One million homes were unoccupied on census night. How that could help people struggling to find hou

One million homes were unoccupied on census night. How that could help people struggling to find housing

An "enormous chunk" of Australia's housing stock is unoccupied, and "something must be done" about it, a demographer says.

According to figures from the 2021 census, one million Australian homes — 10 per cent of the housing stock — were unoccupied on census night last August.

There could be a number of reasons for that — a resident could be staying at a partner's place that night or the house could be a holiday home or a vacant investment property.

But the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) "takes quite a substantial range of methods to ensure that it calculates the usual residents of an area", ANU demographer Liz Allen says, "so we can say with great confidence that the unoccupied dwellings are in fact largely potentially an option for housing for people who are in need of secure housing".

Read More: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-29/census-finds-1-million-empty-houses-amid-affordability-crisis/101190794