ABSTRACT
Offering fresh insights into the key emerging issues in the field, including the changing socio-economic contexts brought about by the rise of the millennial generation and the creative class, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a greater emphasis on social responsibility, this forward-looking Research Agenda critically debates and rethinks theories and practices in the property sector. © Piyush Tiwari and Julie T. Miao 2022. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The urban epidemics of the late nineteenth century shaped housing policies into the 1970‘s and provided better housing outcomes for many. Recent decades, with different policy settings prevailing, have seen rising levels of homelessness, burgeoning queues for social housing and a pervasive crisis of housing affordability for younger people. Tax and other policies that encouraged investment in housing for capital gain have diverted national savings into higher housing costs and debts. Major shifts in wealth have been driven by gains from ‘rentier’ rather than ‘entrepreneurial’ behaviours. Rising house prices and rents have had significant, negative, productivity effects and induced housing outcomes that have reduced labour productivity. Productivity and wellbeing, for the majority, have been eroded by high, and rising, housing and land costs. Covid-19 has revealed the cracks in advanced economy housing systems that policies ignored after the GFC. The housing consequences of Covid-19 have already needed urgent actions for homeless and poorer, overcrowded households. The role of housing in recovery stimulus investment programmes urgently needs a new analytical lens recognising the productivity effects identified in PIN research. The consequences of working at home and the future pandemic risks of present structures of dwellings and cities and the ‘scarring’ effects of economic effects of Covid-19 in poorer communities and neighbourhoods raise new challenges. At the same time metropolitan and national governments need to construct housing policy missions for change that will refocus housing on promoting wellbeing and raising labour productivity over the decade ahead. © Philip McCann and Tim Vorley 2021.