Working together for housing equality in Australia

Home in Place is an Australian community housing organisation and registered charity.

Australia is experiencing a severe crisis of housing affordability and availability. The crisis has been developing over the last 20 or more years and results in high rates of homelessness, low availability of homes for private rental, inflated rental costs (causing housing stress), chronic shortages of social housing (with long waiting lists) and the locking out of first time buyers from housing purchase.

There are multiple causes of the crisis, including lack of supply, failure of government to develop social housing, tax settings that favour investors over first-time buyers and lack of protections for renters from private sector landlords.

Until recently, the crisis has not been properly addressed and there was little public focus on the issue. However, in the recent (2025) federal election campaign, housing has been a key issue and both major parties proposed policies for addressing the issue. The winning Labor Party has pledged to continue work began in the last three-year parliament with policies to support first time buyers, build social housing supply and facilitate housing infrastructure. Central to their policy is a Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) which has invested $10 billion dollars to provide returns to invest in housing. However, projected outcomes do not adequately address the depth of the current crisis.

Home in Place is a major advocate for its mission: ‘that all people have appropriate and affordable housing and are engaged in sustainable communities’. 

Home in Place played a major role in initiating the Everybody’s Home campaign for increased supply of social and affordable housing. We have been advocating for housing as a human right through our promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals and have lobbied state and federal administrations to raise the profile of the housing crisis.

We have also been leaders in housing advocacy in the Pacific region, participating in and funding housing related events as well as broader forums, including the Pacific Urban Forum.  

We believe our lobbying of governments at state and federal levels, our wider advocacy and our support for housing related research and public campaigns has helped ‘change the narrative’ on social housing in Australia and raised the issue as a public and election concern. This has in turn influenced political parties to adopt policies to tackle the housing crisis, although much remains to be done.

In 2024, we have signed an accord with the Fijian Government to develop capacity in delivering housing policy and services. This builds on technical assistance we provided pre-pandemic to Ho Chi Minh city and the wider Vietnamese housing sector.