Take Action on Housing and Homelessness

A systems thinking deep-dive into one of Australia’s most urgent issues - workshop conversation 30th May 2025

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. Bringing together a small group of participants from not-for-profits, community organisations, architecture, and the housing sector, the session asked: What would it take to create lasting change in the housing system?

The event opened with an informal presentation from Andrea Levey from Aboriginal Housing Victoria, whose 35+ years in the field, spanning outreach, local and state government, and Aboriginal housing, anchored the room in history and lived experience. Andrea offered 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.

During the 1980's and 90's in Victoria there were a few key initiatives and movements which emerged to encourage community engagement and enable growth in community housing organisations. These were:

• The Victorian Rental Housing Co‑operative Program & Local Government and Community Housing Program ("Logchop"), which 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, such as women escaping domestic violence, older tenants, or 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 and introduced tenant co‑management and participation provisions. This shift recognized that tenants and community members should have a voice in housing governance not just be passive recipients.

As Andrea pointed out, this was a golden era for community housing, but many of these community-led innovations were defunded or integrated back into traditional public sector frameworks which led 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

An open conversation, exploring variables within the deeper system of housing included the following key insights:

• The commodification of house was agreed to be one of the key variables in the creation of issues in housing and homelessness. Movements like 'The Shift' are trying to work on shifting systems across the globe away from seeing housing as an asset.

• Finland’s Housing First model, where stable housing is provided first, followed by wraparound services to assist those with complex needs has meant they have eradicated rough sleeping.

• There is currently more than 65,000 people on Victoria's public housing waitlist, with a 3-year queue for priority cases. This reflects structural underinvestment.

• HomeGround Real Estate, a social enterprise model, shows how ethical letting can work - landlords often want to help. Nightgale Housing is also a not-for-profit developer, building homes for 'people not profit'.

• Questions arose about whether the answer is only funding — or if it’s also values, agency, and shifting power dynamics.

• One participant shared a personal story of using self-managed super to house a friend, raising questions about dignity, charity, and mutuality. These kinds of solutions offer that, where charity solutions don't always provide agency, and can bias towards subjective definitions of the 'deserving poor'.

• The group discussed how housing types differ:

  • Public housing is owned and run by government

  • Community housing is managed by not-for-profit providers

  • Social housing is an umbrella term that includes both

    
    

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

From Mapping to Action

As the conversation deepened, participants began to shift from identifying problems to exploring practical, values-driven solutions. A wide range of ideas emerged — from bold structural reform 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; and developing policy tools — such as constitutional safeguards — that could help protect successful housing initiatives from being dismantled by future governments.

Rather than staying in the abstract, the group focused on what might work in the current environment, and what would need to change in order for new ideas to gain traction. The discussion returned often to the importance of dignity, agency, and long-term thinking — with strong consensus that while funding matters, shifting power and assumptions about “deservingness” are equally essential.

What Next?

The session didn’t promise easy answers, but it did offer 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 exploring opportunities to continue 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.

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