Structural Racism Index of Housing: Towards health equity in Victoria

^{A large-scale mural in Hosier Lane, Melbourne, by street artist Matt Adnate. Source: Getty}

Where you live shapes your chances of living a healthy life. In Victoria, people from Indigenous and multicultural communities face barriers to affordable, quality and stable housing, due to unfair systems such as access to housing finance and insurance, rental regulations, and the distribution of public resources that advantage some groups and disadvantage others.

These systems can reinforce disadvantage over time, producing place-based patterns of housing inequality and, in turn, avoidable health harms. Australia currently lacks transparent, small-area evidence on how these patterns predict community health outcomes.

This project will create a new public tool to make those patterns visible: a Structural Racism Index of Housing for Victoria.

Working with the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform, we will bring together Victorian and national data to build an index at the neighbourhood level. The index will combine indicators that research has linked to housing-related structural racism, such as planning settings (e.g., zoning), access to finance, insurance and real estate services, the availability of affordable and secure housing, housing quality, and measures of residential segregation.

We will then examine how the Index relates to small-area health outcomes known to be linked to racism, including mental health outcomes, cardiovascular disease, life expectancy, and potentially preventable hospitalisations. We will also benchmark the index against existing measures such as Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) to demonstrate the added value for housing and health justice.

The main outputs will be a publicly available resource, including a dataset, open and reproducible code, clear documentation and a technical methods note, a policy brief, and an interactive map. Together, these products will help governments, service providers, planners, researchers and communities identify where systems reform is most needed, prioritise investment, and track whether changes such as planning reform, improved rental standards, insurance changes or targeted programs are reducing housing and health inequities over time.