The future of regional housing
WATCH: A Regional Australia Institute senior economist speaks on the future of regional housing in Australia
Transcript
00:00I'm Dewar Hopkins and I'm RAI's Senior Lead Ambassador.
00:04And Dewar, we've just been in a panel where you gave us some figures on what housing's
00:09like in regional Australia at the moment.
00:11Could you tell me a bit about that?
00:12Yeah, so there are significant challenges in regional housing markets and specifically
00:19we're looking at housing, the full gamut of non-owner occupier rental housing.
00:25So whether that be at the real sort of crisis, social, affordable end of housing right through
00:31to build to rent, the availability of private rentals, it's that element of housing that
00:39is most challenged in regional communities.
00:42And we know that there's hundreds of thousands of job vacancies and there'll be more coming
00:47up in regional Australia as infrastructure moves.
00:51What kind of came up that you found particularly fascinating in the panel today around solutions
00:55to the housing?
00:57Yeah, so the panel discussion really gave us some innovative solutions to the challenges
01:03that regions face.
01:04They face unique challenges that go to issues of scale, access to finance.
01:09We had a lot of discussions about what modular housing can do to achieve the at-scale needs
01:15that are really required in regions, particularly around those big energy projects and the workforce
01:22accommodation needs associated with those projects.
01:25We also looked at new systems of bringing about community housing.
01:30So there's a wide range of solutions that were really being canvassed in our discussion
01:35today.