scholarly journals Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 004209802091582
Author(s):  
Nicole Gurran ◽  
Madeleine Pill ◽  
Sophia Maalsen

Australia faces a chronic shortage of affordable rental housing, as do many other nations in the Global North. Unable to access the formal rental sector, lower-income earners are increasingly resorting to share housing and other informal arrangements, sometimes occupying makeshift accommodation or illegal dwellings. This article examines informality in Sydney’s housing market, an important case because of the explicit policy efforts geared towards supporting diverse and higher density housing supply. It draws on analysis of the regulatory planning framework and primary data derived from interviews and focus groups with housing advocates, support workers and building compliance officers from across the metropolitan region. It seeks to understand the drivers of supply and demand within the informal housing market and constructs a typology of informal tenures and dwelling provision. The article contributes new empirical data on the outcomes of planning policies designed to enable flexible housing responses which legitimise some informal practices, and the wider dimensions of informal housing provision within formal urban systems of the Global North.

Author(s):  
Aleksandr Kljucnikov ◽  
Mehmet Civelek ◽  
Vladimír Krajcík ◽  
Lubomír Kmeco

This research summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the issue of potential tax evasions and increased rental rates that one of innovative home-sharing platforms might causes. The study aims to find possible tax evasion that each property and each host can cause by considering creative activities in tourism marketing and a sharing economy platform, Airbnb in Prague. Besides, the authors identified the potential problems in the rental accommodation market. Systematization literary sources and approaches for solving the problem of sharing economy platforms indicate that although these platforms benefit for some economic, social and environmental issues, they pose some troubles in various markets. Regarding methodological tools of the research method, this paper used a web scraping technique to gain data from the Airbnb website. The authors analysed 13918 accommodations that were rented by 6768 Airbnb users between April 2016 and March 2017. In the study, the authors used the Microsoft Excel 2016 program and a model created by researchers to make calculations. The paper presented the results of an empirical analysis showing that in case the sensitive regulation of the number of nights will apply the potential tax incomes will lower only on 0.98% when considering accommodations and on 6.40% when considering users. In this case, 16832 rental units will appear in the long-term housing market. Moreover, tax evasion becomes more when considering each dwelling instead of each host because some users rented more than one rental accommodation. The research also empirically confirms and theoretically proves that that extended limits for overnight stays yield benefits for costs, supply and demand of rental housing. Those findings can be useful for governments, academicians that are interested in tourism marketing, firms in the accommodation industry that look for new marketing innovations and short or long-term housing market participants such as lessor and lessees. Keywords: accommodation, tourism, marketing, Airbnb, innovation, home-sharing, Prague, sharing economy, taxation.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110178
Author(s):  
Frances Brill

This article argues that urban governance, and academic theorisations of it, have focused on the role and strategies of real estate developers at the expense of understanding how investors are shaped by regulatory environments. In contrast, using the case of institutional investment in London’s private rental housing (Build to Rent), in this article I argue that unpacking the private sector and the development process helps reveal different types of risk which necessitate variegated responses from within the real estate sector. In doing so, I demonstrate the complexities of the private sector in urban development, especially housing provision, and the limitations of a binary conceptualised around pro- and anti-development narratives when discussing planning decisions. Instead, I show the multiplicity of responses from within the private sector, and how these reflect particular approaches to risk management. Uncovering this helps theorise the complexities of governing housing systems and demonstrates the potential for risk-based urban governance analysis in the future.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Juan Yan ◽  
Marietta Haffner ◽  
Marja Elsinga

Inclusionary housing (IH) is a regulatory instrument adopted by local governments in many countries to produce affordable housing by capturing resources created through the marketplace. In order to assess whether it is efficient, scholarly attention has been widely focused on its evaluation. However, there is a lack of studies evaluating IH from a governance perspective. Since IH is about involving private actors in affordable housing production, the governance point of view of cooperating governmental and non-governmental actors governing society to achieve societal goals is highly relevant. The two most important elements of governance—actors and interrelationships among these actors—are taken to build an analytical framework to explore and evaluate the governance of IH. Based on a research approach that combines a literature review and a case study of China, this paper concludes that the ineffective governance of Chinese IH is based on three challenges: (1) The distribution of costs and benefits across actors is unequal since private developers bear the cost, but do not enjoy the increments of land value; (2) there is no sufficient compensation for developers to offset the cost; and (3) there is no room for negotiations for flexibility in a declining market. Given that IH is favored in many Chinese cities, this paper offers the policy implications: local governments should bear more costs of IH, rethink their relations with developers, provide flexible compliance options for developers, and perform differently in a flourishing housing market and a declining housing market.


2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Boeing

As the rental housing market moves online, the internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information inequalities. Biases in online listings’ representativeness could impact different communities’ access to housing search information, reinforcing traditional information segregation patterns through a digital divide. They could also circumscribe housing practitioners’ and researchers’ ability to draw broad market insights from listings to understand rental supply and affordability. This study examines millions of Craigslist rental listings across the USA and finds that they spatially concentrate and overrepresent whiter, wealthier, and better-educated communities. Other significant demographic differences exist in age, language, college enrollment, rent, poverty rate, and household size. Most cities’ online housing markets are digitally segregated by race and class, and we discuss various implications for residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, housing voucher utilization, and automated monitoring and analytics in the smart cities paradigm. While Craigslist contains valuable crowdsourced data to better understand affordability and available rental supply in real time, it does not evenly represent all market segments. The internet promises information democratization, and online listings can reduce housing search costs and increase choice sets. However, technology access/preferences and information channel segregation can concentrate such information-broadcasting benefits in already-advantaged communities, reproducing traditional inequalities and reinforcing residential sorting and segregation dynamics. Technology platforms like Craigslist construct new institutions with the power to shape spatial economies, human interactions, and planners’ ability to monitor and respond to urban challenges.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 1111-1131 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdulLateef Olanrewaju

Purpose – The opportunities that the emerging markets present to the players in the construction industry means that the players need to expand on the scope and size of their responsibilities and duties to the stakeholders. Each of the professionals now demands more specialised and sophisticated services from one another. The other players in the construction industry now require more emerging responsibilities and duties from the quantity surveyors. The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles that “modern” quantity surveyors play by measuring the gaps that exist in the services that the quantity surveyors provide. Design/methodology/approach – Primary data are collected through survey questionnaires. In total, 23 roles played by modern quantity surveyors are identified and addressed to the respondents to rank the rate at which quantity surveyors provide these “emerging” services. The collected data were analysed statistically. Findings – The results of the findings led to the conclusion that the quantity surveyors were not meeting the expectations of other players. Therefore, for competitiveness, quantity surveyors need to better meet demand expectations. Research limitations/implications – This findings of this research are constrained to the services or functions that the quantity provide in the construction industry. Practical implications – This knowledge is valuable to academic institutions that offer quantity surveying programmes, to practicing quantity surveyors, governments, and other players in the construction industry. It will allow quantity surveyors to reconcile supply and demand expectations. Originality/value – There is no known conclusive empirical study on services offered by quantity surveyors in any emerging markets. Therefore, the findings offer a fresh understanding on the services of quantity surveyors not only in Nigeria but elsewhere. While some of the services are common, others are peculiar to emerging markets.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (8) ◽  
pp. 811-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ping-Chun Hsiung ◽  
Yu Wang

Satiric Shunkouliu (顺口溜), an oral folklore tradition among Chinese peasants known as “slippery jingles” or “doggerels,” express discontent and often contain disguised critiques of official propaganda. In this article, I call upon Shunkouliu to expose the reality behind the dogma during China’s Great Leap Forward and Great Famine (1958-1962). This departs from existing scholarship that has focused on written texts and interviews as primary data. Analyzing Shunkouliu demonstrates the collective efforts of Chinese peasants in speaking the truth. Through its satiric and disruptive qualities, Shunkouliu challenged official rhetoric by making erased realities visible and silenced voices audible. Recognizing Shunkouliu as legitimate data also challenges positivist criteria (representativeness and sample size) in assessing data credibility. I conclude this article by urging qualitative practitioners in the global South to explore forms of data beyond those traditionally examined within the parameters of qualitative research originating in the global North.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document