Dwellsembly uninvited council

A National Housing and Homelessness Plan was promised. It didn't happen and political intransigence suggests that it might not be possible for politicians to make a decent plan. Drawing on lessons from How Big Things Get Done, this assembly will examine what has been done with existing plans and make recommendations to government about whether we think those plans meet expectations, or call for evidence based revision.

Policy-makers do not say what standard of living their policies expect, but they hint at it. Grand housing announcements are made, with significant budgets deployed in pursuit of those goals. When the policy goal is quantity and speed, questions of quality might be lost in the noise. This program explores what quality and condition is expected, from thermal comfort to health, structural-defects to insurability, from fairness to value, we're looking at the commitments, the legal standards and practical consequence of the recommendations that the government's appointed advisory council is making on these subjects.

There are gaps in the housing dataset. Some data is not collected, other data is exposed to privacy and cyber vulnerabilities. One data set that would help inform policy-makers is the level of unmet demand for adequate housing. From thermal comfort to climate-adaptation, homelessness to structural defects, overcrowding to accessibility, we're going to design a mission to source the data, the data access principles and the things we can do to fill the gaps while we do it.

The private market is struggling to entice home owners from making deals to assemble land packages for development. If land parcels could be assembled, it might be possible to deliver landmark projects. Let's see if we can help design deal incentives that could optimise incentives for land assembly deals.