Housing insecurity and precarious living: an Australian exploration

There is a growing interest in Australia and elsewhere on the ways in which housing can make a difference to personal and family wellbeing, mental and physical health, economic participation, social connectedness, community functioning and social cohesion. In Australia, these are often called ‘non-shelter outcomes’ to distinguish them from traditional concerns with the affordability, adequacy and appropriateness of housing (Bridge et al. 2003). Understanding the broader effects of housing is important in developing housing policies that can contribute to improvements in these areas. However, just which dimensions of housing are linked to these non-shelter outcomes is often not clear, nor is there a detailed understanding of how these linkages work in practice (Stone and Hulse 2007). In this report, we focus on one aspect of housing, which we term ‘housing insecurity’, and the way in which this interacts with other types of insecurities to constitute ‘precarious living’. In particular we explore the ways in which precarious living is associated with adverse effects in terms of mental and physical health problems, low levels of social connectedness and the transmission of disadvantage across generations. [Introduction]