Rental-Insights-A-COVID-19-Collection - Flipbook - Page 35
RENTAL INSIGHTS:
UNHEALTHY HOUSING
Involving architects who are specialists
in functional home design is key to
creating quality living areas for the
future. Everyone in Australia not only
deserves a home to live in but deserves
light, air, warmth and aspect. It is about
reframing the problem of the systems
that creates, monitors, and provides
for quality housing for all. Those
renovations could be categorised in
three ways. First, minor repairs and
maintenance which typically is painting,
fixing steps, plastering cracking
from movement, etc. Second, major
construction projects that would require
repairing damage to the structure or
major items such as roofing or cladding,
and third, redesign to improve the
quality of thermal performance, light
penetration, as well as potentially
including skylights, additions of
windows/glazed doors, external
sunscreens/pergolas or internal
reconfiguration of rooms/walls, etc.
What is the relevance
to Australian policy?
It is not enough to simply identify the
extent of the problem through research,
we also need to think through policy
implications. Australia has always viewed
the housing sector as key to economic
growth and stability. In response to the
pandemic and the ensuing recession, we
yet again look to the housing sector to
help us out. The national Homebuilder
Stimulus Package scheme for housing
new build and renovations was put
forward as a stimulus to house building
and construction.
As a catalyst to the Australian economy
and a solution to adequately housing
people in disadvantaged situations, we
also need to redesign and reconstruct
existing rental housing to improve the
quality of life.
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The quality of the existing housing stock
would dramatically improve. For too
long we have focused on new building;
it is time to reset the housing policy
agenda to address poor quality existing
housing stock.
This requires a complete review of
the systems that would fund, assess,
evaluate, monitor, regulate and audit.
There would need to be independent
assessments of building and design
quality and then degrees of legal
requirements to ensure that landlords
authentically accessed funds. The
design, building and certification
community would need to be mobilised
and incentivised.
Everyone in Australia
not only deserves a
home to live in but
deserves light, air,
warmth and aspect.