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Australians spend a lot of time talking about owning houses – who has one, who has too many, who doesn’t but should have, and how we can level the housing market playing field. Because it’s the Great Australian Dream, right? 

Mostly we blame those bloody Boomers for the inequity – the structural incentives and advantages that have caused one generation to get lucky property-wise, adversely impacting other generations. Governments blame it on a supply shortage. What we don’t recognise is that this same unfairness has always been baked into the Australian housing market for people living with a disability. It’s not bad luck or a recent lack of supply: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. 

About 48% of Australians  with disability are homeowners compared to the 61% of people without disability. Only 39% of people with severe disabilities own their own home. Of these, most are older (65+) who purchased property when it was more affordable, or prior to when they acquired their disability. People with disability are more likely to live in low income households, experience higher rates of homelessness and housing stress, and experience difficulties paying bills. 

Why does it happen? Societal and systemic barriers to employment and inclusion compound so that people with disability are more likely to live in poverty; be locked out of employment, work part-time, or be in jobs that pay less. For many, Centrelink support is their only income, which makes the likelihood of buying a house close to zero. It’s been a long term problem and Australia has made little progress in supporting people with disability and their housing needs. Some schemes have tried to address this over the years such as shared/mixed equity, low interest loans and rent to buy schemes but have had limited impact for people with disability.

The introduction of Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) to the available supports for NDIS participants in 2017 was intended to address some of this by providing a funding stream for accessible properties for those with the highest needs, eventually accommodating about 35,000 people or 6% of all participants. For many tenants, SDA has been an amazing, life changing experience, offering on-site disability supports, new apartments in great locations. SDA though, is a narrow slice of a much bigger housing challenge. 

Under the SDA framework, it is possible for people who have SDA in their NDIA plans to be an owner occupier and build their own SDA. As of 31 March 2026 there are 16,263 people with disabilities living in SDA, only 16 of these are owner-occupiers. 

This represents a home ownership rate of one in a thousand. Put another way, in the almost ten years since SDA began, fewer than two SDA recipients per year have become home owners, about .001%.

We need developers in the SDA market. They are critical to the success of the SDA and the majority of these housing providers are committed to the best possible outcome for their tenants. Thank you SDA providers.However, the almost non-existent rates of SDA owner-owners means that the $539 million dollars spent on SDA in the year to 31 March 2026 largely flowed to developers at above-market rates, while people with disabilities continue to be locked out of the housing market as owners. 

Just 16 owner-occupiers points to a real equity problem. Mainstream schemes for new entrants – like the the First Home Buyers Scheme – could theoretically be used for SDA owner occupiers, but the structure of the way that SDA works makes them hard to access. There are no specific  incentives in place to support SDA tenants to become home owners in the way mainstream first-home buyers are supported. 

There’s an unintended policy own-goal here: this model effectively locks SDA tenants out of home ownership and wealth accrual. Putting it bluntly, it locks them out of the Great Australian Dream – something that people with severe disability are as entitled to as any other Australian. The intent of the NDIS is to remove the barriers that disability presents to live an ordinary life in the community. The SDA structure inadvertently removes the opportunity for home ownership that most Australians claim as their birthright.

SDA tenancy offers a (mostly) secure arrangement for people with significant disabilities across the course of their lives and this has prompted some concerns from the general public – you can probably guess how it goes: why do you get a free house? And yes, sure, nobody should get a free house in a system where we don’t have systemic discrimination and exclusion of groups of people that present impossible barriers to accessing employment. But we don’t live in that world; we live in this one. Despite 13 years of the NDIS dream of economic and social participation, we have made only very small gains in workforce participation. As a community, until we introduce universal income (hold my beer, I’m on it) or get serious about dismantling the societal barriers to employment for people with disabilities, we have a responsibility to level the housing access playing field. 

One of the ideals sitting behind SDA is that tenants have secure, accessible and quality housing ‘for life’. But ‘home for life’ thinking has a cost: it gives tenants none of the wealth-building opportunities that secure housing/home ownership provides. An SDA tenant can pay rent their entire lifetime and have nothing to show for it at the end. Compare this to home owners who build equity across the course of their lives, can upsize/downsize/sideways-size, use their capital to fund retirements and pool it with their superannuation for a comfortable retirement. 

SDA tenants have none of this. They are locked into renting with very few pathways into wealth and vulnerable to the uncertainties associated with landlords and NDIA decisions on funding  across their lifespan. They can never enjoy the certainty that home ownership brings. 

SDA is genuinely valuable for people who can now live independently in their own homes – can move from the family or group home, or from public housing into a specially-designed disability accessible property. It’s exactly what the NDIS should make possible. 

Entry into the home ownership market is recognised as being extremely challenging for new entrants. Mostly, we accept that fundamental changes to tax systems/incentives/prices are essential to address the intergenerational housing inequality that we accidentally created, and support housing equity. 

We need to wake from our historical acceptance of this unfairness.  We need to do something about the needs of people with disabilities, who have always been locked out of the housing market, and have a positive policy and plan to increase home ownership by people with disability. This must ultimately be true for all people with disabilities (an article for another day), but for the SDA tenants – that is, those with the most significant disabilities – the current SDA system presents an easy win: a ready-made pathway to home ownership. 

So how do we do this? Here are just a few ideas:

1. State/Federal government tailored schemes – the government co-funds 30-40% of the property price
2. Stamp duty exemptions – for SDA owner-occupiers 
3. Rent-to-Own models – developed in partnership with housing providers and community housing providers to develop rent to own models 
4. Accessible Off-the-Plan packages – incentives for providers to build small, compliant SDA properties that are affordable for SDA recipients, where disability supports can be shareable
5. DSS funding/support for specialist services – in finance/building/brokerage to actively support SDA tenants into home ownership. 

These ideas require government and providers to take a conceptual leap.  If we recognise that mainstream Australians are struggling with housing inequality and access to the housing market and that, as a community, we are committed to addressing this inequality, we need to extend this commitment in a practical way to those whose chances of owning a house are much lower than ‘mainstream Australians’.  Housing developers and people with a disability deserve to share a successful outcome – profits for developers in partnership with equitable housing outcomes for people with disability.