When Peter Dutton grabbed headlines last week claiming his Labor opponent in Dickson, Ali France, was using her disability as an excuse for not moving house ahead of the election, it showed a clear lack of awareness about the situation facing people who need accessible housing.

Newly appointed chair of the Housing and Urban Research Institute Adrian Harrington hopes to research in front of a broader audience, including more of the private sector.

The Netherlands could soon house what’s touted as the world’s first commercial 3D printed housing project. And might complex construction such as vaulted ceilings or curved walls soon be printed off site on a concrete 3D concrete printer?

Around half of new home buyers and tenants under 40 years of age in Britain actively seek eco-aware homes, showing that the public is now more conscious of sustainability than ever before.

After a little over a year the Nightingale Village in Melbourne’s Brunswick is ready to commence.

The true driver of housing prices is cheap money, promiscuously lent by banks under the irresponsible oversight of regulators egged on by lazy governments keen to buy votes.

Last week’s Spinifex calling for Passive House to become a new standard for the National Construction Code certainly struck a nerve.

Some UK builders and solar companies are buddying up to slash homeowners’ energy bills even without the government subsidies that are due to end next month.

With the planet warming, every effort must be made to keep cool without increasing climate change.

The energy policies and building standards that govern our homes need to keep us comfortable and limit global warming. Passive house, a rigorous building standard for ultra-low energy buildings, ticks these boxes.

One bright note from last week’s Building Ministers Forum was an agreement to progress work to increase the energy performance requirements for residential construction under the National Construction Code for the planned 2022 iteration.

There are many logical and economic reasons to support better energy efficiency in housing especially for low income housing where standards sometimes verge on the appalling, but no, the government says no again.

At last, after 12 long years we might finally see some improvement in the energy efficiency requirements for housing.

The new National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation’s first loan is for $35 millioin to Hume Community Housing.

There are more sustainable models of compact cities than a 1920s utopia of towers, expressways and gyrocopters.