Imagine a future where it’s easier to purchase homes because there’s no stamp duty, and people have more choices about where and how they live as their circumstances change. A future where rents are affordable and new approaches to financing can place homes within reach for people who would otherwise be excluded.
Imagine a future where all houses are homes, where our neighbourhoods are the foundations of connection, and people have a say in the design of their home and are encouraged to make decisions about their local communities.
This future is possible – but only if we shift our thinking
The current approach to addressing Australia’s housing crisis largely concentrates on supply, on affordability, and on meeting the needs of vulnerable groups who are particularly poorly served.
All of these factors are critically important, but they are only the symptoms of greater issues within the housing system. In spite of best intentions, the current system often generates problems in exactly these areas, so without wider systemic change, they will only continue to resurface.
Yes, we need places to live, and they need to be affordable. But to really change the game on supply and affordability, what’s required is a shift in thinking about what good housing is. Alongside supply and affordability, we need to be concerned with how the homes we live in set us up to reach our potential in all areas of life.
We invite you to join us in creating the Future of Home
Our Future of Home book illustrates what our future housing system could look like, and showcases the innovations and innovators who are already beginning to shape it. It’s the culmination of over seven years of research by TACSI and other organisations just like us all over the world.
Our hope is that this book stimulates the collective imagination of what could be, and how we might join up all the innovative work currently being conducted on the margins to build a better housing system. Our goal is to create networks and starting points, and to connect and scale existing innovators and existing solutions.
This book is designed for anyone and everyone imagining a better future for home in Australia – a future that is more productive and more equitable for everyone.
What a new system of home could look like
We believe repurposing our housing system to be a system for home would unlock supply, affordability and access, while also creating better social and economic outcomes. Imagine a system of home:
- Policy and markets incentivise home as an outcome
- Active neighbourhoods are shaped by the people who live in them
- Financing makes home ownership more affordable for more people
- Homes are designed with the people who live in them
- Health, care and other services wrap around the home
- Resources and structures incubate and accelerate change across the system
To make this system work, we’ll need to:
- Focus on the long-term social and economic benefit of good homes over short-term profit
- Make better use of people’s intelligence to shape the communities, neighbourhoods and buildings in which they live
- Provide a greater diversity of options when it comes to buildings, finance and ownership, and make it easy to move between those options
- Be flexible enough to adapt to local context, and even influence institutional settings like aged care and custody
What the future of home could look like
Existing innovations are mostly at the fringes, but when they’re joined up, scaled up and supported by enabling policies, they have the potential to create homes that work better for all Australians.
The building blocks for a new system for home are already in place. Across the nation, individuals and organisations have seen how housing without agency, identity and connection can limit people, and started to do something about it.
- Financiers are creating options for ownership and financing that make homes more affordable
- Essential services are organising delivery around the home
- People are creating their own communities to enable connection
- Governments and developers have implemented design processes that listen to people, and communities are running development processes where they set the agenda.
These innovations prove that we can successfully address the most tenacious challenges of the housing system – but currently they operate in isolation from one another, and on a small scale. If we could successfully join up and scale up these innovations, we believe we could make a housing system that works for everyone.
Together, we can create a better future for home in Australia. Read TACSI’s Future of Home book to find out how.
