Sustaining housing through planned maintenance in remote Central Australia

Abstract

Once housing is constructed, its sustainability depends on the efficacy of property maintenance. In remote Indigenous communities in Australia, responsive or reactive approaches to property maintenance dominate over planned and preventive attention, leaving housing in various states of disrepair. By documenting an approach that is succeeding in this wider context, this article shows the commonplace situation of poorly maintained social housing is entirely interruptible. It does so by examining an alternative and exceptional approach taken on the remote Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia, where housing benefits from a planned maintenance program combined with an environmental health program. Through detailed empirical analysis of program datasets, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, this article describes the expert, systematic, and attentive work required to sustain functional housing in the wider context of undersupply, crowding, and challenging environmental conditions. We argue for the necessity of planned maintenance approaches as an essential component of sustainable housing, both to extend the life of housing assets and to ensure householder health and wellbeing.

Keywords:

• Maintenance
• sustainability
• housing quality
• Indigenous housing policy
• healthy housing
• environmental health

Acknowledgments

The authors express their gratitude to Healthabitat, Housing SA, and Nganampa Health Council, with whom they established partnerships for this research. We thank the wider research team for their contributions to drafts of the report on which this article builds, especially Arianna Brambilla, Peter Phibbs, Chao Sun, and Paul Torzillo. We are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and editor of Housing Studies for detailed feedback that helped us to clarify the essay’s argument and contribution to the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See for example Various Applicants from Santa Teresa v Chief Executive Officer (Housing) [2019] NTCAT 7 (27 February 2019), (2019). Available at https://www.hrlc.org.au/human-rights-case-summaries/2019/6/24/nt-civil-and-administrative-tribunal-awards-compensation-to-aboriginal-tenants-for-uninhabitable-housing (accessed 7 March 2022).

2 Throughout this article, interviewees have been anonymised and interview material is referenced by stakeholder code (for example SH1).

3 It is not possible to say if this figure exceeds industry norms as each jurisdiction reports maintenance expenditure differently (Nous Group, 2017, p. 11). The Australian Capital Territory expends approximately $40m on planned and reactive maintenance for 11,600 dwellings in the capital city of Canberra, yielding an average of $3,362 per dwelling in 2014/15 figures (ACT Auditor General, 2016, p. 13, 30). Canberra also has twice the volume of housing stock per 1000 tenants than Australian averages, reducing wear and tear from crowding (p. 66). An analysis of the costs of servicing remote area housing suggests metropolitan public housing costs are multiplied by a factor of 1.4 to 4.5 in remote areas (Nous Group, 2017, p. 13).

Additional information

Funding

This research draws from the project, ‘Modelling Sustainable Regional and Remote Indigenous Housing and Maintenance’, which was funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

Notes on contributors

Liam Grealy

Liam Grealy is a research fellow in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a senior research officer at Menzies School of Health Research. At the Housing for Health Incubator, his work examines housing and infrastructure policy in regional and remote Australia and southeast Louisiana.

Tess Lea

Tess Lea is Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department, Community, Culture and Global Studies, at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Her research concerns issues of dysfunction in Indigenous and wider social policy.

Megan Moskos

Megan Moskos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Employment and Skills research centre, where her work is in applied sociology and social policy, especially with disadvantaged groups, in rural and remote areas, including Aboriginal communities.

Richard Benedict

Richard Benedict is a Research Associate in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney and Director of Richard Benedict Consulting. His research and practice focus on the roles of government, not for profit, and private sectors in delivering and maintaining social, affordable, and Indigenous housing.

Daphne Habibis

Daphne Habibis is an Associate Professor of sociology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. Her career is concerned with understanding and addressing social inequality and her current work is concerned with race relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and with Indigenous housing, especially as it impacts on family violence.

Stephanie King

Stephanie King is a writer and filmmaker, including for the film Undermined (2018). She is employed by the Housing for Health Incubator to work on the project ‘Modelling Sustainable Regional and Remote Indigenous Housing and Maintenance’.