Rooming house futures: governing for growth, transparency and fairness

Examines the policy and practical challenges being encountered in the development of a legitimate and viable rooming/boarding house sector, and how might these best be overcome through an improved regulatory regime and other measures to address a range of housing needs. Executive summary This Discussion Paper is provided to invitees to an Investigative Panel on Rooming House Futures as part of a project funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The principal question framing this project asks: What are the policy and practical challenges being encountered in the development of a legitimate and viable rooming house/boarding house sector and how might these best be overcome through an improved regulatory regime and other measures to address a range of housing needs? Key features of the rooming house sector in Victoria are: There are 1131 registered rooming houses, with 60 per cent operated by individuals and 40 per cent by organisations. The majority are in suburban locations in suburban Melbourne, particularly south-eastern Melbourne and regional centres, most notably Geelong. The number of unregistered rooming houses, for which there are varying estimates, is unknown. The growth of new rooming houses has principally stemmed from the conversion of existing private houses into rooming houses in the suburbs which has arrested and reversed the decline of rooming houses as traditional older style rooming houses were demolished or converted back to single family use. Rooming houses accommodate disadvantaged and vulnerable people but, recently, new forms of demand have emerged which includes that from international and domestic students, travellers, low-income earners and some types of key workers. People find accommodation in rooming houses in different ways including through tertiary education providers, referrals from not-for-profit agencies, online sites such as Gumtree and through word-of-mouth. Developments in the sector have been market-led with increasing growth in segments in the rooming/boarding house sector that appear to have outpaced policy and regulatory settings. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of available evidence on the rooming house market. In the period from 2006 through to 2012 Non Government Organisation (NGO) campaigns highlighted issues of amenity, health and safety for rooming house residents in the context of a changing housing market and called for regulatory reform. In Chapter 3 an account of changes to the system of regulation that followed a government review is provided along with an analysis of stakeholder views of the outcome. In Chapter 4 a summary account of significant outstanding issues is presented which lead to identification of key issues for further discussion by the Investigative Panel (Chapter 5)

Social housing strategies, financing mechanisms and outcomes

This review provides a brief update of developments in social housing policies and national strategies in a cross‐section of developed countries since 2007. The countries included in the review are: Austria, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Scotland, Sweden (described collectively as European countries) and the United States of America. The time‐frame for this exercise is largely influenced by timing of the global economic downturn and credit crisis which has, in many countries, prompted fundamental policy shifts. With this in mind, the next part of this introductory chapter highlights some of the key features of the post‐2007 economic context for housing policy. In selecting countries for inclusion in the review we have aimed to encompass a diversity of national social housing systems in countries with broadly similar economic and social profiles to Australia. Jurisdictions included are those where one or more of the contributing authors have direct knowledge of the social housing system and have recently conducted research on aspects of housing policy. The review has been commissioned by Housing NSW to provide background information for the ongoing development of The Housing Strategy for New South Wales. It builds on and extends research funded by the City Futures Research Centre (UNSW), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and OTB TU Delft which is published in the following conference papers and reports: Lawson, Gilmour and Milligan (2010); Lawson (2009); Lawson and Milligan (2007); Milligan and Lawson (2008); Lawson and Nieboer (2009); Lawson, Berry, Yates and Milligan (2009); Milligan, Gurran, Lawson, Phibbs and Phillips (2009); and Hulse, Milligan and Easthope (2011). The report also draws on the UK Housing Review (Pawson & Wilcox, 2011 and forthcoming 2012) and on recently published material available online compiled by various research and sector organisations in a range of countries. The report was prepared for Housing NSW, Department of Families and Communities, NSW Government in December 2011 and has been recently release

RAMESES publication standards: realist syntheses

PMCID: PMC3558331This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Reanalysis of the Stratosphere in GEOS-5: Lessons Learned from MERRA and Future Prospects

The MERRA configuration of GEOS-5 includes about 30 layers in the middle atmosphere, with an upper boundary near 80km. Stratospheric Sounding Unit (SSU) and Advanced microwave sounding unit ( AMSU) radiance data are assimilated, which yield good constraints on the analyses up to the upper stratosphere. This paper examines the performance of MERRA, with foci on: the somewhat erratic system behavior in the 1980s, as numerous SSU instruments were available for short periods; the transition from SSU to AMSU radiances; conflicts between equivalent instruments on different platforms, given in the context of bias correction and the diurnal cycle; and, the relative stability of the analyses in the 21st Century. The results from MERRA provide guidance for how to use the operational polar-orbiting datasets in future reanalyses. Additional discussion will be directed at the possible use of research data sets, from limb-sounding instruments, in future multi-decadal products

Structure of the Upper Troposphere-Lower Stratosphere (UTLS) in GEOS-5

This study examines the structure of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere in the GEOS-5 data assimilation system. Near-real time analyses, with a horizontal resolution of one-half or one quarter degree and a vertical resolution of about 1km in the tropopause region are examined with an emphasis on spatial structures at and around the tropopause. The contributions of in-situ observations of temperature and microwave and infrared radiances to the analyses are discussed, with some focus on the interplay between these types of observations. For a historical analysis (Merra) performed with GEOS-5, the impacts of changing observations on the assimilation system are examined in some detail - this documents some aspects of the time dependence of analysis that must be taken into account in the isolation of true geophysical trends. Finally, some sensitivities of the ozone analyses to input data and correlated errors between temperature and ozone are discussed

What Have We Learned from MERRA about Reanalyses of the Stratosphere?

The Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalysis includes a well-resolved middle atmosphere. The upper boundary of the underlying model is in the mesosphere, near 80km, and the input data streams include the Stratospheric Sounding Unit (SSU) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) radiance observations. These two datasets provide observational constraints on the deep-layer thermal structure in approximately the 10-2hPa region, the middle to upper stratosphere, which is above the highest range of most radiosonde ascents. This analysis will focus on the difficulties of producing realistic analyses in the middle to upper stratosphere: these arise largely because of vertical averaging inherent in the AMSU and SSU observations, the sensitivity to model biases in this region, the relative biases among the same channels on different instruments, and the orbital sampling of the satellites (morning or afternoon orbits). These issues will be illustrated with examples from MERRA and enhanced by discussions of potential ways of improving the middle atmosphere in future reanalyses

RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews

PMCID: PMC3558334This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Evaluation of Newcastle’s ‘cooperative’ approach to the prevention and management of homelessness in light of changing Government policy

This was a follow up to a previous funded study and examined the manner in which services to prevent and tackle homelessness in Newcastle were developing in the face of substantial funding cuts

Letter from Pansy Pawson to Senator Langer Regarding Illegitimacy Cases on the Fort Berthold Reservation, November 17, 1954

This letter, dated November 17, 1954, from Fort Berthold Social Worker Pansy Pawson to United States (US) Senator William Langer, makes reference to a request from Fort Berthold Agency Superintendent Ralph Shane that Pawson prepare a report on 20 cases of illegitimate birth on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Pawson writes that she has asked repeatedly and unsuccessfully for a list of the 20 cases from John B. Hart, executive director of the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, as there is no such list at the Fort Berthold Agency, and she has no idea where Hart got that figure. Pawson goes on to explain that no mass effort is made to prove paternity on each and every case of illegitimacy reported on the birth certificate at the Fort Berthold Agency, and describes difficulties involved in establishing paternity in such cases, including a lack of emotional support for mothers who try to get fathers to accept the illegitimate children. Clients at the agency, she writes, are not given assistance until some effort is made, usually through court action, to prove paternity. In many cases, she adds, the father is married, which precludes any effort to force a marriage. Pawson, in closing, writes that she is sorry she was unable to remain at the Hearing until I was called upon, as I would like to have discussed the welfare problem here at Fort Berthold more fully than it was discussed during the day while I was at the Hearing. See also: Letter from Senator Langer to John B. Hart Regarding Illegitimacy Cases on the Fort Berthold Reservation, November 19, 1954 Letter from John B. Hart to Senator Langer Regarding Illegitimacy Cases on the Fort Berthold Reservation, December 17,1954https://commons.und.edu/langer-papers/2071/thumbnail.jp