Developer builds smaller dwellings as Albany housing shortage grows
But away from a coastline framed by million-dollar homes, a crisis is growing.
Catherine Sawtell said four weeks ago she was staying in a house with rats under the floorboards and a possum in the roof.
The university-educated 64-year-old once owned her own home in Albany, 420 kilometres south of Perth, but became homeless in about 2019 when her marriage broke down.
She bounced from refuge to shelter, sleeping on couches and in share homes, eventually moving to Queensland in 2021 to stay with a friend.
Ms Sawtell returned a year later to Albany, but affording a home in the coastal city on a disability pension proved impossible.
"I have an excellent rental record … I'm not on any blacklists or anything like that, but I couldn't get anything."
After five years homeless, a social housing provider helped Ms Sawtell secure accommodation that allowed her to start rebuilding her life.
"And I bought a little second-hand car, so I'm mobile now."
Her two-bedroom home is one of 12 units designed by affordable housing provider Advance Housing with people like Ms Sawtell in mind.
Chief executive John Lysaught said demand for social housing had risen by 30 per cent in the past 18 months, but much of the available stock was unfit for purpose.
He said fewer than 6 per cent of development approvals in the past five years were for one and two-bedroom homes, but almost 90 per cent of people on the social housing waiting list were seeking smaller dwellings.
"For pure social housing, there's over 750 eligible tenancies on the waitlist for the Great Southern, and over 570 of those are in Albany," Mr Lysaught said.
Albany has become the fastest-growing regional centre in Western Australia and the fourth-fastest nationally, according to a recent report by the Regional Australia Institute.
It found the region, with a population of about 50,000, experienced a 200 per cent rise in internal migration in the 12 months to December.
Support services fear the increasing population will worsen the housing crisis.
"It seems to be getting worse if anything," Southern Aboriginal Corporation deputy chief executive Oscar Colbung said.
"Demand has increased so much that there's virtually nothing available more broadly."
WA Housing Minister John Carey said the government was working with community housing providers to deliver more social and affordable housing across the state, targeted towards seniors and those with disabilities.
Mr Lysaught's plans for Albany included 36 and 51-unit developments, but getting ahead of the shortage was an ongoing struggle.
"There's lots being done about it, both by government and by community providers, but it's going to take some time to try and catch up."
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ABC News
7 minutes ago
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Tribunal sides with tenant in test of new laws on pets in NSW rental properties
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ABC News
3 hours ago
- ABC News
Prefabricated homes could be the answer to Australia's housing and climate issues
Pre-fab housing has a long history in Australia. ( ) From early colonial settlers to the post-war construction boom, prefabricated and modular housing has a long history in Australia. Can factory-built homes fix our housing woes and help the climate? The donga is a quintessential Australian term that no one really knows the origin of. For those unfamiliar with the term, according to the Macquarie Dictionary, it's a "makeshift shelter" or "a portable prefabricated structure". It's often associated with temporary accommodation and offices, in industries like mining and construction. If you went to a state school during the second half of the 20th century, you'll likely associate prefab with demountable classrooms. The donga is a word describing a wide range of structures, but where it comes from is a mystery. ( ) It's this history that's left a stigma on prefabricated and modular housing construction in Australia. "We need to change the mindset within the community because the history of prefab in Australia is not very good," Dr Ehsan Noroozinejad from the University of Western Sydney says. "Most people think that the current generation of prefab and modular housing is very similar to the housing that they were using as temporary shelters in the 1950s, which were not very high-quality shelters." A small prefabricated home in Altona, Melbourne, about 1950–1952. ( ) Originally assembled in Fitzroy in 1854, the Bellhouse was then moved to its present site in South Melbourne. ( ) Modern prefab buildings are now often higher-quality than their traditional counterparts, but still make up less than 5 per cent of new builds. As Australia struggles to build the homes it needs, governments are grappling with how to increase supply and ease affordability. Productivity in housing construction has remained stubbornly stagnant for more than three decades. At the same time, climate change is putting an increasing number of people's homes at risk, with floods, fires and cyclones destroying thousands of homes in the last decade alone and damaging countless others. Prefabricated or modular homes have been touted as a possible solution to both crises, with the possibility of building climate-resilient, energy-efficient homes at scale, quickly and cheaply. With the side effect of creating less greenhouse gas emissions and waste in the process. "You're seeing amazing, beautiful, architecturally designed [modular] homes that are being delivered all around the country now," says Damien Crough, the co-founder of peak industry body prefabAus. This modular home by architect Daniel Burnett was constructed at the Blok Modular factory in Brisbane and assembled on-site on Stradbroke Island. ( ) The multi-residential design was the winner of the 2025 Australian House of the Year award. ( ) So if prefab could be the answer to Australia's housing and climate issues, what's holding the industry back? How does prefab work? Prefabrication is an umbrella term that means most of the building work is done in a factory, as opposed to traditional construction, where the majority of the building is done onsite. Building components, including the walls and roofs, are manufactured off-site and then transported to the final destination. Modular is going one step further, with the whole house or building constructed in a factory and put on the back of a truck. "Even the facade, even the plumbing, the wiring, everything will be manufactured and tested in the factory," Ehsan says. "All modular systems are definitely prefab but all prefab systems are not definitely modular." A prefab module for an apartment building bound for Queensland at the Modscape factory in Melbourne. ( ) The company specialises in sustainable, high-quality modular homes and commercial buildings. ( ) Advanced manufacturing used in prefab includes robotic technology. ( ) Pre-fabricated housing remains the subject of task forces and reports, rather than a mainstream building method. ( ) Damien Crough says it's a diverse industry, with many different materials, systems and techniques. "You've got timber prefab systems, steel systems, concrete-based construction, hybrid materials and composites. We've now got 3D concrete printing." The advanced manufacturing used in prefab includes robotic technology, AI and digital twins — a virtual replica that mirrors the physical world. These systems make the final product much better than traditional construction, according to Ehsan. "If you see a modular or prefab house from a street view, you cannot distinguish the difference between a traditional system and the modular system," he says. "From the inside, I would say they are much better compared to the traditional system." It's a world away from the tin dongas of the past, in which you typically boiled alive in summer and froze in winter. It's no surprise that the pioneer of factory-built homes is Sweden, the country that brought the world IKEA. It's estimated that around 85 to 90 per cent of homes there are built using prefab. Japan, where many car manufacturing facilities have been converted to house manufacturing, is also touted as a model Australia should look to emulate. Prefab components for homes are manufactured in a factory in the Netherlands. ( ) But so far, the industry in Australia has been unable to get the scale and volume needed to really take off. "It would be great to have factories like that in every state in Australia. That would be excellent. We would really go a long way to contributing to the National Housing Accord targets if we did that," Damien Crough says. "But again, you need the demand and the volume." In the past, governments across the country have been major contributors to building housing stock. In the post-war era from 1945 to 1970, government builds accounted for 16 per cent of residential constructions, but since the 1990s, that's dropped to just 3 per cent, according to analysis by the Australia Institute. "We've got a lot of our members who would definitely invest in scaling up to meet the demand if there was a transparent pipeline of work," Damien says. "It's not the government that's going to deliver this, it's the private sector." A wasteful industry Alongside the speed of construction, one of the major advantages of prefab and modular is the reduction in waste and carbon emissions, of which Australian homes are a major culprit. Residential buildings contribute to waste and emissions in three big ways: the initial build the initial build the waste when you build it the waste when you build it the energy used over the lifetime of the building Construction and demolition is the country's biggest contributor to waste, with around 27 million tonnes sent to landfill each year. The building of residential homes is also the largest contributor to the construction industry's greenhouse gas emissions. As the grid decarbonises and homes become more energy efficient, up-front construction is on track to be the biggest contributor to a building's emissions, and it's locked in during construction. According to a report by the Green Building Council of Australia, an average home built today will contribute 185 tonnes of CO2 equivalent during construction, compared to 24 tonnes of CO2 emitted over its lifetime. On-site construction creates a lot of waste. ( ) Factory-built homes are better on all fronts, according to researchers like Ehsan. "We can reduce the waste and we can do that near to zero," he says. "The final product will be more energy-efficient and higher-quality. So in the long term, during the building life cycle, there will be less maintenance, there will be less energy use." "All these together will produce less carbon emission using this technology." Geelong-based modular startup founder Matt Dingle says while some of this can be done using traditional construction methods, the biggest advantage is planning. "You can design these systems really carefully beforehand and then execute them in the factory," he says. "That often doesn't happen onsite. You see many occasions where there are bandaids over bandaids because something wasn't considered properly at the outset." A low-carbon home Let's break down a typical new Australian build against the types of modular homes Matt is designing. To do that, we'll use the Green Building Council of Australia's "reference home" — which uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to get a picture of what a typical new residential build is like. The major building materials such as concrete, brick, steel, timber, aluminium and glass contribute on average 43 per cent of emissions. All the remaining materials and finishes make up the rest. Emissions are generated by all parts of construction. ( ) A concrete slab is the biggest up-front contributor to carbon emissions during the construction phase — because of both the concrete and the steel reinforcement mesh needed. Pressed brick is the next big-ticket item. That's why making building materials reusable is front of mind for Matt Dingle when designing prefabricated homes. Modular homes can be designed to so components can be reused. ( ) Starting at the ground level, Matt has chosen not to use a concrete slab, instead going with a new type of steel footing that doesn't require any digging. "It won't work in 100 per cent of applications, but we've managed to use it in probably 85 or 90 per cent of ours," he says. "It's also a system that can be removed, and you can take most of those components and use them again." Then there's the external structure of the house. Timber and CLT — "cross-laminated timber" — are common in modular and are a low-carbon option. But Matt uses a special kind of corrugated iron that can seal up gaps in a home to protect against bushfires and provide better energy efficiency. But there are downsides to using so much steel. "We've elected to use a lot of steel in these buildings rather than timber and so the first question really was, what impact [on emissions] does that have?" he says. "If you can also maximise the opportunity for reuse, then steel very quickly outperforms timber in a number of ways." But he admits it's a hotly contested debate. In order to maximise the potential for the steel and other materials being reused, the design doesn't use any welding, instead opting for bolts. And they try not to join dissimilar materials — again, so they can be more easily reused. Climate-proof designs As well as reducing emissions, the industry is also leading the way in building climate-resilient homes, from bushfire-proof materials to homes that can float. Matt's modular homes are designed for the second-highest bushfire rating and can be easily adapted for the highest risk area in the fire zone. "The only thing you have to spend extra on is the windows." An artist's impression of the FORTIS house, a climate-resilient home. ( ) The house has external shutters that close for protection. ( ) There's innovation for modular homes that can survive on flood plains, too. On the NSW mid-north coast, Cicely Sylow has installed the first "amphibious cabin" at the Dunbogan caravan park. The cabin is connected to a pontoon, which is designed to float the house when the waters rise. Cicely and her husband decided that instead of paying exorbitant amounts for flood insurance, they would invest that money into flood-resilient infrastructure instead. "We've really been looking at how to make our businesses more resilient to climate change," she says. "Every decision we make is really long-term. At what point can you build to live with the climate? And at what point do you say we need to move away?" After the devastating floods in 2021, they teamed up with an architect, a modular builder and a maritime company that makes pontoons — to see what was possible. When the Dunbogan Caravan Park flooded in May this year, the amphibious cabins almost lifted off the ground. ( ) An amphibious cabin at Dunbogan Caravan Park. ( ) Cicely hopes the floating cabin will help the communities at her two caravan parks stay where they are for longer, and the cost is on par with building raised homes. "We just thought, we need to demonstrate that there is a way so that people don't need to be inundated," she says. "We'll have a section in the park that has amphibious homes and then a section in the park that will have raised." A recent Productivity Commission report highlighted the importance of boosting resilience as climate risks intensify, saying it can lower the costs of disaster recovery and create a healthier, more productive population, with a better quality of life. "People's experience of climate change will depend on the resilience of their home. Resilient housing reduces exposure to the health and wellbeing impacts of climate change and the disruption and displacement caused by natural disasters," the report stated. The commission has made a raft of recommendations to the federal government, which include creating a climate resilience rating system for housing and actions to boost the resilience of housing stock over the coming decades. Associate Professor Lyrian Daniel from the University of Adelaide is leading a project for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), into this very question — how to achieve a climate-resilient housing stock by 2050. "The really big question is thinking about climate change and whether our housing is going to be suitably protective or adaptive to climate change in the future," she says. People look out at the swollen Hawkesbury River from the deck of a partially submerged house as floodwaters rise in western Sydney in 2021. ( ) Debris lies outside residential properties affected by floods next to the Manning River in Glenthorne, Australia, in May this year. ( ) Just what a climate-resilient house is will vary depending on its location, but as climate change increases the severity of natural disasters, more homes are at risk. Outside of bushfires, floods, storms and other natural disasters, how homes cope in heatwaves and blackouts will also be important. "Energy efficiency gets us a long way in that we can think about how the house performs in terms of heat and cold with and without air conditioning or heating, for example," Lyrian says. "So if there's a blackout in the middle of summer, will our house still be comfortable for a period of time? If we can't rely on the electricity grid, you know, are there other ways that we can source that energy?" A fundamental flaw Despite its potential, the hype around prefab is yet to materialise, and it's not just public perception holding the industry back. From planning to regulation and finance — everything is designed around building onsite, according to Damien Crough from prefabAus. "A builder goes to a site where the bank has security over that asset, and the builder is building stage by stage and getting paid as they add value." Traditional on-site building is slow and resource-intensive. ( ) It is also harder to get a mortgage for modular homes. While the rules vary from state to state, someone wanting to buy a modular home can typically only get access to a small deposit of around 5 to 10 per cent. That means the manufacturer needs to have the capital to fund the production of the home. "It devalues their business, it makes it hard to grow," Damien says. "We've had a lot of these things which have really limited the growth of prefab in the conventional domestic housing market." Until recently, there had been no contract that existed to buy a modular home, but that's about to change. "We've now got a contract that will be ready by the end of July and available to the market very soon thereafter. We've also had Commonwealth Bank come on and support the creation of that [contract] and also change their lending policy to allow the flow of funds to manufacturers." Flat-pack houses The other major barrier is scale and volume, which are needed to bring the price of modular down to be more competitive with traditional construction. "Modular is usually a little bit more expensive, but much faster. But the fact is, traditional building is way too expensive. If we're going to solve the crisis, we have to find ways of driving the cost lower than traditional building, not just on par with it," Matt Dingle says. "And the only way of doing that is to embrace more efficient ways of doing things." Most modular and prefab businesses rely on large single contracts like education buildings or social housing, rather than residential, Matt says. "Each of the builders has visibility of how many they're going to need to build and what they're going to need to build each year. They get allocated a quota — that makes the planning process and investing process a lot easier. "We wanted to focus on [residential] housing and we found it difficult to generate enough consistent demand to keep it all rolling." These modular homes were installed in Middleton Beach in Western Australia. ( ) That's despite the federal government's goal of building 1.2 million homes by mid-2029, which is currently falling well behind. "It's quite damning," Matt says. "We really need to take a big step in the direction of improving efficiency and getting that volume is going to be part of how it's done." Matt is leading a project with Deakin University to design climate-resilient modular communities in regional Victoria, in the hope it could be an answer to increasing volume and improving housing productivity. While Sweden and Japan are often touted as the leaders in factory-built houses, Australians have very different ideas about what they want from a home and how we live. But Matt believes there is a mindset shift in younger generations' views on housing. "This is where the project is going to be fascinating, because we'll get a chance to talk to the people who are really interested in accessing the housing that we're proposing to build and ask them what they want." An artist's vision from FormFlow, which is part of a project that will test housing that is sustainable, adaptable, and resilient to the future challenges of climate change. ( ) He hopes it will provide a blueprint for residential modular projects across the country. In what could be the next step in the evolution of the donga, which has helped shelter Australians through major housing booms over the last two centuries.
News.com.au
19 hours ago
- News.com.au
House of the week: Rare waterfront wonder
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