There's no place like home

Sydney has long been known for its "latte line", an invisible thread of socioeconomic division running from the International Airport out to Paramatta, separating blue-collar and white-collar workers. Over the course of her career, Professor Nicole Gurran (BA '95, MURP '97, PhD '02, GradCertEdStudies '03) has seen how government action and inaction on housing policy have continued to reinforce this divide.

"In effect, high-income earners live behind an invisible 'neighbourhood exclusion barrier' that displaces middle- and low-income renters," she says. According to research conducted by Nicole along with Associate Professor Somwrita Sarkar (PhD '09, GradCertEdStudies '18) and Rashi Shrivastava (MMgt '18), this pattern is replicated in most Australian capital cities. "The most advantaged households benefit from their high access to employment opportunities," Nicole says.

"This is reflected in high house prices and rents in those neighbourhoods. And that, in turn, reinforces patterns of household wealth, poverty and spatial segregation." Now, with 13 rate rises in the past 15 months and rental affordability at a 17-year low , people on both sides of the latte line are feeling the squeeze. This situation is only serving to further entrench existing divisions and, according to Nicole, the proposal to simply continue building more homes does little to address the problem.

"In a good five years, 1.2 million homes should be business as usual," she says, referring to the federal government's proposed housing target. "We delivered close to that in the lead-up to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was followed by border closures and reversal of population growth. And housing prices continued to rise. Which tells us that even when we meet very ambitious housing supply targets, we don't magically produce an affordable outcome."

How did we get here?

As politicians, policymakers and thought leaders propose, debate, knock back, reshape and reintroduce potential solutions to the housing crisis, the continued pressure on everyday renters and homeowners has madepublic discourse feel increasingly tense. That tension is understandable, says former Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Professor Robyn Dowling (BEc (Hons) '88), because Australian perceptions of housing are defined by our aspirations for home ownership and our affinity for the detached house.

"The place that provides security, a sense of belonging, of comfort, needs to be our 'owned' home," she says. "Australia is also quite distinctive in that we haven't historically had high-density family living and therefore, we don't see it as 'home'. We connect home with the detached house." This idea means that Australians often baulk at potential solutions that might involve increasing housing density. Unpicking an attitude that is so embedded in our national psyche is incredibly difficult, but for the school's Head of Urbanism, Associate Professor Dallas Rogers, it is the key to reshaping the future.

"We invented this idea that land and individual property rights go together," he says, citing colonial expansion as the starting point for our conceptions of 'private property'. Once that property becomes 'private', he says, we can track what happens to it - how we apply monetary value to land, assign ownership and include or exclude different social groups. It's a useful thought exercise, according to Dallas, because it shows how our ideas about housing are social products which change over time and can be changed for the better. "It's a tough conversation to have," he says. "We can't recalibrate overnight. But we can ask the question, 'What happens if we don't diversify the way we think about housing?' And that's a productive change."

What are we doing?

As the housing crisis continues to worsen, Nicole has found herself asking how the national discussion of the housing crisis would change if we treated it with the sense of urgency we afford other crises. In 2024, Everybody's Home, a coalition of housing, homelessness and welfare organisations, announced the first People's Commission into the housing crisis. It provided an opportunity for individuals and organisations across Australia to contribute to the national conversation about the housing crisis and suggest real-world solutions. The coalition approached Nicole to serve as independent Co-Commissioner, alongside former Federal Labor senator the Honourable Doug Cameron.

"I was honoured to be invited to do it," she says. "I thought it was overdue that we really centred on the people who are living through this crisis - not just their voices and experiences, but also their knowledge of what could be done to reform the system."

Over three days, submissions to the commission showed the human face of poor policy outcomes - from essential workers priced out of the housing market to older women facing homelessness following divorce. It was a powerful experience for Nicole.

"I've certainly known the data and written about it, but there's nothing like actually hearing the emotion in people's voices and seeing the trauma the housing crisis is inflicting on them to make you despair at the state of public policy in Australia," she says. "But the good thing is, things can be done."

The solution, Nicole says, is sustained investment in social and affordable housing supply. Affordable housing in particular is something that Nicole calls a "no-brainer", requiring little in the way of government subsidy. It just requires a commitment to enforcing the policy. "I think debate about housing tends to get obscured by these rehearsed statements, like, 'Oh it's very complex,'" she says. "It's a way of making people feel as though this problem is something that we couldn't possibly understand."

The evidence, according to Nicole, points to simple causes - disinvestment in social housing over 30 years, investment in an unfair tax system which has overinflated the price of existing properties, and not meeting supply demands. She says the solutions are also simple. "It's easy to unwind those things, once we acknowledge the problem. National leadership is needed to restore investment to social housing, fix the unfair and inefficient tax settings that fuel demand without delivering new supply, and ensure adequate rental subsidies and protections so that tenants in the private sector can access secure and decent homes.

"We need to think about housing not as investing in real estate, but rather as investing in community. We need both immediate interventions and a commitment to long-term systemic change."

Is mould damaging your home and your health?

Mould might not be the first thing you think of in a housing crisis, but if left untreated it can have dire implications for both the life of building materials and our physical health. Professor Arianna Brambilla (GradCertEdStudies '23) explainsthat the financial burden in either scenario can run into the millions.

When housing is in short supply, says Arianna, there is more chance people will be cornered into a living situation that could be detrimental to their health.

"For low-income populations, there isn't the luxury to say, 'No, this house is not providing a healthy environment for me,'" she says.

There is currently no standardised test for mould in Australia. Arianna and her colleagues are collecting data on how and where mould is growing across the country, in the hopes of allowing homeowners and policymakers to make earlier risk assessments.

"If mould is growing under the carpet, you don't see it until you see it," she says. "We want that awareness to come a little earlier, [so] you can begin moving from remediation to prediction. We can start to detect mould before it's visible."

Is the algorithm preventing you from finding a home?

Online housing application platforms have been revolutionary for renters. Not only is the application process easier but, according to Dr Sophia Maalsen (PhD '14, GradCertEdStudies '23), it's given people the ability to create more safe and sustainable households by connecting with like-minded potential flatmates. But those same platforms are also used by real estate agents and landlords to collect massive amounts of data - with murky implications for tenants.

"We know some platforms make an algorithmic decision - if you put in a higher rent range, it might boost you higher up the rankings," she says. "It's impacting your chance of finding a home, but you're unsure of how it's making decisions."

This means platforms may be discriminating in ways we can't see, based on the data we put into our profiles, and this has implications for our ability to find a place to live. With this in mind, Sophia and her collaborators have launched the Know Your Landlord app, a creative project that imagines a world where tenants can conduct the same background checks as landlords. The project aims to shift the perspective on data collection.

"It's a hypothetical, to illustrate the power imbalance on these platforms," Sophia explains. "Until we can mandate there be less data collection, the project is a good reminder that we have some agency in this discussion."

Written by Alex Johnson for Sydney Alumni Magazine. Photography by Stefanie Zingsheim.