A new Community Town zone. You own your dwelling, you lease the site, and you share the kitchen, the workshop and the land. If it does not work out, you take your home with you. Not a substitute for owning a house. The rung before it.
Australia is in a housing crisis and billions of dollars have been committed to it. It is the first-order issue for millions of households. But the solutions being offered are the standard ones: more houses, and more apartments.
Both run into the same wall. The construction workforce is short by roughly 90,000 people. A precinct structure plan takes an average of 4.2 years to gazette against a 2.5-year target. A detached house takes 11.5 months from approval to completion nationally, and 15.45 months in Western Australia — the slowest in the country.
And before any of that, creating a single serviced block of land costs $126,811 in civil works and authority charges in Victoria, $170,899 in New South Wales. That is an empty lot. Before the land, before the house, before one person is housed.
There is a group who cannot wait four years and cannot carry a mortgage: young households with no deposit, workers in regions where there is nothing to rent, tradespeople and makers who need space more than a spare bedroom, people leaving a relationship, and people who would rather live around others than alone.
Australia already does this. Twice.
Retirement and land lease communities. Roughly 130,000 Australians live in about 900 land lease communities, a sector valued at around $12 billion. Residents own their home and lease the site, pay no stamp duty on land they do not buy, and share the facilities. One in four new entrants to over-55s housing now chooses it. It is lawful, financed by banks and run by listed companies — and it is closed to anybody under 55.
Workers' accommodation. Western Australia alone has more than 135,000 mining workers on site, most of them living in villages with a private room, a mess hall serving every meal, a gym, laundries and a recreation building. The units are built in a factory, trucked in and connected. The supply chain, the finance and the regulation all exist.
Communal living is permitted in this country where it serves an industry or an age. It is not permitted where it would simply house somebody.
A new zone and use class in state planning instruments, permitting settlements of privately owned moveable dwellings on shared rural land, with communal buildings and continuing agriculture, assessed against performance standards rather than a list of permitted uses.
The resident buys a dwelling for a fraction of the price of a house and owns it outright. No mortgage, no stamp duty on land, and the capital sits in something that belongs to them.
Multiple communities, and the right to move between them. If a resident does not fit in, or the community does not work, they take their home and go somewhere else. That is the answer to the strongest objection to communal living, which is not sanitation or fire — it is what happens when it goes wrong.
The zone sets standards, not a price. The same instrument produces a supported site run with a funded service, an entry-level community, a standard one, and a premium one on the model that already houses 130,000 older Australians. Only the supported tier requires recurrent public money.
Australia has about 134,000 farm businesses, 99 per cent family owned. The average farmer is 52, twelve years older than the average for other occupations, and around 60 per cent of grain and grazing farmers reported sales of $400,000 or less. The pattern is asset rich and income poor, on an asset that can usually only be realised by selling the farm.
A community changes that arithmetic without changing the title. Site fees from two or three hectares produce an income stream, the rest stays in production, nothing is subdivided and the farm is not sold. Residents who want to work the land are the labour a small farm cannot afford.
It also solves a problem farmers have now. A property of fifty thousand acres may lawfully carry one house. The rules exist to stop rural land being cut into house lots — but the only instrument planning offers is a dwelling attached to a title, so the control on subdivision operates as a control on accommodation. A Community Town houses people without creating a lot.
A hundred acres carrying sixty to a hundred and fifty residents running farm enterprises. Five acres with fifteen to twenty-five residents and support staff on site. Three acres on the edge of a town with ten residents who walk to work. These are different products and no single template fits them, which is why the policy is to trial and learn rather than legislate a form.
In Western Australia the caravan and camping regulations prohibit occupation of a park home outside a licensed park, cap the number of dwellings, and treat a person living in a moveable dwelling as a camper with a duration limit rather than a resident. There is no use class for a settlement that is partly residential, partly communal and partly productive, so it is prohibited by omission.
Four state instruments, none of which requires a referendum, new taxation or Commonwealth agreement.
Two further changes sit with the Commonwealth. Neither costs anything, and both currently operate to shut this form of housing out of support that already exists: communal facilities should not trigger the reduced sharer rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance, and moveable dwellings held under site agreements should count as eligible dwellings for Housing Australia funding.
A third of Australians feel lonely some or all of the time, and the most affected age group is 18 to 24. The estimated cost to the economy is $2.7 billion a year. The World Health Organization established a Commission on Social Connection in 2023 and has linked social isolation and loneliness to more than 871,000 deaths a year worldwide.
Research on cohousing consistently finds increased social support, reduced isolation and improved wellbeing, with the strongest results among older residents. One finding matters for how the zone is written: most of the effect is attributed to residents running the place rather than being served by it.
The evidence base is thin and should be described that way. These are mostly small studies of people who chose this life, so the model may be attracting people already disposed to it rather than producing the effect. 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 demonstration projects are required to measure it.
Together with the city 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.
Four to six demonstration communities, at least one on a metropolitan fringe and one in a region with a documented worker shortage, each publishing the same figures: cost per resident housed, time from application to occupation, dwellings freed up elsewhere, businesses established, and resident wellbeing at entry and at twelve months.
Two years of that evidence establishes whether the model performs as described. It is time Australia discussed other ways to live, and built the proof.
Memo 7 — Rural Communities. The full rural case: the model, its benefits, the detail of the zone, and the five state and two Commonwealth changes that create it. With sources.
Memo 8 — City Communities. The city version: fixed-term communities in empty commercial buildings, and how they are made lawful.
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.