Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Home in Social and Affordable Mixed-Tenure Community Housing

<p dir="ltr">The shortfall in social and affordable housing in Australia has been widely reported. In Victoria, the role of community housing in providing social and affordable housing has been gradually increasing over the last few decades, and this is projected to grow in the coming years. One approach community housing organisations (CHOs) use to deliver housing to people on low incomes is through mixed-tenure sites that provide social housing and affordable housing. Research to date has primarily focused on the key objective of mixed-tenure housing, which is to improve the social and economic position of social housing tenants. At best, outcomes have been mixed, while experiences outside of this objective are largely unknown. As such, there is ambiguity surrounding what mixed-tenure community housing offers the people residing there, particularly for social and affordable sites. </p><p dir="ltr">This research employed a qualitative approach to study and compare two social and affordable mixed-tenure housing sites delivered by Unison Housing, a CHO in Melbourne, Victoria. The study consisted of document analysis of Unison’s policies and three focus groups with 12 staff members, ethnographic observation on two mixed-tenure sites, and photo-elicited and semi-structured interviews with 11 tenants to gain insights into the factors and processes that contribute to tenants’ homemaking practices. The thesis builds a framework of ontological security in community housing, drawing on Dupuis and Thorns’ (1998) conditions of home, Kearns et al.’s (2000) notion of ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’, and Giddens’ (1991) ideas of adaptive reactions to explain how historical and current social and economic contexts shaped participants’ experiences of home. </p><p dir="ltr">Social and material conditions attached to tenure provided ‘freedom from’ past experiences of insecurity and risks to safety, enabling participants to passively experience the benefits of home, and the ‘freedom to’ actively engage in making home. However, the housing sites were also places of social and material disruption that unmade home. In these instances, participants engaged in adaptive practices to remake a compromised version of home. Despite being a mixed-tenure study, tenure type was not a driver for how tenant participants experienced home. Indeed, tenant participants of both tenure types shared similar social and economic marginalisation, experienced the making, unmaking, and remaking of home in similar ways, and derived comparable wellbeing from these experiences. The research draws attention to how past and current social and material conditions, and housing governance, intersect to mould experiences of home. Further, this research reinforces the significance of affordable, secure housing, and emphasises the need for consistent, accessible, and active on-site governance.</p>