Kalgoorlie’s Housing Crisis: Insights from a Research Project
08 Jan 2025
The housing and rental crisis in Kalgoorlie-Boulder highlights the challenges faced by regional communities across Western Australia. During her Parliamentary Research Project with Curtin University, TBB Consultant Jillian Bardos explored these issues in depth, and she shares her experience in this TBB Insights article.
Through her research, Jillian uncovered the complexities of regional housing, from skyrocketing rents to the unique challenges of construction and policy in remote areas. Her findings offer valuable insights and suggestions to address these challenges and build resilience in regional housing markets.
In early 2024 during my first semester at Curtin University, I signed up to be considered for the Parliamentary Research Project (PRP) through the Western Australian Parliamentary Education Office through their partnerships with local universities. The program pairs selected students with Members for Parliament to produce a report on a selected area of study. I chose the topic “The Housing and Rental Crisis in Kalgoorlie” which was sponsored by Hon Wilson Tucker MLC, Member for Mining and Pastoral Region. My supervisor through Curtin was Dr. Margaret Gollagher, who has extensive experience in policy and sustainability initiatives.
The housing and rental crisis in Kalgoorlie-Boulder has been brought to a head over recent years. While the housing prices haven’t seen a huge uptick in value, the rental vacancy rate (at the time of writing the report) was <1%, and weekly rents had nearly doubled since the COVID-19 era. This seems pretty symptomatic in many areas in Australia currently, but in regional areas, it’s particularly dire: the support services are limited, constructing new housing stock is very expensive and takes a lot longer, and capacity is constantly fluctuating due to an ephemeral stream of FIFO workers.
I naively thought the process would be a great way to learn about the Parliamentary process, work with a really cool supervisor, and punch out an easy ~5,000 words on an interesting topic. While I did get the first two, throughout the process the beast of a report grew to what I can only describe as a thesis in itself. Pretty much everyone (except for me at the time) will know that regional housing is a deeply complicated issue, and subject to global forces (especially in mineral-rich Western Australia). It’s not a case of plonking down more dongas (what of the town’s character and vibrancy?) or building more suburbs (bricks are expensive when you have to haul them 600kms through a desert), or shutting the whole thing down (what about people who have lived there for generations, and who will service the mining operations?).
While I reviewed the economic and policy situations, global case studies, and development history, there was no “universal” conclusion to provide a tidy answer and simple solution. It’s frustratingly multi-faceted-- something mentioned over and over again in the research papers I reviewed as part of the project. I did manage to consolidate a few suggestions to alleviate the housing capacity issue and provide some future resilience: incorporate place-based strategic planning / infrastructure coordination between stakeholders, facilitate institutional partnerships to implement housing diversity initiatives through standard and novel means, and finally to continue to monitor and evaluate progress.
If I were to pick one, I would go for monitoring and evaluation. During the research process, it was exceptionally hard to piece together the data for a proper analysis and I believe that would be a PhD in itself. Housing capacity can potentially be monitored more to identify triggers when it may be getting to “crisis” levels, before the actual crisis hits. This would likely require substantial investment from the Local or State Government, but the benefits could be applied to other regional towns with similar housing issues—something which Western Australia is not short on.
Housing capacity can potentially be monitored more to identify triggers when it may be getting to “crisis” levels, before the actual crisis hits.
While the State Government is pulling as many “levers” as possible for the metropolitan housing, regional towns are often left to fend for themselves and come up with their own solutions. The report was tabled in Parliament by Hon Wilson Tucker MLC on the 27th November 2024, and will hopefully bring more awareness to other MPs of the particular issues that regional Australian’s face.
