Sustainability and Housing: More than a Roof Over Head. Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy

Housing continues to be critical to how Australians secure their future. Sustainability is defined as a global process that also tries to help create an enduring future where environmental and social factors are considered simultaneously with economic factors. Principles are used from the Western Australian State Sustainability Strategy to help define what sustainability could mean for housing. These are distilled into three major tasks: • Ensuring there is a ‘roof overhead ’ for the housing disadvantaged, • Ensuring housing is more eco-efficient, and • Ensuring housing is well located or is part of a project to improve locational amenity. The housing disadvantaged are defined in terms of the housing stress being faced by: • Aboriginal people (especially those in remote areas), • people requiring public housing (this housing stock has not grown in the past decade and now needs a 60 % increase to meet requirements), • people requiring private rental assistance (this subsidy is rapidly falling behind the market with increases in the proportions of people spending more than 30 % of their income on rent, eg Sydney has gone from 67 % of low income renters in housing stress to 81 % in ten years), • people looking to buy their first house (despite the First Home Owners Grant there are less owning or purchasing a home, dropping from 72.4 % in 1988 to 69.4 % i