What the homelessness sector can teach us about housing design

At a Housing@RMIT gathering, I presented on what the homelessness sector can teach us about developing affordable housing. The presentation brought my local-government experience into a conversation with academics about the relationship between housing, design and ongoing support.

My interest was in the conditions that help a housing response work over time: the way organisations collaborate, how residents can influence decisions, and how design connects with services and everyday life.

Homelessness work brings the barriers around a dwelling into view. Access to a home may depend on referrals, eligibility, available support and coordination between organisations. Once someone moves in, the relationships and practical arrangements around them continue to matter.

For a design project, this suggests useful questions. How do people arrive? What support can they access? Which shared spaces encourage connection while respecting privacy? Who can respond when circumstances change?

In the presentation I discussed examples including Common Ground and the Design Guide for Older Women’s Housing. I used them as prompts for considering how evidence, lived experience, policy and spatial decisions can be brought together.

My broader lesson is that engagement should have a continuing relationship with decisions. Residents and service practitioners hold knowledge about everyday use that is difficult to see from a drawing alone. A project needs a way to hear that knowledge and act on it.

Housing@RMIT provided a setting to test these ideas with people approaching housing from different disciplines. This was a practitioner contribution to research exchange, informed by my work in housing and homelessness.

Soft Infrastructure can support evidence reviews, interviews, facilitated research conversations and the translation of housing-sector knowledge into planning and design questions.