Beyond the Housing Crisis: What Australia Can Learn from Kerala’s Radical Success
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Article Summary
- Australia faces a growing housing affordability crisis with limited new home construction and increasing homelessness, requiring urgent, systemic policy shifts.
- Kerala’s LIFE Mission tackles homelessness by integrating secure housing with livelihoods and financial empowerment, successfully housing over 80% of its homeless population.
- With housing issues on the rise in Australia, what can the country learn about combating homelessness from the Indian state of Kerala?
By Dickie Currer-Ganguli
Australians are feeling the pinch like never before. The so-called “Lucky Country” – a term once coined by writer Donald Horne due Australia’s abundance of natural resources and low population density – is going through a period of prolonged economic turmoil as well as homelessness and housing insecurity.
In 2025, 26,200 people seeking specialist homelessness services identified housing affordability stress as their main reason for seeking help – more than double the 12,500 figure recorded 10 years earlier.
Younger Australians are being hit particularly hard, with the rate of 18-24-year-olds experiencing housing affordability stress more than doubling to over 12% during the same 10-year period.
What we can say is that Australia is not building homes quickly enough, with only 29% of the Federal Government’s target of 1.2 million new homes over five years to June 2029 currently running on schedule.
Meaning this trend is unlikely to change anytime soon, unless drastic change is taken.
But if Australia wants inspiration, they could look to a state in India’s South-West that has taken radical action.
Kerala, which has a population of roughly 36 million (more than Australia’s 28 million) is targeting zero homelessness and is well on the way to achieving this lofty ambition.
Kerala’s LIFE Mission (Livelihood Inclusion and Financial Empowerment), launched in 2017 by the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government, is a comprehensive housing and social welfare strategy.
The ambition is simple: everyone should have a safe, dignified home, and the ability to sustain themselves.
LIFE stands for:
L — Livelihood
I — Inclusion
F — Financial Empowerment
E — Empowerment
The idea is that putting someone in a house isn’t enough if they remain economically vulnerable, and that housing is a basic platform for participation.
LIFE divides the problem into four different categories:
1. People with land, but no house
The government provides financial assistance to construct a home.
2. People without land or a house
Kerala develops apartments, housing complexes and clusters, rather than requiring every family to own an individual plot.
3. Incomplete or uninhabitable houses
LIFE also funds the completion of houses abandoned under previous schemes and repairs homes that are no longer suitable for living.
4. Extremely vulnerable households
Priority is given to groups including people with disabilities, destitute, widows, single mothers and people unable to earn because of serious illness or accidents.
Impressively, LIFE had completed 365,531 houses by December 2023 by pooling resources from local, state, and central governments, with the 2025-26 state plan allocating ₹5.8 crore ($8.5 million) to the rural LIFE housing program alone.
Kerala has also experimented with acquiring or receiving land for landless households, through its “Manassodithiri Mannu” (“A little land from the heart”) campaign, which encouraged voluntary land contributions.
Kerala’s government says the program has secured more than 28 acres of land already.
Kerala hasn’t eradicated homelessness yet, though it’s remarkably close to its goal, having successfully delivered secure housing to over 80% of its identified homeless population.
Obviously two different countries with unique challenges. But what could Australia adopt from the Kerala model to solve its ever growing homelessness problem?
1: Start treating housing as a basic platform for participation
We often separate housing, employment, health, welfare and homelessness into different policy silos.
Kerala’s LIFE Mission is not simply to provide a roof. The program explicitly links housing with the ability to earn a livelihood, participate in society and access government welfare and financial services.
A home is the foundation from which people solve other problems. Australia could increasingly design homelessness programs around that principle.
2: Moving from crisis response to prevention
Kerala’s stated objective is to provide secure housing to all eligible homeless people, including people who have land but no house and people who have neither land nor a house. That creates a fundamentally different policy question.
Instead of: “How do we help this person who is homeless?, the question becomes: “What do we need to do to ensure this household never becomes homeless?”
Australia could adopt much stronger early-intervention housing systems, identifying households at risk of eviction, family breakdown or housing stress before they enter the homelessness system.
3: Thinking more like a collectivist culture
Kerala hasn’t relied entirely on government money, but has also relied on the philanthropy of its people, something which is deeply rooted in Southern Indian cultures.
Australia has a large philanthropy sector which has been underutilised thus far in combating homelessness.
Not to mention the country has a huge amount of government-owned land across federal, state and local governments.
A national audit of under-utilised public land specifically for social and affordable housing would be another step towards tackling this equitably.
Does Australia have an appetite to really change?
Kerala isn’t a model Australia could simply copy. It has different land markets, planning systems, demographics and institutional structures.
But the underlying philosophy of LIFE, integrated government, land mobilisation and prevention shows that with a clear mission statement and systems thinking, real change can be made.
The question is, whether the appetite for urgent and proactive action exists in Australia?
