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.