Empty commercial buildings, converted for a fixed term into private rooms with shared living space, kitchens and work space. One rent, in the middle of everything. When the term ends, the fitout comes out and the building goes back to work.
Four groups cannot afford to live near the places their lives actually happen — their work, their study and their play. Students have one purpose-built bed for every fifteen enrolled, at $550 to $850 a week in Sydney. Young workers on shift and apprentice wages cannot pay what being near the job costs — and they are the loneliest age group in the country. Artists earn a median of $5,000 a year from creative work in Greater Sydney and spend around 80 per cent of it renting workspace: a second rent on top of housing. Older renters are the fastest growing group within the homeless population, and the communities that serve them are rural — there is no city equivalent for someone who needs to stay near a hospital, family or the train line.
The inner cities show the end state. The suburbs made desirable by the artists and young people who lived in them have gentrified to the point where neither can now afford to live there. The city keeps the value they created and loses the people who created it.
Across six inner suburbs of Sydney, share rooms average more than 2.5 occupants a room, and two-bedroom flats commonly hold five to fourteen people. Bathrooms and living rooms are converted into bedrooms and smoke detectors are removed to make the space; an international student died in an apartment fire at Bankstown in 2012. One Melbourne flat let at $150 a bed to eight people returns about $1,200 a week — roughly triple the median unit rent. None of it can be made lawful: no planning definition covers the arrangement, so a responsible operator has no lawful version to run.
15.9 per cent of Australia’s office space stood empty in January 2026 — 19.0 per cent in central Melbourne, 16.9 in Perth. The stock being emptied is older and lower grade, and its narrow floors are the convertible kind: every room can reach a window. Above the suburban shop, the ground floor is trading while the floor upstairs sits empty or holds storage.
Living above the city is not a new idea — it is the oldest Australian one. In Newtown in 1892 there were 413 shop-residences against 20 buildings serving solely as shops. Melbourne’s Postcode 3000 program converted vacant upper floors through the 1990s and is credited with restarting residential life in the city’s centre. Renew Newcastle moved about 130 projects into 60 empty buildings on a thirty-day rolling licence. Student accommodation runs the shared-floor model in every capital today.
This is the point of the policy. A private room with shared facilities costs less than any self-contained dwelling in the same location, because the private space is smaller and everything else is shared. One rent covers a home in the middle of everything — no car, no commute, no second rent for a workshop. Cheap city housing currently means overcrowding and isolation; this is the low cost without either, with shared living space, kitchens and work space on every floor and neighbours in them.
A private lockable room, with living space, kitchens, bathrooms, laundries and work space shared on each floor, under one operator and one set of house rules — the arrangement purpose-built student accommodation already uses, opened to everyone. Nothing is bought, nothing is strata-titled, and the building stays in one ownership.
The building converts for a fixed term. At the end of it the fitout comes out and the building reverts to commercial use. A permanent conversion strands the commercial use and asks for a decision most owners will not make; a fixed term asks only for income from space that is earning nothing, and the building’s commercial valuation survives the term. A permanent conversion stays available where an owner wants one.
Germany already runs the split as ordinary rental practice — an apartment is let as a shell, and the tenant brings the kitchen and takes it on leaving. This is the same division at building scale: the wet areas are communal and built once, the rest of the fitout is demountable, and nothing in it is built into the structure. That is what makes the reversion real.
Minimum room size, shared living space and work space set as measurable figures, with fire and egress stated as outcomes. The standards are the load-bearing part: the United Kingdom allowed office conversion without them from 2013 and produced substandard apartments with documented consequences for the people in them. The shared living room is named in the standards so it cannot be designed out — it is what makes this a community rather than a rooming house.
Nothing can be moved here, so security of tenure does the work portability does in the Rural Communities policy: a written occupancy agreement with defined grounds for termination, tribunal access on the same footing as a residential tenant, rules on fees and on changes to facilities, continuation when the building is sold, and a long-term form for residents who want one.
Permanent supportive housing has run in single city buildings since 2010 — support on site, tenancies mixed rather than concentrated, and a measured net saving of about $13,100 a tenant in the first year housed against a year sleeping rough. Housing with support attached — not a treatment service, a refuge or crisis accommodation.
No planning definition covers rooms with shared facilities under one operator, so a landlord cannot obtain a permit to run a lawful version. The building code provides no standard route for changing the use of an existing building — every conversion needs its own engineered case — and submissions to the Commonwealth’s 2026 code consultation say this biases the industry toward demolition.
Eleven changes across three levels of government. None requires a new program.
A third of Australians feel lonely some or all of the time, and the most affected age group is 18 to 24 — the same cohort priced out of the city. Research on shared and cohousing living consistently finds increased social support and reduced isolation, strongest where residents run the shared spaces themselves.
The evidence base is thin and should be described that way. Community living is not a mental health treatment and this policy does not present it as one. It is a housing form with a plausible second benefit, and the trial buildings are required to measure it.
Together with the rural version, this is Sovereign Australia’s answer to the housing crisis itself. The crisis is a shortfall of supply, and these two solutions capture supply that already exists and is captured by nobody — rural land that may not lawfully house anyone, and city buildings standing empty. The supported tiers house people who have no dwelling at all. Everything else lowers the cost of being housed: the cheapest lawful forms of home there are, and a dwelling released behind every household that moves.
Three figures decide whether this is worth doing, and none can be established from published data: cost per room delivered, the weekly rate a resident would pay, and how many existing dwellings are released. A small number of buildings of different types — an office floor, a shop-top, a motel — measured on a common basis would establish them within two years, with resident wellbeing measured at entry and at twelve months.
Memo 8 — City Communities. The full city case: the buildings, the fixed-term arrangement, the standards, and the eleven changes that make it lawful. With sources.
Memo 7 — Rural Communities. The rural version: privately owned dwellings on shared rural land, portable between communities.
Memo 9 — Inner Nation Towns. Housing Solutions Part 3, the grand plan: 200 new towns across the inner nation, the water that makes them possible, and what cheap country homes would mean for families.
Memo 6 — The Housing Predicament. Where the housing programme actually stands, and why the current settings will not close the gap.