Abstract:

Commonwealth and State Governments spend very large amounts of money on housing assistance. They provide housing of particular types in particular locations, with specific affordability outcomes. The housing or shelter impacts of these interventions are reasonably well understood. However, given the capacity of housing to affect many other elements of people’s lives, an important question is the extent to which housing assistance impacts on a range of what could be called nonshelter or non housing outcomes including the impact of housing on one’s health, employment prospects and the educational outcomes of children. n understanding of non-shelter impacts is important for a variety of reasons. Firstly, if it can be shown that spending on housing has a variety of non-shelter benefits that may reduce the call on government funds in the short, medium and long term, this is an important argument to make when negotiating with Treasuries and others for housing assistance funds. Secondly, the type or “design” of housing assistance might have significant impacts on the non-shelter benefits – this would have implications for SHAs and others in the delivery of housing assistance. Thirdly, nonshelter benefits might vary between different target groups (e.g. aged persons, singles, single parents etc). This outcome might affect the allocation process within SHAs. Whilst the issue of non-shelter outcomes has been part of the academic debate for a number of years, the research with a clear housing policy focus has been much more limited. Much of the research has been undertaken overseas, particularly in the United Kingdom and the USA. The different housing and welfare framework in other countries means that the findings of international studies may not be directly comparable. Some recent quantitative work has been done in Australia - mainly sponsored by AHURI. However, the work was limited to examining cross sectional data that was generated by previous studies. In examining the non shelter impacts of housing it is considered that non-shelter impacts could be classified functionally into impacts related to tenure, dwelling, area, eighbours, community and after housing income levels. This framework will be used in the longitudinal study that will form the basis of this research project. It is proposed that a study of about 350 households recently allocated public housing in Sydney and Brisbane using a face to face survey approach, combined with a smaller survey of community housing and a qualitative study will be used to examine nonshelter impacts.