Factors influencing the rent vs. buy decision - implications for housing markets

This paper considers recent trends in regards to home ownership versus renting in the Australia housing market.

Household composition and housing expenditures in rental-occupied and owner-occupied markets

This article examines the relationship between household compositions and housing expenditures in rental-occupied and owner-occupied markets. The author finds that renters allocate their budget proportionately between housing and nonhousing goods for an additional household member, leaving the budget share of housing expenditures unchanged. For homeowners, nevertheless, an extra member implies a reduction in housing expenditures as a share of total budget. Although age and gender compositions turn out to be significant in determining the budget share of housing expenditures for renters, they play no major role for homeowners. And although an increase in the number of working members for renters significantly reduces the share of budget spent on housing, it has no significant impact for their owner counterparts. Moreover, keeping total expenditures constant, the main income source of the head of the household does not make any difference in terms of resource allocation across housing and nonhousing goods for both renters and owners.

Towards prefabricated sustainable housing - an introduction

Prefabricated building systems are once again gaining popularity. The new prefabricated paradigm offers the integration of several approaches previously ignored: automated manufacturing, integrated building services and environmental sustainable principles. Consistency, predictable environmental control, modular flexibility, quick assembly and affordability are promising features of modern manufactured construction. Though the concept of prefabricated building is not new, this type of construction may be the only hope in obtaining a truely sustainable architecture for our future.

This paper attempts to define and evaluate several prefabricated building systems, ranging from a ‘kit-of-parts’ to fully assembled ‘volumetric’ modules. It aims to categorise various manufactured types among a vast amount of information, and to observe their attributes regarding materials, flexibility, structural integrity, delivery and constructability. This paper suggests that pre-fabricated architecture can deliver high order design and diversity within the framework of waste reduction, renewable systems integration and optimal performance.

Ethnography of housing : a conclusion

This paper is the final report of a research project spanning three years, exploring three field locations and capturing the stories of forty (plus) housing workers. Using an ethnographic research approach, this paper provides an account of how housing workers use language and stories to understand and make sense of their challenging and changing work. First hand accounts ('stories') about every day housing work frame the data in this paper, explaining how housing workers in Victoria have experienced and made sense of the shift from public housing as 'affordable housing for the working poor' to 'housing of last resort for the most vulnerable and needy members of the community'. Using a number of composite stories, this paper provides the reader with a glimpse into the work of public housing staff, transporting the leader from the relatively static world of policy and procedure to the more colorful world of tenants with 'high and complex' needs, 'wicked' problems, weary staff and the daily reality of organisational change.

A unique feature of this research is the comparison of how different workers use stories to build a range of 'socially constructed realities' around the housing work and its wicked problems. This paper compares and contrasts the socially constructed realities of frontline staff with the corresponding social realities of the managers at head office (and vice versa). This 'same problem, different perspective' approach allows the reader to better understand how the same problem is understood and approached in different ways, depending on the individual's organisational role, responsibly and authority. Using stories about 'working with problem tenants', 'collecting rental arrears from the poor and marginalised', 'maintaining old, neglected properties' and 'coping with organisational change', this paper illustrates how the shifting (and sometimes contradictory) construction of housing problems has meant that the organisation has long struggled to devise and implement sustainable remedies to these problems.

The following pages describe how the problems identified in the Housing Office Review (and experienced in the daily work of the 'modern day' housing worker) are simply a contemporary manifestation of 'age old public housing issues'. This paper describes and explains how housing staff have long used narrative to make sense of their often difficult work and ultimately, how they understand and experience a major process of operational policy change associated with the shift from 'public' housing to 'welfare' housing.

Sustainable living environment for urban low-income households in Malaysia : key factors for maintenance

Urbanisation is predicted to continuously increase every year. Demand for urban shelter will rise and hence this will force governments to act, within their capability, to provide affordable housing in order to maintain social and economic stability. Some industrialized countries have demonstrated full state support from planning and implementation through to continuing maintenance in order to create and sustain a healthy living environment for urban low-in-come households. For developing countries, this might be more difficult. Ensuring adequate maintenance to provide housing quality over the long term is proving even more problematic than simply providing housing. The question is how housing in developing countries can be made sustainable in order to provide a better living environment in the long term. This study focuses on key issues of residential living environments for urban low-cost housing in Malaysia in relation to housing maintenance management. Drawing from extensive primary research and a series of interviews, this exploratory study identifies factors that must be considered by policy makers in order to provide a decent and sustainable living environment for the urban lower-income group. The outcome suggests that current systems of maintenance management - offsetting maintenance to developers or the housing communities themselves, is not working well. The government may need to continue to support low cost housing through maintenance in order to prevent deterioration of accommodation that could become future slums.

Living high but healthy : high-rise housing, nature, health and wellbeing

This exploratory mixed method study investigated the factors, including access to nature (i.e. parks and gardens), impacting on inner city high-rise residents' health and wellbeing. Analysis of the integrated findings revealed that a range of factors (including accessibility, choice and control and tenure) impact on residents' health and wellbeing.

Malaysia's terraced housing : towards an environmentally sustainable future

Housing developers in Malaysia have been focusing on providing more homes to deal with the ever growing urban population, and have failed to address environmental issues which run parallel to these housing developments. The thesis identifies and suggests possible actions enabling future housing developments to incorporate sustainable elements.

Analysis of public housing standards in Victoria : 1939-1995

The "housing standard" is a government policy document which defines minimum dwelling standards. This thesis outlines the development of public housing standards in Victoria between 1939 and 1995. The Hotham Housing Estate, North Melbourne, was the case study from which a proposed framework for critical analysis of minimum housing standards was derived.

Migrant housing in the city and the village : from Melbourne to Zavoj

This paper will discuss the kinds of communities that evolve through historical practices of migration. The migrant house is associated with a new architecture that hod appeared in the cities of immigration of the new worlds (Melbourne, Toronto, Chicago). It is perceived as a stereotypical symbolisation of immigrants from Southern European origins that had arrived in the decades following the Second World War. The appearance of houses built by returning migrants in sites of origin suggests other traiectories, other modes of travel, and other forms of community. Central to the thesis of this paper is the testimony of two types of migrant houses. The study draws on theories of migration that address the site of departure, the site of arrival, and the question and conflict of return which is at the centre of the migrant's imaginary. This study will examine the migrant houses in the village of emigration (Zavoj in Macedonia), migrant houses built by returning emigrants. A study of the two houses of migration implicates a set of networks, forces, relations, circumscribing a large global geopolitical and cultural field that questions our understandings of diaspora, the binary structure of dwelling/travelling, and the fabric and fabrication of community. In addition, the paper will explore the notion of house as an imaginary landscape, a psychic geography narrated through migratory travels.

'Build it, fill it and bill it' : how work in the public housing sector has changed (and stayed the same)

This paper is an ethnographic account of how 'wicked' (i.e. entrenched and enduring) problems with the 'building, filling and billing' of public housing have shaped and influenced the work of public housing workers in Victoria, Australia. With a few exceptions, the front line work of housing staff is represented in the literature as smaller, constituent parts of some larger policy process, organisational event or procedural reform. In order to understand how housing work has been constructed over time, this paper attempts to consolidate these fragmented narratives (contained in old documents, training manuals, news articles and reports) into an historical account of 'what it was like' to work in the public/social housing sector. In this paper, I will construct this 'historical account' with the stories I gathered over twelve months of field work in three different public housing offices. In their stories, public housing workers tell me how subtle and incremental has been the change to their work, how increasingly complex are the needs of tenants and how dfficult their work has become. Their stories illustrate the complexity of undersdanding and addressing these 'wicked' housing problems when tenants change, staff change and
the public housing sector has a history of frequent 'restructuring'. This contextualisation of 'old and new stories' will allow the reader to understand how the organisational reality of present day housing work has been socially constructed ('sedimented') by generation, of workers, managers and tenants.