National Strategy to end Homelessness and Ensure Housing Affordability.5pm Oct 12 @ Occupy Sydney Anniversary

A swarm of Government departments and Peak Bodies NGOs have monopolised the Australian discussion about Housing and Housing Affordability for decades. Under their stewardship housing has become less affordable and homelessness is firmly entrenched. Every year there is a call for more funding. Government departments get bigger. NGOs get bigger. And the problem gets bigger.  Doesnt that sound like a complete waste of taxpayers and donors dollars to you?  We need to end the Housing Affordability Crisis.  Our proposal includes; Immediately ending negative gearing for non resident investors. Adding a Municipal responsibility that all businesses workforces be assessed quantifying exactly how much each employee will be paid and where they will be able to afford to live in that authoritys limits. Forcing all Motels Hotels Serviced Apartment Complexes and Travel Accommodation Service Providers to give over a percentage of their accommodation to affordable housing. With tax breaks . Affordable housing purchase to be indexed at 30% of nett income. Rent at 15% Come and have your say on Australia's lack of Housing Affordability and Ending Homelessness Nationally  5pm October 12 2013 @ Occupy Sydney  An Event within the Occupy Sydney 2nd Anniversary : https://www.facebook.com/events/519337341460865/

Affordability :Rental & Social Housing Failures

Came across this US video of homelessness America - Down and Out

The scenes may be from the US of A but the song remains the same. More and more people have access to less and less resources , while a few greedy people who do little have more and more of the worlds resources. 

Aboriginal Hostels Ltd
Tony Mundine Hostel

 Affordability is at the root of the Occupy Sydney message and Occupy Sydney occupy in the seventh least affordable City in the World. The City of Sydney orchestrated "Homeless count" fudges the numbers of homeless in the Sydney City area. The count is done over a two hour period (midnight to 2am) and only in public spaces. Many homeless people choose to sleep in the day -its safer,especially for the elderly. Missing from this statistic are the many homeless who sleep on private property, or the numerous long term homeless who sleep on the City Rail System.

 The "solutions" pro-offered by the government marginalisation industry are often "Jail you pay for". For example the Tony Mundine Hostels charge students a whopping $168 per week, leaving them a mere $80 per fortnight from their Centrelink allowances to pay for transport clothes and essentials. Hostels such as Matthew Talbot (Vinnies) and Foster House (Salvos) impose draconian rules extra to a tenancy and charge hefty rents while denying that a tenancy exists -in order to ursurp homeless peoples rights in exchange for a roof and a bed.

Housing NSW Property at MillersPoint
for Auction May 1st 2012

   Current NSW Social Housing policy enables the gentrification of some suburbs and the ghettofication of others . A distardly scheme where conveniently located inner City properties of the proportions needed to accommodate larger families or suitable for extended family living are being privatised ( sold on 99 year leases) with no known comparable replacements being built or bought anywhere in Sydney City.  Housing NSW waiting lists exceed 10000 approved applications on awaiting list which seems to move with glacial pace. there are clearly insufficient houses to accommodate all seekers.Yet Sydney City Housing is being sold and not replaced in locations such as Millers Point. 

  Housing NSW further exacerbate the high cost of rental accommodation by not only being Australia's largest landlord, but also Australia's largest tenant of residential property. By leasing private property to fulfil some social housing rental responsibilities Housing NSW who pay by configuration rather than quality, enable slum and low end landlords to charge above market rents for properties relative to the respective area. This has the effect of lifting the private rental cost of lower end properties in cheaper areas adding to unaffordability.

   Missing completely from the basket of non-solutions pro-offered by Federal State and Local government is Affordable Home Ownership -current models have social housing being controlled by the State often under the management of one of the plethora of parasitic agencies. For clients there are more obligations than a standard rental agreement and zero opportunity of ownership. Ownership and therefore control defines a home. For many less than ownership is merely an enslavement handcuff full of recurring obligations and responsibilities -jail you pay for.

Help Occupy Sydney put Economics Front and Centre

Brief for Occupy Sydney Research Working Group Projects

The Occupy Sydney Research Working Group is calling for individuals or self-organised teams to produce fact reports on various issues of interest to Occupy Sydney. These reports will be used to produce educational materials that will be kept and distributed at the occupy site and published online. 

Issues of interest at this stage include, but will not be limited to (‘*’ indicates priorities):

• Personal debt*
• Mortgage debt*
• Housing foreclosures*
• Housing affordability*
• Conditions for studying while on welfare*
• Homelessness
• Business debt
• Sovereign debt
• Food affordability
• Wealth and poverty distribution in Sydney
• Fractional banking
• Superannuation

For the fact report we will need you to provide a .doc (word document) containing:

• 1 A4 page of writing that reports on the issue
• A series of bullet pointed facts relevant to the issue
• Any relevant graphs, charts or images referenced to the original source
• Any additional information is welcome but should be submitted in an appendix

All facts will need to be clearly referenced to the most reliable, primary sources possible, i.e. not newspaper articles but the sources that an article might use, not media surveys but  government, institutional, or academic reports etc.

If you are interested in producing a fact report please contact Lance occupysydney@gmail.com or on 0410722000. You will need to provide details on what issue you would like to research and when you will be able to submit the fact report. You are also welcome to ask for advice on how to conduct research or suggest other issues to be added to the list.