At the beginning of 2020 in the face of a deadly global pandemic we were told to #stayathome. This was impossible for the homeless and difficult for those in precarious or insecure housing. Shelters became full, closed, or were too dangerous to consider sleeping in. Common places to find shelter and a bathroom—libraries, gyms, fast food restaurants, internet cafes — were all closed. Soup kitchens closed, out of food and out of workers.  In a number of cities in France, charities claimed, people were fined for not staying in homes they do not have. In Japan, the government promised to distribute two reusable face masks to every household in the country—this doesn’t include rough sleepers.    

Authorities and charities all over the world scrambled to find accommodation for millions of people by using hotels, motels, gymnasiums and caravan parks. Safe hand-washing stations were set up at major homeless encampments in Los Angeles. Safe Parking LA established a project to enable those living in their cars to stay overnight in secure lots while in Las Vegas people are now sleeping in parking lots, confined to white painted rectangles spaced six feet apart. In India, millions of migrant workers set out to walk home as they could no longer sleep on the streets and public transport was cancelled. Australian governments suddenly found millions of dollars to house rough sleepers in hotels and motels.  

The pandemic has exposed more forcefully and to a wider audience the failure of our current housing system to provide shelter for all. It has also shown, again, that the only way to house everyone in Australia is if governments pay for it. Access to good quality housing is a human right but it is also a public good. Community groups and Housing workers are asking what will happen when we no longer have to stay at home. Will we tip everyone out of hotel rooms and back onto the streets?

As David Pearson from the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness says, "If the global pandemic has been the catalyst required to shock our community into action, to say that rough sleeping is not normal, it's not something we should accept, then lets chalk that up as a positive side to this pandemic. We have this great opportunity to get everyone off the street that wants to get off the street, and supported and moved into long-term housing. Let’s use this once in a generation opportunity [to] change our systems so that no one else goes on the street.” (Luke Michael, Pro Bono Australia, 8th April 2020).

Post-war Reconstruction

The last time we used the opportunity of a major crisis to change our systems so that no one else goes on the streets was three generations ago. World War Two finished in 1945 (75 years ago this week). Before the end of the War, in 1942, the Curtin administration set up the Department of Post War Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Division of the Department of Labour and National Service (which had been established under Menzies in 1941 with 32-year-old Harold Holt as Minister) formed the basis of the new Department.  JB Chifley was appointed the minister and HC (Nugget) Coombs the Director-General. 

One of Coombes’ first actions was to establish the Commonwealth Housing Commission to report on all aspects of housing in Australia and to recommend plans for the provision of housing in the post-war years. During 1943 the commissioners visited 53 towns in every state, heard 948 witnesses and received submissions from numerous housing authorities and societies, professional bodies, welfare groups, manufacturers, political organisations and individuals. Their final 300 - page report was completed in August 1944.

The 95 recommendations dealt, in varying detail, with: low-cost housing, housing standards, types of houses, building materials, housing density, slum clearance, town and regional planning, community facilities, rural housing, building research, and housing subsidies. Its primary concern was with the provision of public housing for low-income workers. It estimated that by 1945 there would be a shortage of 300,000 houses and it set a 10-year target of 700,000 houses to overcome the backlog of housing, normal annual replacements and the replacement of slums.

The commission considered that about half the projected construction would need to be financed by governments and would be mainly for rental. Ignoring constitutional limitations and the sensitivities of state governments, it envisaged a Commonwealth housing authority and a Commonwealth planning authority working in harmony with state, regional and local authorities. The report influenced two generations of architectural students and town planners, but most of its recommendations were ignored or not implemented by governments. http://guides.naa.gov.au/land-of-opportunity/chapter14/

This was the beginning of the Housing Commission (1943) and, after lengthy negotiations, led to the Commonwealth State Housing Agreements. By March 1949, 132,000 houses and flats had been constructed since the end of the war and an estimated 600,000 people were living in new homes. It had been hoped that government-sponsored housing would account for half of all houses built but the proportion was much smaller. In 1945-46 it was 26% but by 1949-50 the proportion had fallen to 13%. Many government houses were constructed in regional areas.

The Commonwealth State Housing Agreements were replaced by rent subsidies in 2008 by the Howard government.

Post – COVID-19 Construction

Many voices have joined to urge governments to address the serious flaws in our housing system exposed by COVID-19. We know what these problems are, although the true extent of homelessness is difficult to determine, and we don’t need to spend the next 18 months gathering information as the 1943 commissioners did. We can start building straightaway. Many organisations and State Housing Authorities have housing policies languishing because of the lack of commitment by governments. (e.g. ‘Leaving No-one Behind: A National Policy for Health Equity, Housing and Homelessness’ which the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness brought out in January this year[1] ).

Housing workers and researchers have been arguing that homelessness has been increasing in Australia. According to Launch Housing’s Australian Homelessness Monitor, homelessness increased by 14% between 2011 and 2016, with around 116,000 people nationally experiencing homelessness on any given night. (This may or may not include couch surfing?). Rough sleeping in particular increased by 20% in the same five year period, to around 8,200 people. AHURI research estimated that in 2016, there was a shortfall of around 431,000 social housing dwellings in Australia, and that this deficit would grow to 727,300 dwellings by 2036. The research concluded that 36,000 new social housing dwellings per year were required to meet this need. (AHURI, May 2020).[2] The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), in a report before the pandemic, proposed building 30,000 social housing dwellings as a way to reduce homelessness and to boost employment.

In Victoria alone, 82,000 people are on the social housing waiting list. Some have been waiting for 25 years. Relative to population the number of properties let by public and community housing providers has halved since 1991.[3]  In southern NSW households who were burned out in the 2019/20 fires are still living in tents.

In the most recent edition of The Conversation, Hal Pawson (2020) notes that those already living in insecure and unaffordable rental housing and being pushed into poverty numbered around 1.3 million people. [4]  After paying rent, they didn’t have enough money for essentials like food and electricity. It’s likely that these renters will have lost jobs or work hours because of the pandemic

The leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, is supportive:

“As someone who grew up in Council Housing in Camperdown, I know how important having a secure roof over your head is… When the worst of this virus has gone, housing can also help our economy recover…The pipeline for housing construction is drying up and will result in a sharp decline in work for small business and tradies unless action is taken… Governments should be working with the private sector and superannuation funds to deliver significant investment in social and  affordable housing… This would help those in need and keep many tradespeople on the tools”[5].

There is no proposal for government funding here, though.

The Victorian Government has set up the ‘Building Victoria’s Recovery Taskforce’ to help keep the state’s building and development industry running through the COVID-19 pandemic. The taskforce doesn’t commit to actually building any social housing, but one of its roles will be to advise on ‘a pipeline of building and development projects over the longer term, including initiatives that further expand social housing’.

A National Strategy and Shovel-ready Projects

The pandemic policy jolt is an opportunity to put Australia’s housing on more stable footings through a Commonwealth-led bipartisan, long-term, national housing strategy.[6] A housing strategy should be the central plank of the post COVID – 19 stimulus package. Rather than using language like, ‘investigate’, ‘advise’, ‘governments should be’, ‘facilitate’, ‘encourage’, such a strategy must commit to government funding for social housing construction that at least keeps pace with population growth. (i.e. up to 15,000 homes a year – around five times the current number). This may sound ambitious, but it’s below the levels regularly achieved between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s).

Geoff Hanmer (2020) has argued that the focus of a stimulus plan has to be construction that puts social housing first and that organisations that could participate in an economic stimulus program will need to be in a position then to deliver “shovel-ready” projects to help revive the economy.[7]  

One example of a recent housing development in Victoria which could be rapidly expanded to create housing for the homeless is the ‘Harris Transportable Housing’ project. This project used parcels of vacant government land in Footscray and Maidstone to create 57 tiny homes for people with a chronic experience of homelessness. The project is a partnership between Launch Housing and philanthropists Geoff and Brad Harris, of Harris Capital, with funding from the Victorian Property Fund, and vacant land provided by VicRoads. The houses are prefabricated, delivered to site on a truck and lifted on by a crane.[8]

We could also use shipping containers as Amsterdam e.g. has done. We import more shipping containers than we export and many are sitting on valuable inner city land.

Housing Authorities are currently unable to keep up with the demand for emergency and transitional housing and many of those in housing crisis were being housed in hotels, motels and caravan parks even before the pandemic. As the economy slumps, there may be opportunities for Authorities to buy or lease existing housing and even hotels, motels or cabins in caravan parks. (These are excellent housing and there were acres of them lying empty during the lockdown).

Idealism and opportunity

Post-war reconstruction in Australia became a much broader phenomenon than simply the re-establishment of servicemen and women. After more than a decade of economic depression and war, there was a widespread belief that radical political, economic, social and cultural changes in Australia and in the wider world were necessary. Cultural nationalism, evident in much of the art and literature of the 1940s, influenced attitudes to reconstruction. The historian Geoffrey Serle later recalled that in the war years many young Australians 'felt themselves to be a new generation of independent Australians, were fed up with the cringe to Empire, were inspired by idealism for post-war reconstruction (having grown up in the Depression) and saw themselves as contributing to the description and definition of Australian society'’

There are elements of cultural nationalism and idealism emerging in COVID Australia as well. There’s a sense of national ‘pride’ that so far we’ve done well, our national health system is in good shape, we’ve managed the lockdowns, we’re diverse and young and funny (the ‘We are Australian’ routine played on the ABC every day is joyful and optimistic) and there have been fewer outbreaks of stupidity than in other countries.. Perhaps we will be able to resist ‘business as usual’ or ‘leaving it to the market’.

Writing in The Guardian on 22nd April, 2020, Emma Dawson argued that it would be folly to introduce austerity measures in order to pay off public debt instead of investing in our society. She notes that ‘at the end of the War, Australia’s debt was equivalent to over 120% of GDP, but Australians were not paying off this debt for generations and rather the post war years are remembered as a boom time’. Post-war migration was a significant contribution to this but it was also because ‘the Australian government in the post-war years concentrated on creating a full employment economy, building a robust manufacturing sector, creating the Commonwealth employment service to help people find work, and making significant public investments in productive infrastructure, including a large build of public housing’.[9]

As the scientist Peter Doherty says, “we need to take this as an opportunity to rethink how we live in the world, what’s of value to us and to look at what is really important”[10]

[1] https://aaeh.org.au/assets/docs/20200120-POLICY-PROPOSAL_Leaving-no-one-Behind.pdf

[2] https://www.ahuri.edu.au/news-and-media/covid-19/why-building-housing-infrastructure-after-the-pandemic-can-benefit-australia

[3] https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/social-affairs/coronavirus-lays-bare-5-big-housing-system-flaws-be-fixed

[4] ibid

[5] https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/anthony-albanese-speech-australia-beyond-the-coronavirus-canberra-monday-11-may-2020

[6] Pawson, H and Mares, P (2020) Coronavirus lays bare 5 big housing system flaws to be fixed.

[7] https://theconversation.com/why-the-focus-of-stimulus-plans-has-to-be-construction-that-puts-social-housing-firWWst-136519

[8]  https://www.launchhousing.org.au/harris-transportable-housing-project-frequently-asked-questions/options

[9] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/22/we-do-not-have-to-worry-about-paying-off-the-coronavirus-debt-for-generations?fbclid=IwAR3ag8FvwjFLotIeZEyFwzmsafNI8j8v-FEJA9ey6QxIentef2Fgql60qSo

[10] https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/health-and-wellness/i-m-79-i-won-the-nobel-prize-and-i-don-t-give-a-s-20200506-p54qhb?fbclid=IwAR2_XKqbf_oaiFuwU0AkxyhVqIv7rnh5ft6DMY86s50t4JUsnmJ-NQerPYw