Part 3. In conversation with Dr Sarah Taylor, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Unison Housing
We have come to the final instalment of our three-part conversation with Dr Sarah Taylor, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Unison Housing Research Lab.
Part 1 and Part 2 are available on our blog.
In Part three, Sarah reveals what Lab projects she’s working on at the moment and what’s in planning.
What are you working on at the moment?
I have a few projects on the go at the moment.
One of my key roles is to assist with the Maximising Impact project, which involves surveying Unison residents over three successive years. The study looks at the experiences of social housing tenants from the time they first move into their properties, then a year and two years after this, whether or not they stay in the same property. It aims to be the largest and longest panel study of social housing tenants in Australia.
We have interviewed over 170 tenants and we are currently conducting the second and third wave of interviews. Our first report has been released with our second due mid this year.
I am also finalising a paper on tenancy duration at the Elizabeth Street CommonGround site.
I play a secondary role in the tenancy support project. This project is building an understanding of Unison’s tenancy support approach, i.e. what people understand support to be, what works well and what doesn’t work so well.
There’s also quite a lot to do at the moment for upcoming projects (see below).
What projects are in planning?
We are planning to research affordable tenancies, which are tenancies where people pay under 75% of market rent. We want to understand why tenants stay or don’t stay, and what they like about affordable properties.
From Homelessness to a Home (H2H) is a new State Government funded program to transition people from short-term hotel accommodation (crisis accommodation created during the pandemic). We are planning a research project that follows up on housing and health outcomes for people who have moved into more stable housing with the H2H program. This is important because it’s the first large scale Housing First program in Australia.
A side project is my interest in rooming houses. I aim to explore this topic further, using some data I gathered with my colleague last year, looking at listings in the private rooming house market. I’d also like to write a short piece on hotels. Like rooming houses, hotels are a form of marginal housing which has undergone rapid change in the last year. I suspect that what’s happening in hotels now will have lingering impacts on low income housing and crisis accommodation, so we might as well get acquainted with it.
More information about Sarah's work
Unison Housing Research Lab papers
Additional publications and profile
Parts 1 and 2 of Dr Sarah Taylor’s interview are available here.
The Unison Housing Research Lab conversation series includes interviews with
Lab Director Professor Guy Johnson
and Lab Deputy Director, Dr Juliet Watson
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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