The real ‘housos’: Reclaiming identity and place

Public – or, as we are now more likely to refer to it, social housing¹ – represents a very small and indeed falling proportion of Australia’s housing stock, especially when compared to most European countries. From a peak of just under 6 per cent of dwellings nationally in the 1980s (10 per cent in South Australia), by 2006 social housing represented around 4 per cent of housing stock.² Government subsidies for low-income rental housing have been politically contested since the earliest federal government intervention following the Second World War, but at least until the early 1990s public housing provided affordable and secure