Destination Dumping Ground: The Role of Housing Market Processes and Policies in Concentrating and Dispersing Disadvantage in South-East Queensland, Australia

In Australia, where stocks of social housing are being gradually depleted, only those with the greatest need and most complex problems are eligible for public housing, with the remainder being forced to negotiate the private rental market. The effects of this are twofold: first, a growing concentration of social disadvantage within neighbourhoods containing social housing; and second, the movement of low-income and unemployed residents into peripheral urban areas where private rents are cheap. In both cases, this creates a perception among residents that their neighbourhood has become a ‘dumping ground’ for what Zygmunt Bauman in Wasted Lives (2004) sees as modernity’s ‘surplus, redundant, unemployable and functionless population’. In this paper, we illustrate how housing policies and processes inadvertently and deliberately contribute to the creation of these kinds of dumping grounds in two separate regions of south-east Queensland. The first – Logan City – is a low-income area with an historical concentration of social housing, unemployment and stigmatization that has recently been targeted for renewal in order to disperse disadvantage and create a socially mixed community. The second – Russell Island – is a popular retreat for retirees but its cheap land and low-cost rent has rendered it a last chance destination for those pushed out of other areas by the absence of affordable housing. While the history and circumstances of these two areas are very different, the dynamics of housing policies and processes means their trajectories are increasingly connected as attempts to reduce concentrated disadvantage in one area have flow on-effects for the other. Further, as we also demonstrate, the movement of populations is not necessarily accompanied by a commensurate flow of services, which compound existing forms of disadvantage through isolation, a lack of support and few options for moving on.