Auditor-General reports on public housing

The NSW Audit Office has today released the Auditor-General's report 'Making the best use of public housing'.

(Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat)

There's a lot in the report – more than we can cover this afternoon – but its essential message to the State Government is something low-income households and the people who work with them have known for years: there's just not enough social housing, particularly public housing. As the Auditor-General puts it:

The constraints in the current portfolio and funding arrangements do not enable HNSW [Housing NSW] and LAHC [Land and Housing Corporation] to meet the changing public housing need. 

Public housing is ageing and increasingly not fit for purpose. It is declining as a proportion of overall New South Wales housing. 

There is an increasing shortfall between the supply of and demand for public housing.

This is the essential problem from which so many other problems in public housing follow – and compound that essential problem. Not enough public housing means targeting allocations to the most poor and crisis-afflicted applicants. This in turn means higher costs to Housing NSW, and less rental revenue. This in turn means yet fewer funds for new stock, and for maintenance. This means greater resort to asset sales, to avoid maintenance liabilities of the stock that's sold, and to pay for some maintenance on the stock that's left. This means fewer dwellings, and a further increase in the shortfall between supply or and demand for public housing. It's a vicious circle, and it's unsustainable.

Appropriately, the Auditor-General locates the problem of 'under-occupancy' of public housing within this context. To the extent to which it is a problem – and as we've previously noted, under-occupancy is less common in public housing than private rental or owner-occupation, where it is not seen as a problem at all – under-occupancy happens largely because the old public housing stock profile does not match the new public housing clientele profile, and Housing NSW's ability to do anything about it is constrained by the pressures of not enough dwellings and too many poor and crisis-afflicted applicants.

It would be a mistake, and a serious injustice to all the households whose needs are not being met by our diminished public housing system, if the State Government was to merely tweak Housing NSW's policies around the allocation of bedrooms and transfers, and not face up to the essential challenge of growing public housing. Tweaking allocations and transfers really is just shifting the deckchairs.

That's not to say that there are no changes that can be made at the operational policy level to address the vicious circle of public housing's decline. Housing NSW could change now its wretched policy of offering fixed term tenancies and reviewing eligibility to remain in public housing. According to the Auditor-General, this policy has 'had little impact on people moving on from public housing'. We'd go further: we suspect it has induced tenants to stay sick and stay poor in order to stay housed, where otherwise they might have taken work opportunities that lead, eventually, to their moving on from public housing. The declining number of exits from public housing, illustrated in the report, is consistent with our view. 

Likewise Housing NSW's 'moderate income' rents policy, under which Housing NSW takes 50 cents in each additional dollar earned by tenants foolhardy enough to get a job that pays a 'moderate income' – with the Centrelink and the Tax Office getting most or all of the other 50 cents. Scrap this policy and see if the increased incentive to work doesn't eventually free up some space in public housing too.

The Auditor-General makes a number of recommendations for higher-level work by Housing NSW and the Land and Housing Corporation, in terms of strategy and planning. But these mustn't be strategies or plans merely for managing the decline of the social housing sector. Social housing must grow to meet community needs.

Are you enrolled to vote?

If you're waiting for the date of the federal election to be set to sort out your electoral enrolment, wait no longer. No, the date hasn't been set. You should just do it now. Don't wait!

If you've never been enrolled before, you can enrol online at the Australian Electoral Commission's website.

You're required to enrol if you're 18 years or older and an Australian citizen (some British citizens are eligible too). (And if you're 16 or 17 and are waiting til you're 18, don't wait – you can enrol now too).

If you've enrolled previously, but are not sure if you are still enrolled, you can check your enrolment online. And if you're enrolled under an old address, you can change your address online.

It does happen that people drop off the electoral roll, particularly if they've moved and have not notified the AEC of the change of address. (The AEC periodically sends out surveys to check who is currently living at an address, and if the returned survey doesn't match the roll, those on the roll may get bumped.)

If you've dropped off the roll, you can re-enrol online.

Tell your friends, housemates and fellow tenants to make sure they're enrolled to vote. See the AEC's 'Don't Leave It To The Last Minute' campaign for more info.

There's no such thing as a free shirt

We're a gracious lot here at the Brown Couch. As a way of saying 'thanks' for your continued support of the work of the Tenants' Advice & Advocacy Services and the Tenants' Union of NSW, we'd like to give away a couple of T-shirts.

We don't have many. As much as we'd like to, we can't just give them out to anybody who wants one. Instead, we've come up with a bit of a game - play the game, and you can have a free shirt.

It's a pretty simple game. Here's how it works:

We're going to pretend that we've got a situation where some rising damp is causing an internal wall to blister and peel. At first it just looked like a coat of paint would fix it, but it's pretty obvious now that more than that will be required.

The landlord has said they'd fix it, but they don't really seem that concerned about it. From our own inspections, we can see that this wall has been patched up before…

We're sure the landlord ought to do more this time. How can we get them to fix it properly?

***

Answer this question

- Or -

Tell us about a time when you asked for your landlord to fix something

- Or -

Tell us what you would change to make asking your landlord to fix something less of an ordeal

… and we'll send you a shirt.

***

All answers need to be left as comments on this blog.

Feel free to answer anonymously, but in order to get your shirt, you'll also need to contact us so we can get one to you in the correct size. The best way to do that is by Facebook or Twitter, but if you're not on the social pages you can always contact us by more traditional means.

Congratulations to tenants William and Catherine

The Brown Couch congratulates tenants William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, on the birth of their son and future Australian monarch, George.

Their Royal Highnesses rent their home, a farm house on the Isle of Anglesea, off the coast of Wales. (Although, according to reports, the young family is shortly to move to new digs, with some help from William's gran.)

As a renting family, their Highnesses are in good company amongst subjects in New South Wales too: here about 40 per cent of rented houses are homes to children.

In fact, about a quarter of all people living in rented houses in New South Wales are children under the age of 14 – and almost half of all Aboriginal people living in rented houses in New South Wales are kids.

Best wishes and good luck to William, Catherine and George, and all the other parents and kids trying to make a home in rental housing.

Little paper houses...

We think affordable housing is really important. In fact we're talking about it pretty much constantly on The Brown Couch. Check out this link if you'd like to read over some of our featured comments.

We know we're not alone. Housing affordability is a huge issue for loads and loads of Australians. In fact, we'd go so far as to say it's an issue that concerns everyone. Even if you've secured your own affordable home - whether you're paying a landlord or a bank, or you own your place outright - unaffordable housing has a significant impact on our economy. As the 'resources boom' starts to wane, and we turn to the residential housing sector to fill the void, unaffordable housing will continue to bite.

This week, Australians for Affordable Housing are encouraging us to take 5 days of action for affordable housing.

Today's action calls for us all to get a little bit crafty - if you follow this link you'll get a graphic that looks like this:

You download it, print off a couple of copies, cut them out and fashion them into a neat little row of cute paper houses.

Once constructed, you put them around your own neighbourhood, and draw attention to the Australians for Affordable Housing campaign.

Better still - take a photo and post it to your favourite social media site, along with your message about why affordable housing is important.

... and if you haven't already done so, like the Facebook page, follow the Twitter account, and sign up to support the Australians for Affordable Housing campaign.

Friday afternoon grizzle...

Its raining in Sydney, and that's reason enough to go off on a bit of an angry ramble.

The other day, we came across this article, in which a noted Australian supplier of tiles - Mr Bob Beaumont - opines that the affordability of housing is pushing home-ownership beyond even our wildest dreams.

He makes a good point - it's not the cost of construction that's pushing up the prices, but the cost of land:

Builders aren't to blame. Open a newspaper on any weekend and you'll see ads from people who are happy to build you a new house for an amazingly low price. Materials also cost less. I know because tiles are my line of business. Their prices are less now than they were in the mid-'80s - and many other construction supplies are similarly cheaper.

Home ownership has become the privilege of the few rather than the rightful expectation of the many because policymakers have paid no regard to the law of supply and demand. Our urban planners and policymakers have drawn an arbitrary red line around the edges of our cities and decided all building development will be contained within these boundaries.

Okay, so we might have a few words to say about policymakers and their regard to supply and demand - or how over-stimulated demand and under-stimulated supply creates a volatile cocktail that sends house prices to the moon...

But that's not important right now, because Mr Beaumont goes on:

These shallow-thinking twits didn't think that by restricting supply they have pushed the price of land up tremendously, condemning our kids to a lifetime of renting with no hope of owning their own homes.

Of course, there are a couple of easy-to-spot problems with Mr Beaumont's claim here: landlords need houses, too; and renting a home doesn't always make it cheap.

But let's leave that aside.

... and in the meantime, consider yourself condemned!

What we've got here is a cultural indicator that should never go unchallenged: for as long as you rent, you're missing out on something that's very, very important. Perhaps you'll never even become a proper grown-up if you're going to spend your whole life renting - you'll always be thought of as one of 'our kids'.

But renting is fine. Or at least it would be, if we had laws and policies that were more than a mere reflection of this patronising but entrenched assumption. Our legal relationships with land should be of no concern to our neighbours, but the way we regard one another so often depends on our illogical biases around tenure.

Anyway, there's more. Mr Beaumont again:

What right do governments have to dictate to voters they are better off living in cramped conditions in apartments and units than in the suburbs with a backyard and room to move?

Perhaps the same right that builders-who-have-already-made-their-fortunes have to assume 'our kids' are better off buying in the middle of nowhere than to rent in the inner- to middle-ring suburbs, with decent transport links, and proximity to the rest of their lives...

Bright sparks and smoke alarms

I was talking recently with a fellow from the Real Estate Institute about smoke alarms, which since 2005 have been required in all homes in New South Wales.

The fellow from the REI recounted that soon after the requirement came in, agents began to get a bit suss that tenants were removing the batteries to put in their TV remotes. So the agents started installing alarms that took nine volt batteries – won't fit in remotes. Problem fixed. Ha ha!

My only thought in response to this was... that's pretty clever, actually.

It's a foolish tenant who leaves a smoke alarm without a battery. If the battery's dead, change it – and if you can't change it (eg you can't reach the alarm), get the landlord to change it. If it's giving false alarms, get the landlord to fix it.