Taking an Enlivenment Worldview
Embracing the Enlivenment Worldview means taking a hard look at how we are thinking about the growing housing crisis. As we discussed in our post about commoning as an economics for the Enlivenment Worldview, housing is where the rubber of neo-liberal individualism really hits the road of modernity/coloniality.
Housing and Extractivism
The idea of private property and enclosure takes its most visible form in the privately owned home on its individual legal title: a tradeable asset independent of community, even though community connection and neighbourhood reputation are valued aspects. The dream of intergenerational social mobility is intimately linked to the ability to move house, to trade up to a bigger and better dwelling in an ever more desirable location, in terms of access to schools, transport and employment opportunities, along with leisure resources. In Australia, many of these are public goods, whose value is captured by those who can afford the premium prices of the well-located dwelling. As the real estate market knows, location is almost everything.
Thus, housing as an individualised asset, linked to individualised ownership of land is based on an extractivist logic, at the expense of the relationist logic of ‘self as participants in community.’ Thus embedding the isolated ‘self’ of neo-liberalism and the rule of the ‘market’ as the cultural norm.
As the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) notes: access to good quality, affordable housing is fundamental to wellbeing. It can help reduce poverty and enhance equality of opportunity, social inclusion and mobility.
For this reason, the housing crisis represents a fundamental challenge to Australia’s social and economic fabric.
The Home Ownership Crisis
House prices have risen across Australia over the decade to 2024 and now well into 2025. The median transfer price for established houses in capital cities increased substantially, with the median real house transfer price in Sydney increasing from around $615,000 in the first quarter of 2013 to around $1.3 million at the end of 2023 (ABS 2024a) and is still rising. Median transfer house prices in Canberra ($980,000) were the second highest among the capital cities at the end of 2023, followed by Melbourne ($840,000) and Brisbane ($830,000), whilst Darwin ($585,000) was the lowest.
The median transfer price of attached dwellings (units, apartments, et cetera) in capital cities also generally increased since 2013. Sydney prices increased from $520,000 at the start of 2013 to $780,000 at the end of 2023 (ABS 2024a). Melbourne ($615,000) was the second most expensive for units/apartments at the end of 2023, followed by Canberra ($610,000) and Adelaide ($556,000).
The Rental Crisis
Based on weekly rents sourced from the SQM Research Weekly Rents Index for the week ending 4 March 2024, the Everybody’s Home Report: Priced Out: An Index of Affordable Rentals for Australian Voters. Third Edition, released in March 2025, reveals that many renters earning below $100,000 per year would struggle to afford asking rents, with housing costs far exceeding the internationally recognised 30 percent affordability benchmark. Those on lower incomes can be forced to spend over 70 percent of their income to rent, making housing costs completely unsustainable. Even at $60,000 per year, renting consumes 50–70 percent of net income in capital cities, leaving little financial room for essentials like food, utilities, and transport.
For those earning $40,000, with a net weekly income of $688, annually rent accounts for 82 percent of income. This figure is far above the widely accepted affordability benchmark of 30 percent, placing people in this income bracket in severe rental stress. Even at an annual income of $50,000, rent still consumes 68 percent of net income, suggesting that rental affordability remains out of reach for those on lower incomes. As income increases, the proportion of earnings required for rent decreases. At an income of $60,000 per year, rent takes up 59 percent of net income, and for those earning $70,000, it accounts for 52 percent.
ACOSS and Anglicare Australia, who represent the needs of people living on social security income report that for most of their clients, access to private rental accommodation is now unavailable. They predict that, at current trends, by 2031 over 440,000 older households will not be able to find or afford housing.
Thus, Australia is witnessing a rising incidence of homelessness among new demographics, particularly older single women, and low-income single income families. The affordability of private rental accommodation is now restricted to two-income households in the competition among renters for accommodation in capital cities, while waiting lists for social housing continue to get longer. Housing has thus grown as a political ‘hot potato’ for all levels of government.
The Public Policy Response
Australia operates on a social democratic philosophy whereby the Government plays a role in managing the consequences of market extractivism, through direct intervention as a supplier of goods, or through regulation and taxation, to prevent environmental and health harms, and to raise the funds to provide public goods. As neo-liberal economic policy began to influence government thinking to favour increasing marketisation in the provision of some public goods, we saw a drastic reduction in the funding of public housing as houses for ‘workers’ changed to the idea of public housing for high priority welfare ‘cases’. This had the unintended effect of concentrating high-needs populations in public housing estates, often on the urban fringe with poor access to community facilities and employment opportunities. This exacerbated their social marginalisation and impoverishment, demonstrating that a ‘house’ is not a ‘home-in-community’, which is required for social wellbeing and community resilience.
The entrenched financialisation of the housing sector, since Prime Minister Howard’s fateful decision to remove capital gains tax from housing, and further taxation benefits to allow tax deductions on private investment into the housing market in order to stimulate supply of rental accommodation, means the solution for the housing crisis is being sought in the catchcry of increasing supply. Such supply is being sought through the rapid increase in the provision of social housing (both public and affordable housing) and innovative schemes such as build-to-rent, which seek to induce private developers into the supply of rental accommodation, not just houses and units for sale.
Given the intensity of the housing crisis that is impacting Australian cities, submissions to the draft National Urban Policy in 2024 highlighted many of the issues. Of particular interest to an Enlivenment Worldview approach is the submission from the Australian Community Land Trust Network, welcoming the Policy’s recognition of an opportunity to plan for and create future-proofed adaptive urban environments in the face of change and uncertainty, quoting: “We agree that Australian cities need to prepare for, and adapt to the anticipated structural changes that will shape urban economies, industries and settlement patterns.”
The 2025 combination of cyclonic floods impacting SE Queensland and Northern NSW, and the Trump 2.0 upending of assumptions about a rules-based international order under US hegemony, have brought all these considerations into sharp relief. A further tsunami awaits us in the potential impact of AI on future jobs.
Access to suitable land for new housing supply is proving a critical issue. Land releases on the urban fringe lack public transport access to where jobs are located, and are often on flood plains, now vulnerable to flooding associated with severe weather events. This is placing pressure on government to repurpose their own public owned land resources and to enforce regulations on local councils to allow increased density in housing stock along public transport routes. Productivity in the housing sector is low; construction costs and delays are high, and there is widespread evidence that building standards in the high-density sector have left many owners of units in a position of financial precarity. Furthermore, many of these units have been built for single income households, or double income no-kids households, and are unsuitable for families with children, either in the provision of bedrooms or in access to public parks or community facilities.
We might therefore ask, can we build a bridge between the release of government owned land for housing to an entirely different way of thinking about housing: one that takes it out of the neo-liberal economic marketisation bubble, or the public housing welfare bubble, with all its attendant, well documented problems?
How might the economics of commoning be applied to the housing sector?
The Community Land Trust (CLT) Movement
The debate on the role of commoning, as an alternative economic framework, can offer a new perspective on housing, moving beyond the conventional legal, economic, and political framework that frames housing as a site of privacy, private ownership, and individual aspirations.
Harvey has asserted that ‘at the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commodified, off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations.’
Since 2010, Prof. Louise Crabtree-Hayes and Emeritus Prof. Peter Phibbs have been leading a series of projects researching CLTs as an affordable housing option in Australia. As interest in the CLT model developed, Crabtree-Hayes set up an online network for people who wanted to share knowledge. Over 200 people joined this group. A small group of dedicated volunteers from the online group established the Australian CLT Network Inc in November 2022. As their work has continued to develop, it was officially launched in 2024, along with providing submissions on urban and housing policy to government.
Another group active in this space is the Property Collective, whose building group model empowers people to take more control over their housing future by allowing members to build the homes and communities they want. The process they undertake involves like-minded people coming together to pool financial resources to buy land and fund their own development. This collective then defines their specific needs and controls and design and build of their own project, allowing homes to be customised to individual requirements. However, while a collectivised approach, this model still rests firmly within the market sector.
Housing Cooperatives are another approach. They are a community-led form of affordable housing run by the people who live in them. Residents can be renters or they can have a stake in the co-operative’s equity, and advocates say they could be part of the solution to Australia’s rental crisis. In Australia, co-op housing is less than 1 per cent of the national community housing stock.
But in some parts of Europe, such as Sweden, Denmark and Norway it is 25-30 per cent of national housing stock.
The Community Land Trust (CLT) model constitutes a cohousing model that is specifically aligned with the idea of housing commoning due to its emphasis on taking land out of the market, its focus on affordability, and on collective self-management. To facilitate this, CLTs are non-profit organisations that aim to provide affordable housing by owning land and leasing it to home owners. The model, which originated in the United States during the civil rights movement, has since spread globally as a means to combat housing inequality and land speculation.
According to the Australian Community Land Trust Network, over the past four decades, more than 200 CLTs have been established in the USA, where low-to moderate-income homeowners in CLT homes withstood the 2008 mortgage meltdown, with a foreclosure rate one-eighth of the national average across all income levels. Over 350 CLTs have been established in the UK in the last 15 years with over 2,000 assets, and they are growing across Europe and other parts of the world.
While the CLT retains ownership of the land, the home owner owns the building on it. This unique arrangement helps to keep housing costs down by removing the land component from the price equation, where real increases are occurring, which are again reflected in council rates (property taxes) that fund local government operations.
Because the CLT leases the land through long-term agreements, the land remains a community asset and the housing remains affordable for future generations. Resale price restrictions prevent homes from being sold at market rates. Governance structures reinforce the relationist ethos of CLTs, as they are governed by a board of directors that includes residents, community members, and public representatives. This structure ensures that the trust operates in the best interest of the community, with decisions being made collectively to serve the public good. Further, by separating land ownership from housing ownership, CLT ensures that homes remain affordable across generations.
This model is particularly beneficial for low-to moderate-income families who seek stability, community involvement, and the opportunity to build equity in their homes while being protected from market volatility. Housing based on CLTs principles in Australia could foster mobility and stability in housing, combining community development and high-quality design with a range of much-needed affordable housing options that stay affordable. Like any other form of housing, CLT models require homes, land, and/or funds to start.
Australia has a growing community housing sector that currently provides affordable rental housing for very low-to moderate-income households.
Resale restricted home ownership based on CLT principles could be a natural extension of their activities. Local communities and municipalities may also want to start up organisations to create affordable housing and deliver diverse benefits through non-speculative development. Increasingly, global cities, including London and New York, are choosing to not sell public land, but to support and partner with CLTs as innovative placemakers to develop and perpetually steward high quality and affordable residential and non-residential spaces (Crabtree-Hayes).
Differences Between CLTs and the Build-to-Rent (BTR) Model
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and the Build-to-Rent (BTR) model are both innovative approaches to addressing housing challenges, but they serve different purposes and benefit distinct groups of people.
CLTs focus on creating long-term affordable home-ownership opportunities, the Build-to-Rent (BTR) model is designed to provide high-quality rental housing, often in urban areas, where tenants do not have the option to purchase the property.
BTR developments are typically owned by institutional investors who rent out the units as a long-term investment. This model benefits renters who prioritise flexibility, access to modern amenities, and a lower commitment than home ownership. It is therefore attractive to young professionals, transient workers, and those who may not yet be ready or able to purchase a home, but still desire high-quality, well-managed living environments.
However, the Australian Community Land Trust Network suggests that these benefits can also be found through CLTs, who often refer to themselves as “developers who don’t go away” as they are community-based and community-driven. Their ongoing place in their community means they are committed to better construction, environmental performance, and other housing and planning outcomes.
Difference between CLTs and Social Housing
Social housing tends to be only available as rental housing for very low through to moderate income households. Often, residents in social housing can’t stay in their homes if their incomes go above certain limits. In contrast, CLTs can provide everything from boarding houses to single-family, owner-occupied housing and can house people across a range of incomes, usually up to 120 per cent of median income. Importantly, CLT residents can stay in their homes as long as they like. Householders can rent or own their homes, but cannot access the land value, ‘flip’ properties for profit, or sub-let for profit.
Due to their focus on community benefit, CLTs can and do also underlie community and commercial facilities including aged care, childcare, community gardens, health centres, refugee centres, businesses, open spaces, and many other valued aspects of an urban community life.
The Politics of Housing
Most political leaders in Australia at the national, state and local level are themselves home owners, financially invested in the value of the housing market. Many of them have substantial holdings as investors in the private rental market, taking advantage of available tax benefits. However, as home ownership becomes increasingly unavailable to millennials, the children of baby boomers, and Gen Z (born after 1997), the political focus has shifted from home ownership to include those who rent. It is now accepted that without access to the ‘bank of mum and dad’, even those with relatively good incomes no longer have access to home ownership.
This is a major cultural shift in the Australian political landscape that speaks directly to the financialisation of housing. Because of this, in many parts of the world we are seeing how housing movements can play an important role in contesting the commodification and financialisation of housing as well as demolitions and evictions from rental, private and unlawfully occupied housing.
However, if housing cooperatives, and structures such as CLTs are to contribute toward de-commodified housing models, taking housing and maintaining it outside market dynamics, attention must be given to the market and property relations in which they are embedded.
As we look into the coming Federal Election, it is now commonly recognised that the ‘housing crisis’ is the face of the ‘cost of living crisis’: the number one community concern. This comes on the back of a growing and reluctant realisation that climate change is ‘real’ not just in terms of energy transition requirements away from ageing coal-fired power stations, but in terms of the impact of fires and floods on the long-term viability of large tracts of our housing. As insurance premiums skyrocket, it is readily apparent that it no long makes sense to build on cheap flood prone land, in fire impacted landscapes, along ocean foreshores being eroded by storm surges, or on land where access to fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce and unreliable.
This is not only a crisis of homelessness for renters and home owners unable to afford to rebuild their homes, or access loans dependent on their having insurance. It is also a crisis for the great Australian obsession with the house as a financial asset, free of any capital gains and inheritance taxation, primed for intergenerational wealth accumulation—if you happen to have built in locations unlikely to be impacted by changing weather patterns as the world continues to warm, well past the target of 1.5 degrees centigrade.
In their submission to the Draft Urban Policy, the Australian Community Land Trust Network highlighted important issues for government consideration:
- Current shared equity models under development and roll-out in Australia are based on models that internationally have been shown to be inflationary and lose affordability over time.
- Australia has a critical absence of housing and urban development models that embed and uphold ongoing mechanisms for genuine resident and community input into collaborative forms of governance.
- Much urban development is premised on and/or experiences immense community opposition and antagonism, driven partly by a history of bad actors and poor faith.
- There is a pressing need for appropriate and regenerative development, informed by Country and its stewards as appropriate, foregrounds the need for approaches that move beyond business-as-usual and into spaces in which innovation can occur.
- Australia could address the living on Country and self-determination aspirations of First Nations communities through specifically encouraging, as appropriate and determined by community, culturally appropriate forms of CLTs.
- Specific legal definitions are required as CLTs are not Trusts as understood under Australian trust law. Therefore Australian CLTs are incorporating as not-for-profit associations and corporations, and some may incorporate as co-operatives. A national CLT definition could provide grounds for permission to use the word “trust” in a CLT name without being subject to Trust law, if CLTs were to seek to pursue that course.
- Internationally, local, state, and national governments see CLTs as appropriate, ongoing governance partners and targets for policy programs that seek collaborative approaches to addressing intertwined issues of social, ecological, and economic justice.
Images of the 1930s Depression Years are beginning to haunt us. As Dinmore notes, recent images of families pitching tents or living out of cars evoke some of the more enduring scenes from the Great Depression.
As discussed by Ian McIntyre, the economic depression of the 1930s saw thousands of Australians thrown out of their homes and into the streets. These actions did not go unopposed. Across Australia pickets, occupations and protests were organised to successfully disrupt and prevent evictions and auctions, winning forms of rent assistance along the way. Anti Eviction Committees (AECs), the Unemployed Workers Movement and other organisations utilised a variety of strategies against the bailiffs, landlords, banks and finance companies who preyed on the disadvantaged.
With the failure of government, of all descriptions, to find a meaningful and timely solution to the growing housing crisis in Australia, as the conflict between the housed and the disposed increases, and takes on an intergenerational flavour, we may well see such radical political movements once again emerge.
A movement that will promote the sort of solutions being offered by the CLT movement, that removes such housing from the market, is creating a new commoning approach to enabling Australians to have access to the security of a home-in-community, protected from the volatility of market speculation. As Dinmore notes, our Depression-era shanty towns and eviction protests, as well as the way we remember them, are a reminder that what people say and do about the housing crisis today is not just about facts and figures. Above all, it reflects what we value and who we think we are.
Maori Innovations in New Zealand
New Zealand’s housing crisis disproportionately affects Māori in rural areas where healthy homes are in short supply and collective land ownership presents a challenge to banks. At its heart, housing on ancestral lands is a Te Tiriti issue. The Waitangi Tribunal recently concluded the Crown has a duty to provide housing because of the guarantee of tino rangatiratanga over kāinga (homes and settlements).
Whare Ora, a community-run housing initiative in Te Tairāwhiti (East Coast), shows that innovative approaches to home ownership can be found within communities. Since 2020, Whare Ora has developed a social enterprise model, focused on producing healthy, affordable and transportable whare (houses) for local communities. Run by the charitable company Hikurangi Enterprises, Whare Ora has now supplied more than 80 homes for local whānau. This project is directly addressing regional housing deprivation and the finance barriers for building on Māori land under multiple ownership.
Such a model has obvious implications for Indigenous Australian communities seeking innovative solutions for the acute housing crisis that affects their communities, particularly in rural and remote areas. But it also has implications for exploration of ethical finance models for non-Indigenous Australians, interested in the CLT approach to housing-in-community as a long term solution to housing for the future.
Conclusions
Professor Louise Crabtree-Hayes of Western Sydney University, who is recognised as an expert in the area of CLTs, has undertaken research on increasing the uptake of this solution within the Australian context, using a range of focus groups based in Melbourne.
She notes that as with many Anglophone nations, Australia displays a dualistic housing system dominated by private ownership and private rental, both of which demonstrate an ongoing and intensifying lack of affordability. Despite extensive public subsidisation, rates of ownership have dropped in recent years while the proportion of renters is increasing. Alongside calls for private rental reforms to make this more appropriate as a form of long-term tenure, there is growing interest in intermediate tenure forms to allow easier access to ownership, ease the pressure on the country’s marginalised social housing, and provide a greater range of options.
Due to their small scale and relative newness in Australia, intermediate tenures such as shared equity, community land trusts, and housing co-operatives remain under-researched and unfamiliar, with previous research showing limited interest in shared equity products amongst potential buyers.
While small scale, Crabtree-Hayes claims that her research based on focus groups would suggest that in Australia there is a latent market for diverse affordable home ownership options that restrict resale values to maintain affordability. nearly all focus group participants were prepared to forego equity gains in return for the stability and autonomy that the model provided, aligning with data on the lived experiences of CLT residents in the USA (Martin et al., 2020). She notes that Innovative design and development models such as Melbourne’s Baugruppen-inspired nightingale developments are over-subscribed, which shows there is a definite market for that model’s typology of compact units complemented by high-amenity shared spaces. Thus the history of CLTs as community-led organisations shows they are appropriate to deliberative development models and designs that respond to community needs, which is partly driving their uptake internationally, in addition to their affordability mechanisms. This means there may be potential and market justification to combine diversity in tenure and design.
In particular Crabtree-Hayes questions assumptions that rest on staircasing housing innovation towards conventional home ownership. She maintains that financialised and asset-based interpretations of shared equity might not align with or capture the entirety of market aspirations, which foreground the desire to make and stay in a home. This echoes recent research showing that the majority of affordable housing co-operative residents want to live in their homes for the rest of their lives. This underscores the need to increase the scale and diversity of resale-restricted models rather than design them to meet the demands of, and contribute to, overheated markets.
She concludes that the adoption and adaptation of CLT principles in Australia is in its early days and, similarly to the USA and UK sectors, occurring within a landscape currently dominated by private, speculative property forms and government outsourcing of welfare.
This presents a series of issues regarding the possible form, objectives, and activities of CLTs and of other forms of permanently affordable and community-led housing such as co-operatives. These issues are relevant in Australia but also in other countries grappling with heavily speculative, financialised, and duopolistic housing regimes.
Shifting the lens on housing solutions in the Australian context requires the wider shifting of the lens from the entrenched extractivist assumptions of the Enlightenment Worldview of homo economicus toward the Enlivenment Worldview of relationalist engagement across the human and more-than-human world.
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