The many faces of social housing – home to one in 10 Australians

Abstract

On any one night in Australia, just over four per cent of households rent social housing.

Yet it has housed many more people than this for brief, and sometimes repeated, periods.

We estimate up to 10 per cent of Australians have called social housing home at some time in the past 20 years.

Throughout the postwar era, Australians have used social housing in various ways. Social housing can be:

• a place to raise a working family
• a “springboard” to owning a home
• a brief “safety net” to escape domestic violence
• a stable home following homelessness.

Today the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) releases a major commissioned study tracking the pathways of people into and out of social housing from 2000 to 2015.