Housing, home ownership and the governance of ageing

'Active ageing' has become core to ageing policy internationally. This paper argues that housing, and specifically home purchase, is fundamental to the governance of active ageing in liberal welfare states such as Australia, the UK, the US and Canada. Specifically, the paper expands understanding of how neoliberally inflected active ageing agendas are advanced in conjunction with housing consumption, and builds new knowledge of the governance of asset-based welfare, the investor subject, and housing marginality, showing how these practices and identities are governed temporally through ideas about what it means to age well. Arguments are advanced through analysis of Australian government ageing and age-connected housing strategies in the 20 years to 2015. These strategies construct three key connections between housing and ageing. First, housing is framed as a base (or location) for active ageing, with secure, appropriate and affordable housing depicted as enabling participation. Second, home ownership is positioned as an individual responsibility. In this framing home ownership becomes a 'choice' and means through which individuals can demonstrate responsibility by self-insuring against the fiscal risks of older age. Third, home ownership is connected to the activation of ideal ageing identities by enabling home owners as productive agers (the home as a form of income) and active consumers (home as a resource to fund prudential and age-defying consumption in older age). Significantly, in framing home ownership as an individual responsibility and choice the importance of structural factors shaping housing access are downplayed. This is a question of key geographical significance, foregrounding an interlinked agenda of not just how, but where, ageing should take place

Co-living, gentlemen's clubs, and residential hotels : a long view of shared housing infrastructures for single young professionals

Shared housing is an important infrastructure for young single professionals living and working in the city. Co-living is a contemporary shared housing infrastructure. But it certainly is not the first. We advocate for what Flanagan and Jacobs (2019) call taking a “long view” by drawing connections between early 19th-century gentlemen’s clubs, mid-19th-century residential hotels and contemporary co-living. We argue each have been dynamic infrastructures of mobility, work, and sociality that make certain practices more or less possible and reflect on how the socio-material form of these infrastructures connects with the infrastructural work it does. We draw on our own research study into co-living, connecting our findings with research on the historical housing types. Our findings show that shrinking private spaces, maximizing productive spaces, and integrating services are strategies that animate the infrastructural work of these housing types. By linking co-living with historical housing types, we demonstrate the importance of taking a “long view” when thinking infrastructurally about novel housing practices

Articulating Value in Cooperative Housing: International and Methodological Review

Housing cooperatives are a growing presence in Australia’s housing system, providing a diversity of housing forms to a variety of household types across the income spectrum, typically serving low- and moderate-income households. International evidence shows that housing cooperatives can provide a range of housing from very low price points through to market rate in both non-urban and urban contexts. The research presented in this report reviewed a selection of international cooperative housing sectors in addition to the Australian context, with two aims: 1. Compile the current evidence for the social and financial benefits of housing cooperatives, to develop a framework to assess this in Australia; and, 2. Identify preliminary issues regarding the growth and diversification of housing cooperatives in Australia

Wicked Urban Challenges in Western Sydney: Researchers Respond

The purpose of this publication is to provide critical insights and perspectives around how to tackle four of Western Sydney’s wicked urban challenges, and ensure our region is prepared for the future, namely: job/housing imbalances and inadequate infrastructure investment; declining housing affordability; cultural infrastructure disparities; extreme urban heat. Our aim is that this publication continues the debate generated in the online forum, ‘Wicked urban challenges in Western Sydney: researchers respond’, held in October 2021. The event was sponsored by Western Sydney University (WSU). The university is a modern, forward-thinking, research-led university, located at the heart of the Western Sydney region. Boasting 12 campuses (many in CBD locations) and more than 170,000 alumni, 48,000 students and 3,000 staff, the university has 14 Schools with an array of well-designed programs and courses carefully structured to meet the demands of future industry. The event was organised through the University’s Urban Living Futures and Society Research Theme and formed part of the University’s 2021 Research Week, called ‘Bold Research Futures’. This theme had real resonance with what was discussed that day. Over 160 people attended this highly interactive forum, right across the built environment profession and other key professions. The invitation, however, had gone wider, to many people living and working in Western Sydney and beyond. The event brought together our researchers, government, industry, and our local community to challenge conventional policy thinking and offer new ways to solve these four wicked urban challenges in Western Sydney (as outlined above). The remainder of this report provides a summary of four of WSU’s leading urban researchers’ presentations, as delivered on the day. Each of the academics draw from the strategic programs of work being carried out by multi-disciplinary teams across our university. Each brings fresh perspectives and insights to our understanding of the challenges that Western Sydney faces and offers bold policy solutions and initiatives

The Value of Housing Co-operatives in Australia: Technical Report

This technical report details the methodology developed for the ARC Linkage project "Articulating Value in Co-operative Housing". It discusses the overall approach, details the tools and analyses used, and provides the relevant research tools as appendices

Older Women in the Private Rental Sector: Unaffordable, Substandard and Insecure Housing

Single older women aged 55 and over are overrepresented amongst the asset poor in Australia. They are also one of the fastest growing groups of homeless people nationally. This status is a product of a number of risks that accrue to women across the life course including gendered differences in pay and superannuation. It is also a product of an unaffordable and insecure private rental system. This report presents the experiences of single older women living on low incomes in the private rental sector within and around the Greater Sydney region, Australia. It presents their efforts to make home and meet their essential needs in a segment of the housing market where rising rents and short lease terms of six to twelve months are the norm. First, the report presents women’s experiences of unaffordable housing. Older women renters face difficulties finding appropriate, quality housing. High housing costs have implications for budget management, including the ability to buy sufficient nutritious food and manage utility bills. Further, affordable housing is often of low or degraded quality. Second, the report presents women’s experiences of housing insecurity. Rent increases and evictions often required women to move house. Women described the challenges moving house and how these challenges compounded over time through multiple experiences of unchosen and unplanned relocations. Ongoing housing insecurity drives interconnected financial, physical and emotional costs

[In Press] Mobility-based disadvantage in older age : insecure housing and the risks of moving house

This paper develops knowledge of the logistics of moving house amongst older people living in insecure housing. These people typically do not move once and settle into a new house, but face ongoing moves driven by factors including housing affordability, tenure conditions and eviction. The paper identifies four domains of experience faced by people undergoing cumulative, involuntary residential moves: the material (process of relocating oneself and possessions), economic (costs of moving house), embodied (physical experience) and affective (how relocation is experienced and felt). The logistics of relocation are examined through the experiences of single older women living in insecure housing in the greater Sydney region of Australia. The accounts of these women foreground the costs and challenges of insecure housing that are a consequence of relocation. Conceptually this work contributes to understandings of mobility-based disadvantage in older age through drawing out the ways that the logistics of moving house – of relocating oneself and possessions – contribute in distinct ways to mobility-based disadvantage through risks to identity and senses of home. Empirically it addresses gaps in gerontological and housing scholarship through developing knowledge of the logistics and experiences of ongoing, involuntary residential moves

For renters, making housing more affordable is just the start

Deloitte Access Economics’ Chris Richardson recently suggested that young Australians would be better off renting than trying to buy a house. He argued that ‘rents today make a lot more sense than housing prices’. This may be true. However, the situation for renters is far from clear-cut. Rents continue to increase in Australian cities, and are out of reach for low- and very-low-income earners. Renters also face substantial housing insecurity. In Australia, 50% of renters are on a fixed-term, one-year lease; 20% are on a month-to-month ‘rolling’ lease. For renting to become a truly viable, long-term alternative to home ownership, greater rental affordability and security are needed

Households and neighbourhoods

This chapter explores two very familiar sites, households and neighbourhoods, and discusses the importance of these sites for senses of identity and belonging. The chapter will show that there is a two-way relationship between identity and household/neighbourhood: while social identities impact on the ways that people experience households and neighbourhoods, the experiences that people have within their households and neighbourhoods also impact upon their sense of identity and belonging. These ideas will be explored through case studies that examine the ways that people ‘make homes’ and interact within neighbourhoods. Importantly, households and neighbourhoods will be explored both as places and sets of practices, that is, the practices of home-making (through which home is created and maintained) and neighbouring (the interactions between people who are neighbours and through which neighbourhoods are constituted). Through this focus on practice we can start to ask how houses are made into homes and how neighbouring relations shape the nature of different neighbourhood spaces. The chapter also reflects on the ways that global cultures, processes and relations are impacting on the sites and practices of home and neighbouring, starting at the home before expanding in scale to consider the space of the neighbourhood

Assembling the capacity to care : caring-with precarious housing

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring-with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring-with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of “caring with” as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring-with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring-with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co-constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring-with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring-with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)