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Joe Flood (policy analyst)

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Joe Flood
Joe Flood
Born
Joe Flood

(1950-07-28) 28 July 1950 (age 74)
Melbourne, Victoria
Occupations
  • Policy and data analyst
  • indicators
  • genealogist
Children4

Joe Flood (born 28 July 1950) is a policy, data analyst and mathematician. He has made contributions to mathematics, housing and urban economics, urban indicators, slum studies, climate change and genetic genealogy.

Flood worked in CSIRO from 1977 to 1993, where he conducted about 25 research projects for every level of government in Australia during 1984-93. His research contributed to several major changes in Australia's housing policy. With university partners, he established the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) in 1993.

Flood joined UN-Habitat in Nairobi from 1994 to 1996, where he devised a system of urban indicators that was collected in over 250 cities around the world. He was the originator of the City Development Index and the Global Urban Observatory. After leaving the UN, he spent the next ten years on follow-up work on establishing local observatories and indicators, with some housing and urban work in Australia.

From 2010 he has written and lectured extensively on genetic genealogy.

Early life

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Joe Flood is the eldest child of poet and playwright Dorothy Hewett, His siblings include Tom Flood and Kate Lilley. His parents eloped in 1949 from Perth to Sydney. Before and after his birth they lived in "Australia's last slum" Redfern. His mother wrote poems and short stories about him as a small child.[1][2] His boilermaker father Les Flood suffered from untreated schizophrenia, and the family fled to Perth in 1958 as Les became increasingly dangerous.[3]

Joe Flood, Canberra 1973

Flood completed a pure mathematics PhD in category theory and functional analysis at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1975,[4] and wrote several other associated mathematics papers.[5][6] To support his three children aged under four, he took a job as graduate clerk at the Bureau of Transport Economics, where he worked on a simulation of arid lands,[7] dial-a-bus modelling, and a national rail wagon study.[8] Here he learned computing, simulation modelling and data analysis.

Australian career

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In 1977, Flood joined the CSIRO Division of Building Research[9] at Highett, Victoria.

By 1993 he was a Principal Research Scientist and leader of housing research at CSIRO. With university partners he won a tender to establish the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, and he was appointed as Associate Director and the director of housing research.[10]

He became an official of the CSIRO Officer's Association[11] from 1984 to 1993. He was elected national Vice-president of the CSIRO Staff Association in 1993. He was also President of the Australian Council of Professional Associations[12] for several years.

Later life

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Joe Flood, Oregon 2013

In Australia from 1996 to 2010, Flood's work included institutional lending models,[13] maintenance in indigenous housing,[14] asset management,[15] factorial ecology,[16] and multinomial analysis of large housing surveys. In 2010 he re-visited work of Yates showing that home ownership continued to fall among younger households in Australia.[17]

From 2015 to 2017 Flood was Research and Policy Adviser for Community Housing Limited,[18] where he worked on an affordable housing project for Rwanda; the wind-down of the National Rental Affordability Scheme;[19] alternative home ownership arrangements; homelessness policy;[20] transitional housing;[21] a furniture industry for Timor Leste; and active management of the housing stock.[22]

Flood has co-ordinated a large international Cornwall DNA group since 2011.[23] He has written a book on Cornwall's history and the Cornish people.[24] He gives talks and courses on DNA,[1] and has written a number of articles on genetic genealogy.[25]

Controversy

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Flood has been critical of Australia's housing policy. In 1986, he showed that the popular federal program, the First Home Owner's Scheme (FHOS), was counterproductive unless it was restricted to lower income earners,[26] and might result in house price rises in excess of the amount given as a subsidy to home purchasers. Nevertheless, FHOS continued after 2000 and prices rose more strongly than ever.[27]

In 2004 he became alarmed when the median house price to income ratio rose sharply in Australia, along with overcrowding indicators, while the rate of home ownership began to fall. Initially he attributed this to the increased availability of housing loans to landlords, who were outbidding first home buyers while writing off their mortgage costs against other income.[28] Later he considered that falling global finance costs, and rapid immigration without the necessary supporting infrastructure spending, were also to blame. The practice of charging the costs of infrastructure to developers was also leading to steep residential land price rises in some States.[29] In 2010 he completed an AHURI study[17] showing home ownership was decreasing sharply among younger households.[30] He stated," The country that promised limitless land, cheap housing and near-universal home ownership to all comers now has some of the most expensive housing in the world."[31] He was the subject of a flurry of media attention in South Australia, who were desperate to know if he was forecasting an imminent house price collapse.[32][33]

Personal life

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Flood was married to arts educator and artist Adele Flood[34] from 1972 to 2009, and they had three sons Benjamin, Daniel and Matthew.

He had a fourth son, Nathaniel Cervas, in the Philippines in 2002. Nathaniel developed Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in 2004, a cancer that had killed Flood's elder half-brother in 1950.[3] Flood immediately brought Nathaniel to Melbourne for treatment, but Nathaniel finally died in Melbourne in 2010.[35]

Flood was married to women's cultural arts advocate and nurse Watiri Boylen from 2013 to 2021.

Publications

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Flood's books and book-length publications include:

  • Free Topological Vector Spaces (University of Warsaw, 1984)
  • Evaluation of the Impact of Housing Expenditure on Employment (AHRC, 1984)
  • Housing Subsidy Study (AHRC, 1987)
  • Financing Public Housing: the Need, the Options and the Risks (DCSH, 1989)
  • Internal Migration Study (DITAC and CSIRO, 1992)
  • Australian Urban Exports: An Assessment of the Current Situation (AGPS, 1993)
  • Environmental Indicators for National State of the Environment Reporting. Human Settlements (DoE, 1998)
  • Strategic Asset Management Best Practice for Indigenous Housing Organizations (ATSIC, 2000)
  • Cities Data Book for the Asia Pacific (ADB, 2001)
  • People's Participation in the Local Development Councils (DILG, 2000)
  • The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (Earthscan, 2003)
  • Housing Implications of Economic, Social and Spatial Change (AHURI, 2010)
  • Unravelling the Code: The Coads and Coodes of Cornwall and Devon (Deluge, 2013)

References

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  1. ^ Hewett, Dorothy; Liiley, Merv (1963). "The story of little Joe Flood". What About the People. Realist Writers. p. 63.
  2. ^ Hewett, Dorothy (1983). "Joey". A Baker's Dozen. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780141001326.
  3. ^ a b Hewett, Dorothy (2012). Wild Card: An Autobiography. UWA Publishing. ISBN 9781742583952.
  4. ^ Flood, Joe (1984). "Free topological vector spaces". Dissertationes Mathematicae. Study No. 221.
  5. ^ Flood, Joe (1979). "Pontryagin duality for topological modules". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 75 (2): 329–333. doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1979-0532161-7. S2CID 122919663.
  6. ^ Flood, Joe (1981). "Semi-convex geometry" (PDF). Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society. 30 (4): 496–510. doi:10.1017/S1446788700017973. S2CID 249897984.
  7. ^ Freeman and Benyon, ed. (1983). "Chapter 10. Labour submodel". Pastoral and social problems in a semi-arid environment. A simulation model. CSIRO and UNESCO.
  8. ^ "Railway Freight Operations: Survey of Wagon Utilisation" (PDF). BTE. 1979. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  9. ^ "Manufacturing and Building Research Divisions". CSIROpedia. 10 July 2013. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
  10. ^ "1/2 million in government funds for new housing research". The Age. 30 June 1993. p. 5.
  11. ^ Smith, Bruce A (20 April 2001). "CSIRO Officers Association (1980 - 1992)". Australian Trade Union Archives. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  12. ^ "Australian Council of Professions (Professions Australia)". www.professions.org.au. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  13. ^ Berry, M, Flood, J., Lindfield, M. and Fisher, J. (1997). Institutional investment in housing: an Australian perspective. Development of investment models aimed at encouraging institutional investment in rental housing. A report for the Department of Social Security, September.
  14. ^ Spiller Gibbins Swan Pty. Ltd, Joe Flood, et al. (2000). Identification of strategic asset management best practice for indigenous housing organisations, The Commonwealth-State Working Group on Indigenous Housing.
  15. ^ Flood, Joe (2005). "Chapter 1: Australia". In Vincent Gruis and Nico Nieboer (ed.). Asset management in the social rented sector: policy and practice In Europe and Australia. Kluwer Academic. ISBN 1402025572.
  16. ^ Flood, J. (2000), Sydney divided: factorial ecology revisited. A paper to the APA Conference, Melbourne, November and to the 24th ANZRSAI Conference, Hobart, December. https://www.academia.edu/5135339/Sydney_Divided_Factorial_Ecology_Revisited
  17. ^ a b Flood, Joe; Baker, Emma (2010). Housing Implications of Economic, Social and Spatial Change. AHURI final report 150. Vol. AHURI Final Report 150. Melbourne: AHURI. ISBN 978-1-921610-49-3.
  18. ^ "Community Housing Limited". Community Housing Limited. Retrieved 25 April 2022.
  19. ^ "About the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS)". www.dss.gov.au. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  20. ^ Flood, Joe (2017). "Rental affordability and homelessness in Victoria. Joint Research Paper CHVL and Launch Housing". Retrieved 27 April 2022.
  21. ^ "Transitional housing and tenancy support". Launch Housing. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  22. ^ "Joe Flood". National Housing Conference 2022. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  23. ^ "Cornwall: about us". Family Tree DNA. Retrieved 27 April 2022.
  24. ^ Flood, Joe (2013). Unravelling the Code: the Coads and Coodes of Cornwall and Devon. Deluge Publishing. ISBN 978-0992328108.
  25. ^ Flood, Joe (15 May 2014). "Using STRs for intra-family Y-DNA comparisons: segmenting markers". Surname DNA Journal. doi:10.14487/sdna.000953.
  26. ^ Pawson, Hal; Milligan, Vivienne; Yates, Judith (2019). Housing policy in Australia: a case for system reform (PDF). Palgrave Macmillan. p. 140. doi:10.1007/978-981-15-0780-9. ISBN 978-981-15-0779-3. S2CID 243397048.
  27. ^ Estlake, Saul (16 March 2011). "Doling out cash to first home buyers hasn't made more of us home owners". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 27 April 2022.
  28. ^ Tan, Su-lin (22 July 2017). "Increasing dwelling supply does not lower prices, Community Housing's Joe Flood says". Financial Review. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  29. ^ Flood, Joe (2011). "Impact fees". International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home. Netherlands: Elsevier. ISBN 9780080471631.
  30. ^ Colebatch, Tim (23 March 2010). "Housing at these prices will leave us all a heavy debt to bear". The Age. p. 11.
  31. ^ Colebatch, Tim (14 September 2010). "Ownership out of reach". The Age. p. 11.
  32. ^ "Home ownership dream dims, researchers find". Flinders University News. 14 September 2009. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  33. ^ Silverman, Hannah (15 September 2009). "Aussie dream slipping away". The Adelaide Advertiser. p. 22.
  34. ^ "Adele Flood". Academia University of New South Wales. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  35. ^ "News". Cocolife. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
[edit]

National Housing Conference, 2019. Speaker Dr Joe Flood

Academia, Joe Flood

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