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Expert calls for national strategy

Expert calls for national strategy

Former general manager of Frasers Property Australia and Southbank resident Robert Pradolin is now an active member of the property industry who speaks and writes regularly on affordable housing.

He told Southbank Local News that he believed a “paradigm shift” was required towards how Australia dealt with affordable housing as a country.

He has called on the Federal Government to begin working towards developing a national housing strategy, as he said current controls such as those in Fishermans Bend were not economically viable.  

“One study released in 2015 found that if you don’t provide a child stable housing when they’re young you’ve lost their economic productivity for life,” he said.

“How much is that worth to government to then invest to give people stable shelter? It’s only if you’ve got stable shelter can you start to create a life and productivity in your society. It’s as basic as that and I think we get confused.”

Mr Pradolin said government needed to start reframing social housing as “economic infrastructure”.

“In a metropolis the housing segmentation is blurred, everybody says the market will solve the housing problem only if it’s economically viable,” he said.

“Social affordable housing is not economically viable because the rents will not support the capital investment therefore no one does anything in that space and its declining.”

“Developers need rules,” he said. “If the rules are there they’ll follow the rules so change the rules and then you actually get different outcomes. Otherwise nothing changes.”

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