If housing was considered a human right, would it fix our housing crisis?
If housing was considered a human right, would it fix our housing crisis?
If housing was a fundamental human right, what would that mean for Australians, asks Gareth Hutchens.
Yes lol, almost every country has the resources and labor power to provide housing for every single citizen
So let’s game out what this could look like. If the US instituted housing as a right, there would be a constitutional push to provide a minimum of housing for all citizens. The approach would be of concern on this. Would it be a Medicare type of push or private healthcare type of push. If a public service, there would be minimal standards for housing and the purchasing of land along with possibly some eminent domain to provide housing of decent standards and in appropriate proximity to places where people want and need to be. If this is done via private enterprise with public money, we end up with a single 10x10 room in the middle of the desert and shared bathroom across 50 residents and possibly double ply cardboard for walls. I guarantee that if this is done as a public/private partnership that the private prison industry makes a proposal that is super cost effective to provide housing to large segments of unhoused Americans. We need both housing as a right and for it to be handled not terribly.
lmfao at the arrow on the graph "the market did not do this"
You can practically feel the frustration of the author.
Gareth is a good bloke.
How about this: you can't use price signals to lower demand for something that's a basic need.
There was a push to end rent-bidding recently, but they said no of course we need rent bidding, how else are you meant to respond to rising demand, except by pricing poor people out of the market?
Yeah no. It's not OK to do that.
Luxury items, it's still mildly sociopathic if you think about it but fine, whatever.
But basic human needs don't go away if you make them too expensive, and it's fundamentally not OK to triage them by wealth.
Imagine if they implemented this as a solution for overcrowded emergency rooms. Okay people, wait times are getting pretty long, so we're charging you all $10,000 just to stay in the queue; pay up or go home. Yay, it's looking way emptier out there, we fixed healthcare.
There would be heads on spikes before the week was out.
Doing the same thing with shelter is just as fucking inappropriate.
Don't we actually do that with private health though? In a roundabout way.
"hey you can wait 6 months for a doctor/surgery or you can tithe to some millionaires and get seen by a parasitic sector draining resources from public health and driving up prices faster!"
If only there was some way the government could influence any of this.
Seeing as housing is already considered a human right (Article 25), tautologically the answer to the question is no.
This. Housing is definitely a human right and it is generally provided in Australia.
Where it gets more complex is how much should housing cost and what quality of housing should people get for their money? For example can you afford a house to yourself, or do you need to live with other people and share the rent? Maybe even share a bedroom?
Australia doesn't have a shortage of housing, what we have is a shortage of affordable housing. As in, some people aren't able to pay for the houses that they want to live in and they aren't willing to live in the ones that they can afford.
Domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness in Australia. Victims of that often do have a home but it's not a safe one, so they're actually better off on the street. With help, these victims can find a home (and help is available).
In my mind, the only way to fix the housing crisis is to implement policy which will effectively collapse the housing market, and that would be a suicidal move by any party so they just wont do it. Every day is some story of the Government's attempt to fix it, the latest was building 3,000 appartments next to the Metro at Macquarie Park. In what world does anyone think these things will be affordable when they are 30 mins from the city and a walk to the metro?
The only ways I can see to fix it is to grandfather capital gains tax discounts on investments and kill AirBNB
Also, while I like the notion of affordable housing, I don't think it is possible to build. Nothing is affordable these days. Affordable labour and materials don't really exist..
No?
We already fail to provide basic human rights to many Australians. Enshrining more wont magically make the government give a fuck about us.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It was scornful of the way private landlords had historically treated renters in this country, and said housing was a right and should stop being a "field of investment" that yielded high profits for a minority of landowners.
At the same time, there was strong growth around Australia in owner-building, made possible by the large number of prematurely subdivided blocks and vacant allotments that were sitting idle in major cities from the pre-war era.
According to the late Professor Patrick Troy, by the mid-1990s Australian governments were recreating the social conditions that had originally led to the demands for a national public housing program in the 1940s.
"Surely we need our tax system to enable opportunity for everyone to have secure access to one home before incentivising a minority to have many," former NSW Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, said at the at the same event.
And they said the private sector had repeatedly failed to build adequate housing for low-income groups in Australia, suggesting that governments should accept responsibility for doing so.
"The Commission considers that the housing of the people of the Commonwealth adequately, soundly, hygienically, and effectively, each according to his social and economic life is a national need, and, accordingly, should cease to be a field of investment yielding high profits," they concluded.
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