A key priority of the NSW premier is making homes more affordable (https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities/making-housing-more-affordable/ ). So the NSW government wants to make sure that enough home are built in the right places to meet the needs of a growing population.
To achieve this goal, we need to start by knowing how many homes we already have in NSW, and going forward how the housing stock is changing over time.
Housing data, along with information about the households living in them is used to monitor changing household size and living arrangements and the mix of housing stock, and the adequacy of housing in our local communities.
While housing data is available from a range of sources including the census, a number of policy-related questions remain unanswered.
Granny flats (or secondary self-contained dwellings) can be built on a lot of land where there an existing house, without the need for a development application. https://www.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/building-or-renovating/do-i-qualify-fast-track-approval/granny-flats . As such there is no standard data source from local councils to monitor how many have been built in NSW, where they are located and the extent to which they are providing additional housing for the state’s growing population. The question remains how many granny flats have been built in NSW in recent years and where are they located?
Regional development is a focus of both state and federal governments. This is centred on ways to boost regional economies to reverse the slowing population growth or in some cases population decline. Strategic responses include the provision of adequate land for residential and industrial expansion, plans for infrastructure provision, employment diversity and economic growth.
Focussing on future housing demand, some of the questions or challenges for planners include:
• Assessing the housing demand of non-resident populations. With changing work and employment arrangements, people may work and live in more than one location. The extent to which this is happening and how it impacts on the use of housing is unknown. The assumption that one dwelling was required for every household may no longer be a valid one – we may need more. This includes people who have a second property that they use as a holiday home and people who are part of the growing drive-in-drive-out and fly-in-fly-out workforces throughout Australia. There is no reliable count of the number of private dwellings used as holiday homes – counts of tourist beds in hotels and motels may undercount the number of visitors to an area and underestimate the seasonal peak demands on local infrastructure.
• Information about the extent to which holiday homes may become a permanent residence when people retire and decide to relocate would be useful to assess future land requirements for housing. While the Census will not be able to provide this information, it will at least provide a current count of residences and a mechanism to monitor trends over time.
• There is anecdotal evidence in some parts of regional NSW that there is a lack of private rental accommodation for FIFO/DIDO workers and that they are also using up much of a towns hotel and motel accommodation. The inclusion of this question, alongside information on a person’s place of usual residence and their place of work will provide a means to investigate this further.
Other issues of interest to planners in both regional metropolitan areas are:
• The number of children who live in another (private) residence when they attend school or post-school education. We already have a count of children in boarding schools and university colleges, but not those who have other living arrangements during the academic year.
• The number of children of separated families who live for part of the week in two different residences. It is possible that some of the single person households enumerated at the census are in fact a parent who shares joint custody of their children. It is possible that assessments of underutilisation of housing, using current census statistics, may be over-estimating this measure.
This information would also be useful for people modelling household and dwelling projections.