Housing choices?

Harvey Coyne is a sixty-six-year-old Noongar man. Before moving into his current home in 2021, he was homeless for several years, sleeping rough while managing serious chronic illnesses. Harvey is awaiting major heart surgery, and his medical condition demands a stable, secure and quiet home environment. But instead, he has spent the last two years under relentless scrutiny by his landlord, and has been subjected to multiple attempts at eviction.

In 2023 alone, Harvey’s landlord, Housing Choices Australia (HCA), carried out at least ten inspections of his property, many more than the four times a year allowed under regulation. Each time an inspection was carried out, a new complaint was filed by housing officers — actions that are altogether contrary to supporting and maintaining his tenancy. His health challenges and the social dynamics of a neighbourhood marked by structural poverty and police violence have all been used to construct him as a problem tenant.

It is more useful to think of these inspections as asset appraisals, conducted to determine whether the tenant is compatible with the asset’s future value.

The WA Government helps shape this asset-first landlord discourse by providing guidelines to the community housing organisation industry “to be used to assess the asset conditions of properties,” whilst cautioning that such guidelines are “not intended to be used to assess a tenant’s housekeeping standards or tenant liability.” HCA has issued multiple breach notices, often based on unverified complaints from neighbours or assumptions about who is visiting the property. Harvey has not been charged with any offence, nor has he held parties or created noise disturbances. Still, HCA issued a no-grounds termination notice in November 2024, as he was hospitalised with heart issues. If evicted, he will return to street homelessness.

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Harvey’s home would have once been part of the public housing system. Like many public housing units, it has since been transferred to community housing management under HCA, a shift that has redefined both the nature of the tenancy and the rights attached to it. Public housing, though far from perfect, traditionally offered lower rents, greater security of tenure, and clearer mechanisms for appeal and accountability. Tenants like Harvey, had they remained in public housing, would have been afforded stronger on-paper protections against eviction, and subjected to fewer behavioural interventions disguised as support — in practice however, Aboriginal tenants in WA’s public housing system experience higher rates of eviction than any other demographic. But these homes have been steadily moved into the portfolios of community housing organisations, who operate under different regulatory frameworks and priorities. Over the last decade in Australia, heavy subsidy funding, private finance and stock transfers have contributed a 61.4 per cent increase in community housing units, whilst over the same period public housing units have declined by 7.4 per cent.

Unlike public housing, where tenants are recognised as participants in a social welfare system with public obligations, community housing operates through a hybrid model that is charity in name, real estate in practice. These providers function as landlords, collecting closer-to-market rents (as well as market rents), enforcing compliance through behavioural metrics, and increasingly shaping the moral governance of low-income communities. In this context, Harvey’s situation is not an aberration or the result of bad policy, it is the logical outcome of a system that has already shifted. The community housing model is not a future threat to tenants, it is the mechanism through which security of tenure is being dismantled in real time.

Even Western Australia’s celebrated Housing First programs, which were designed to offer unconditional housing and wrap-around support, are increasingly delivered through partnerships with community housing providers like HCA. This embeds Housing First within a tenancy management system that is more property- than person-centred. As a result, its core principles are constrained by organisational logics of asset management and rent recovery.

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On its landing page, HCA offers a statement of reconciliation, acknowledging Traditional Custodians of Country. But beneath such acknowledgments lies the enduring machinery of colonial dispossession, now sharpened by decades of neoliberal restructuring. Australia’s public housing system, once conceived as a foundational social infrastructure, is now little more than emergency triage that is severely residualised and tightly targeted to those deemed in “greatest need.” HCA’s own Reconciliation Action Plan commits the organisation to “

culturally safe practices in our housing and tenancy services” and to “[prioritise] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in decisions that affect them.” Yet Harvey has been repeatedly threatened with eviction, subjected to surveillance, and offered no culturally safe alternative. The very organisation claiming to support self-determination and “build strong relationships based on mutual respect” is actively destabilising the housing of an Aboriginal elder, treating him not as a tenant in need of care, but as a liability to be managed.

Residualisation describes a process in the public housing system whereby the tenure has become an elusive life raft to households with complex, often intersecting experiences of homelessness, health crises, and poverty. In 2023–24, nearly 80 per cent of new community housing tenancies and 87 per cent of public housing tenancies were allocated to this cohort, nationally. Such hyper-targeting has turned social housing into a regime of conditional tenure marked by behavioural scrutiny, disciplinary control, and precarity. Evictions from community housing are higher than those in the private rental sector, disproportionately affecting women, children and First Nations people.

Whilst this selective housing system targets those in greatest need, importantly, it is structurally incapable of accommodating them. Rather than expanding access, it actively manufactures surplus populations deemed too risky, too complex, or too costly to house. In the face of rising demand for secure and stable shelter, the state has doubled down on exclusionary tactics. As the number of available homes shrink, the criteria for accessing them become ever more restrictive. This is a recursive cycle where eligibility is narrowed, thresholds are raised, and evictions become routine.

Conditional access to housing is thus not a flaw in the system — it is the system. Scarcity contributes to this conditionality as public housing stock shrinks and as the number of people in housing crisis increases, a surplus of people in housing need is created. In Gosnells, the local government area where Harvey lives, only 32 per cent of people deemed in greatest housing need can be accommodated by the affordable and social housing stock. Successive housing authorities across the states have presided over decades of defunding, neglect, and the active deterioration of public housing. Scarcity and inadequacy together incentivise the imposition of conditionality. As residualisation takes hold, the social housing cohort becomes more deeply marginalised, more complex, and more exposed to punitive tenancy relations. The tenancy itself becomes a starker series of disciplinary relations, and under these conditions a breach notice is no longer a mechanism of last resort but rather a tool of behavioural calibration.

But what is there for Harvey to conform to? HCA can’t see Harvey’s dwelling as a home, because it is structurally incentivised to see it as a subsidised asset, whose value must be protected through surveillance and reappraisal, the only way to realise the asset’s full value is through the exercise of eviction. In this arrangement, Harvey’s home is simultaneously a place of work for HCA’s housing officers. Every inspection, every entry, every interaction becomes labour in defence of the asset. If a housing officer can’t navigate your home without moving something, then it’s clutter. If it’s clutter, it’s a hazard, and if it’s a hazard, it’s a breach. “Hoarding,” as it is often described in the parlance of officers, is not understood as a private response to trauma or instability, but as a tenancy offence insofar as it represents a risk to the value of the housing asset and to the safety of the housing worker.

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Residualisation is not solely an economic or policy phenomenon. It emerges from deep colonial logics embedded in Australia’s property relations. Students of coloniality with deep local knowledge, such as Noongar scholar Uncle Herb Bropho, rightly emphasise that dispossession is neither historical nor singular, but a recursive process continually renewed through eviction, enclosure, and un-homing. Indigenous sovereignty is a material fact, making every tenancy regime an expression of colonial control over Country. Housing, administered by market-aligned actors like HCA, is thus inherently entangled in these colonial structures, managing populations deemed disruptive to settler order.

As community housing organisations like HCA continue to expand into becoming Australia’s largest landlords, critical questions emerge about the fitness of these institutions to provide secure, rights-based housing to deeply marginalised tenants. These organisations are now the state’s preferred agents for welfare tenancy. Yet their operational priorities of asset management, rent maximisation, behavioural enforcement, and service metrics, align more with the logics of real estate than with the right to housing.

HCA’s growing influence is not just in tenancy management, but in shaping the narratives and knowledge that frame housing futures. In December 2024, they sponsored the award for excellence in housing research at the Australasian Housing Researchers Conference. In April 2025, HCA sponsored the “First Nations Housing and the Treaty Process” plenary session at the Community Housing Industry Association of Victoria’s (CHIA-VIC) conference. Most recently, they are a major sponsor of the National Housing Conference 2025, to be held in Perth this October and hosted by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute — Australia’s primary housing research funding body, which plays a central role in shaping national policy agendas and has been critiqued for producing policy-led evidence.

These sponsorships are not neutral acts of support. They are strategic interventions in the production of housing discourse, aligning corporate community housing actors with policy making, research authority, and even Treaty conversations. When an institution that routinely evicts tenants under the banner of care and sustainability also positions itself as a thought leader in housing justice, the contradiction is clear.

Ultimately, what is at stake in the rise of community housing organisations isn’t just housing access — it’s the political and moral landscape of dwelling itself. Removing the last vestiges of affordable housing security converts a universal right into a selective service, all the while undermining collective efforts to advance housing as a human right. For tenants who fail tests of compliance and worthiness, where to go? Housing, ostensibly a foundation for the reproduction of life, is reduced to yet another instrument of colonial governance that perpetually un-homes First Nations Peoples on unceded land.

Image: Amith Nair