A Systems Thinking Deep-Dive into Australia’s Housing Crisis: Join Us on July 26th, 2025

Understanding the Urgency of Housing and Homelessness

On Saturday, 30 May 2025, Loops of Learning hosted a powerful, in-person workshop titled “Take Action on Housing and Homelessness” at ValueLabs on Bourke Street, Melbourne. This event brought together a small group of participants from not-for-profits, community organisations, architecture, and the housing sector. The central question was: What would it take to create lasting change in the housing system?

The workshop opened with an informal presentation from Andrea Levey of Aboriginal Housing Victoria. With over 35 years of experience in outreach, local and state government, and Aboriginal housing, Andrea anchored the room in history and lived experience. She provided a timeline of housing policy in Victoria, highlighting moments when promising community-led or government-backed initiatives were defunded or cancelled due to political shifts.

Key Initiatives in Victoria's Housing History

During the 1980s and 90s, several key initiatives emerged in Victoria to encourage community engagement and foster growth in community housing organisations. These included:

• The Victorian Rental Housing Co-operative Program & Local Government and Community Housing Program ("Logchop"): This initiative provided funding and support to grassroots housing co-operatives and councils in partnership with not-for-profits to directly deliver affordable rental housing.

  
  

• Growth of Community Housing Organisations: Beginning in the late 1970s and expanding through the 1980s, community housing organisations emerged to serve groups overlooked by public housing. This included women escaping domestic violence, older tenants, and those with specific cultural needs. These early grassroots bodies laid the groundwork for what would become Victoria’s vibrant community housing sector.

  
  

• Inclusion and Tenant Participation: Legislative changes in the Housing Act 1983 strengthened community involvement in housing policy. This introduced tenant co-management and participation provisions, recognising that tenants and community members should have a voice in housing governance rather than being passive recipients.

  
  

As Andrea pointed out, this was a golden era for community housing. However, many of these community-led innovations were defunded or integrated back into traditional public sector frameworks, leading to a contraction in locally driven models.

“Housing should be a basic human right,” Andrea stated, summing up the sentiment that echoed throughout the session.

Uncovering the System Beneath the Symptoms

The workshop included an open conversation that explored the deeper system of housing. Key insights emerged from this discussion:

• The Commodification of Housing: Participants agreed that the commodification of housing is a significant variable contributing to issues in housing and homelessness. Movements like 'The Shift' are working to change the perception of housing from an asset to a basic human right.

  
  

• Finland’s Housing First Model: This innovative approach provides stable housing first, followed by wraparound services for those with complex needs. As a result, Finland has successfully eradicated rough sleeping.

  
  

• Public Housing Waitlist: Currently, over 65,000 people are on Victoria's public housing waitlist, with a three-year queue for priority cases. This reflects a concerning trend of structural underinvestment.

  
  

• Ethical Letting Models: HomeGround Real Estate exemplifies how ethical letting can work. Many landlords genuinely want to help. Additionally, Nightingale Housing is a not-for-profit developer focused on building homes for 'people, not profit'.

  
  

• Funding vs. Values: Questions arose about whether the solution lies solely in funding or if it also requires a shift in values, agency, and power dynamics.

  
  

• Personal Stories: One participant shared a personal story about using self-managed super to house a friend. This raised questions about dignity, charity, and mutuality. Such solutions can provide agency, whereas charity often leads to subjective definitions of the 'deserving poor'.

  
  

• Types of Housing: The group discussed various housing types:

- Public Housing: Owned and run by the government.

- Community Housing: Managed by not-for-profit providers.

- Social Housing: An umbrella term that includes both public and community housing.

Other proposals included adjusting council rate models to support Aboriginal home ownership and recognising that while rooming houses offer shelter, they can lead to deep isolation without community support.

From Mapping to Action

As the conversation deepened, participants shifted from identifying problems to exploring practical, values-driven solutions. A wide range of ideas emerged, from bold structural reforms to small but scalable interventions. These included:

• Unlocking underutilised church properties to provide safe housing for vulnerable groups, particularly older women.

• Creating superannuation-based investment models that allow individuals to direct funds into ethical housing projects.

• Developing policy tools, such as constitutional safeguards, to protect successful housing initiatives from being dismantled by future governments.

  
  

Rather than remaining in the abstract, the group focused on what might work in the current environment and what changes would be necessary for new ideas to gain traction. The discussion frequently returned to the importance of dignity, agency, and long-term thinking. There was strong consensus that while funding is crucial, shifting power dynamics and assumptions about “deservingness” are equally essential.

What Next?

The session did not promise easy answers but offered a space to ask deeper questions.

“If we don’t work with the system while challenging it, we’ll just keep patching over the same pain points,” one participant reflected.

Loops of Learning will continue to explore opportunities for unpacking systemic issues through further workshops, writing, and campaign co-design. It's all interconnected, and we must keep discussing the deeper levels at which our systems integrate and influence each other.

Make sure you *subscribe to the Loops of Learning e-newsletter to stay in the loop. Join us on *July 26th, 2025, for our next event focused on these critical issues. Together, we can foster meaningful change in the housing landscape.

Simplistic Solutions - the easy road to system change?

In our increasingly complex world, the allure of simple solutions is undeniable. I have recently been triggered by the emerging proposal by Robert F Kennedy Jnr to implement new “wellness farms” for addressing drug addiction. These spaces promise healing through nature, structure, and community and a first glance, seem to offer a humane and holistic alternative to institutional rehabilitation. But a closer look reveals the dangers of simplifying complex social problems into neatly packaged remedies.

Drug addiction isn’t just a matter of personal failure or chemical dependency; it’s deeply entangled with systemic issues like poverty, trauma, housing instability, and the criminalisation of substance use.

Wellness farms, though well-intentioned, often bypass these root causes. They may treat individuals but ignore the broader ecosystems that perpetuate addiction.

This oversimplification has consequences. By isolating the individual from their environment, wellness farms risk creating a false sense of resolution. When participants return to the same destabilising conditions they left behind, relapse becomes a near certainty. Furthermore, such programs can shift the focus away from advocating for systemic change, like affordable housing, accessible healthcare, and harm reduction policies.

This tendency toward oversimplification is not confined to wellness farms. It reflects a broader political strategy seen across the ideological spectrum, particularly in today’s polarised environment.

Simplistic narratives thrive because they appeal to deep-seated fears and anxieties. The bombardment of 'cost of living' stress and the changing of a world order, 'the Trump era', creates a future of unknowns. We want simple answers to complex problems, as we have no certainty of our future. A search for stability forces us to lean into simplistic solutions.

In the Trump era (the rise of far-right populism) simplicity is a powerful tool. "Build the wall" and "Make America Great Again" are emblematic slogans: direct, digestible, and designed to alleviate fears of economic insecurity, cultural change, and perceived loss of control. The left, too, isn’t immune, often relying on equally reductive promises of sweeping reforms without acknowledging the complexity of implementation.

The problem with these simplistic solutions is that they paper over nuance, fostering a dangerous binary worldview: good vs. bad, us vs. them, cure vs. crisis. They offer voters not complexity but comfort—the illusion that deeply rooted, systemic challenges can be overcome with straightforward fixes. This approach distracts from the difficult but necessary work of engaging with systems thinking: addressing the interconnected realities of inequality, governance, and public health.

Without this depth, whether in political rhetoric or wellness initiatives, we risk perpetuating cycles of harm. True progress requires resisting the pull of simplicity and committing to the harder path of systemic change and adaptation.

Our systems are dynamic, and they need adaptive solutions born out of evidence-based research, not simple solutions developed from erroneous statements designed to win votes!