Innovative approaches to building housing system resilience: a focus on the Australian social and affordable housing system

ABSTRACT Housing is a complex, integrated network of social and economic infrastructure. Improving the overall provision, suitability and socio-economic resilience of our housing system is needed. This requires new typologies to accommodate changing demographics, and to address the critical issues of access and affordability. Current pressure across the housing system is resulting in long waiting lists for social housing and a lack of affordable rental housing. Meanwhile, we have an oversupply of some social housing types, indicating a mismatch between what is being supplied, and what is needed. Tiny houses, elder co-housing, inclusionary zoning and the use of vacant infrastructure are some of the emerging approaches available to address current system shortfalls and build future system resilience. Such innovations pose many challenges, including for our planning systems. This paper discusses these approaches, with a focus on both asset and social needs, in order to inform the development of a more accessible, robust and resilient social and affordable housing system. This is done in the context of recent research which developed social procurement criteria which aim to enable more expansive thinking by those developing policy and delivering outcomes in this space.