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The given document is a final report of a research project titled "Disruption in regional housing: Policy responses for more resilient markets." It examines housing trends and supply processes in rural and regional areas of Australia, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report highlights challenges such as shortages of land for development and workforce shortages that continue to affect housing supply. It includes case studies and insights from policy makers, emphasizing the need for support for community housing providers and place-based policies. The report suggests various policy responses, including utilizing existing programs, implementing direct government action, and implementing place-based policies. It emphasizes the importance of addressing housing challenges in regional areas to prevent further pressure on metropolitan housing markets. The report also discusses the findings of a quantitative research project on regional housing markets in Australia, identifying six clusters of housing markets with their own characteristics and challenges. It emphasizes the need for tailored policy responses to address the specific challenges faced by each housing cluster. The report further discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on housing supply and highlights resource limitations as a barrier to affordable housing supply in regional Australia. It provides case studies of regional housing markets and highlights the challenges faced by smaller communities and those located far from major cities. The report also discusses the housing challenges and pressures faced by specific regions in Australia, such as Dubbo, Bendigo, and Murray Bridge. It suggests that addressing these challenges will require coordination between government agencies and flexible funding. The report concludes by discussing the outcomes of an investigative panel and [Extracted from the article]

The local neighborhood forms an integral part of our lives. It provides the context through which social networks are nurtured and the foundation from which a sense of attachment and cohesion with fellow residents can be established. Whereas much of the previous research has examined the role of social and demographic characteristic in relation to the level of neighboring and cohesion, this paper explores whether particular environmental features in the neighborhood affect social porosity. We define social porosity as the degree to which social ties flow over the surface of a neighborhood. The focus of our paper is to examine the extent to which a neighborhood's environmental features impede the level of social porosity present among residents. To do this, we integrate data from the census, topographic databases and a 2010 survey of 4,351 residents from 146 neighborhoods in Australia. The study introduces the concepts of wedges and social holes. The presence of two sources of wedges is measured: rivers and highways. The presence of two sources of social holes is measured: parks and industrial areas. Borrowing from the geography literature, several measures are constructed to capture how these features collectively carve up the physical environment of neighborhoods. We then consider how this influences residents' neighboring behavior, their level of attachment to the neighborhood and their sense of neighborhood cohesion. We find that the distance of a neighborhood to one form of social hole-industrial areas-has a particularly strong negative effect on all three dependent variables. The presence of the other form of social hole-parks-has a weaker negative effect. Neighborhood wedges also impact social interaction. Both the length of a river and the number of highway fragments in a neighborhood has a consistent negative effect on neighboring, attachment and cohesion.

The distribution of population between metropolitan regions and their rural counterparts is a topic of interest, due to the growth pressures in large cities and areas of decline in some, typically remote regions. In Australia, fostering population growth in regional urban centres (RUCs) has been a long‐term goal of government policy. Understanding the different profiles, structures, and population dynamics of Australia's RUCs is critical in informing Australian regional development, as well as factors in regional population dynamics in general. This research is focused on patterns of population change through internal migration across Australian RUCs. In addition to a detailed spatial analysis of patterns of population migration flows, this research offers a comprehensive analysis of a range of regional social, economic and infrastructure development factors and their effects on regional migration and population changes. The outputs of the method are new evidence to inform the future regional plan to increase economic and population growth in RUCs. This research contributes to population research and regional planning and provides a baseline for the prepandemic status of regional population dynamics in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the intra‐urban residential migration of workers in Melbourne and assesses the spatial effects of this dynamic on urban internal structure and spatial labour markets. Intra‐urban migration is an important category of internal migration that relocates human and social capital in urban areas, contributing to changes in urban residential and labour market structure. This paper fills the gap in internal migration literature by determining spatial residential movement dynamics through a spatial analysis of census‐based intra‐urban migration flow data. In addition to detailed migration flow analysis undertaken at a local scale, the paper contributes an improved economic data geography based on functional economic regions (FERs) that permits analysis of the intersection of worker migration flows with sub‐metropolitan labour markets. Our results show that intra‐urban migration results in a strong outward flow of workers in Melbourne, which primarily appears to be shaped by spatial housing markets. This process, in turn, contributes to the dispersion of labour markets in Melbourne, complicating policy aims concerning urban agglomeration and limiting urban spatial expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many technical and modelling tools are available to support the strategic assessment of land-use and infrastructure policy proposals in local government. However, there remains a lack of guidance and general confusion as to how modelling may be integrated into the policy- and decision-making process or how to practically set up participatory model-building with practitioners. Although major advances have been made in modelling over recent decades, several unresolved implementation issues remain in practice. This paper provides the results of a panel survey, which explored what planners and modellers believe to be key modelling implementation issues, their perceived importance and a set of modelling requirements. The results suggest that planners generally feel that they do not understand models and the modelling process, and modellers, in turn, feel that they do not always understand policy development and decision-making. Problems regarding data preparation were viewed as the most important challenge. Ensuring leadership and management support and initiatives aimed at improving the communication and confidence of participants were perceived as key requirements. Limited resources, leadership support and a lack of education are some of the challenges that are perceived as important before planners and other government officers can take advantage of modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]