for maintenance, upgrading and replacement must be minimised to ensure low costs into the future. The lowest income housing must have the highest standards of durability and sustainability to ensure the lowest ongoing costs for the residents.

Divested: Whilst social housing may be funded by the federal government and planned state-wide, it must be managed by local organisations that know the areas, problems, and issues. This may be multiple Community Housing Providers, or CHPs. Centralised delivery is divested by letting a thousand flowers bloom.

In closing…

Successful social housing in the 21st century can learn from past missteps by addressing the real needs and desires of residents. Easy to say; oh, so hard to do, but that’s how we get the best outcome for the much-needed investment in what will soon be the poorest 10% of households.

‘Housing Australia – Noun + Verb' is a forthcoming book by Tone Wheeler, collecting fifty years of work on philosophy, policies, projects, planning, processes and the practice of housing.

Tone Wheeler

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