Home to own: Potential for Indigenous housing by Indigenous people

Abstract

Responding to criticism that the housing stock in many of Australia's Indigenous communities has reached a critical state, the Commonwealth and Territory governments allocated significant resources to improve public housing in the Northern Territory. To this end, the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) was initiated in September 2007 to provide 750 new houses, rebuild 230 houses and refurbish 2500 houses by 2013. This type of top-down procurement structure is necessary when such a quantity of housing needs to be upgraded or built from scratch in such short timeframes. However, there is evidence that housing projects driven by both 'self-build' and 'supporter' ideo..