WATCH: How 'bluefield housing' could help our crisis.
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00:00Would you ever consider having a stranger live with you in your family home?
00:04Well, some housing experts across Canberra and South Australia reckon that it could be part of
00:09the solution to our housing crisis, but not in the way that you are probably thinking. Dotted around
00:14Canberra and in fact the rest of Australia, there are a lot of ex-government homes or just large
00:19houses that aren't being used to their full capacity anymore, and some architects reckon
00:24that they could be divided into different homes with some pretty simple modifications like
00:28new walls and a second kitchen. It would mean that families have access to yards when perhaps they
00:33wouldn't before, and it would give a communal living and kind of village aspect for a lot of
00:38people who are used to living in apartment blocks. The idea was developed by Professor Damien Madigan
00:43at the University of South Australia. He's called it Bluefield Housing, and he's pretty close at
00:48getting it embedded within SA planning laws. Now we're not that far along in the ACT, but there
00:52are a number of architects working on how this may be a plausible solution. The problem is that our
00:58planning system would make it pretty difficult at the moment. In a lot of ways it's a pretty novel
01:03concept for the territory. So what do you think? Would you be keen to live in a large house divided
01:08into smaller ones with something like a shared yard? Or should we be focusing more on apartment
01:13blocks and freestanding dwellings?