Joe Flood (policy analyst)

National Housing Conference, 2019. Speaker Dr Joe Flood

From 2015-17 Flood was Research and Policy Adviser for Australia's largest community housing provider, Community Housing Limited, where he worked on an affordable housing project for Rwanda; the wind-down of the National Rental Affordability Scheme; alternative home ownership arrangements; homelessness policy; transitional housing; a furniture industry for Timor Leste; and active management of the housing stock.

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

Flood continued to work intermittently with UN-Habitat. In 2012, as part of a review of the Global Shelter Strategy, he examined the housing situation across the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. In 2016 he organised a session on rental housing at the Habitat III Conference in Quito. He developed a National Housing Strategy for Myanmar in 2017.

Flood has managed a large international Cornwall DNA group since 2011. He has written a book on Cornwall's history and the Cornish people. He gives talks and courses on DNA,[1] and has written about 15 articles on genetic genealogy. He is also a guitarist, singer-songwriter and author.

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

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 and writing off their mortgage costs against other income. 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. In 2010 he completed an AHURI study showing home ownership was decreasing sharply among younger households, and stating that the housing market was in a dangerous and unstable situation. He wrote," 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." He was the subject of a flurry of media attention in South Australia, wanting to know if he was forecasting an imminent house price collapse.

In 2003 he edited and partly authored the flagship UN report The Challenge of Slums, which contained a detailed global analysis of the situation in informal and low-income settlements. In 2004 he estimated the worldwide cost of upgrading slums at $200 billion for the UN Millennium Project.

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. Flood immediately brought Nathaniel to Melbourne for treatment, but Nathaniel finally died in Melbourne in 2010 after six years of continuous treatment.

From 2001-2006 Flood advised on the establishment of Local Urban Observatories in Ethiopia, Yemen, South Africa, Mexico and Iran.The most successful of these has been in Al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia, which was designed by Flood with the support of UNDP, It has extended to a network responsible for monitoring the Hajj pilgrimage.

In 2000-01, Flood ran two large commercial projects on local governance in the Philippines.

In 1998-99 he ran a team at ESRI Ltd (the leading GIS company) in Redlands California, where he designed and programmed the Urban Data Link, a GIS solution for indicators entry, display and analysis.

Returning to Melbourne in 1996, he analysed the Urban Indicators data. He discovered that much of the variation in the data could be explained by a single index, the City Development Index, which is strongly associated with the level of development of a city.

In Australia from 1996 to 2010, Flood held adjunct positions at four universities and at AHURI. Work included institutional lending models, maintenance in indigenous housing, asset management, factorial ecology, and multinomial analysis of large housing surveys. In 2010 he extended work of Yates showing that home ownership continued to fall among younger households.

Flood joined UN-Habitat in Nairobi from 1994–96, 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.

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.

In 1993, as a result of his new participatory approach, Flood was offered the position of inaugural Co-ordinator of the Indicators Programme at UN-Habitat in Nairobi. From 1994 to 1996, the programme developed a comprehensive series of urban indicators covering a range of pro-poor local issues - social outcomes, poverty measurement, infrastructure, housing and governance. The indicators presented an overview of progress in achieving the aims of the Habitat Agenda for the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul. The indicators were then collected in 1995-6 and in 1999 for more than 250 cities, with an emphasis on Africa. During the period, Flood travelled to about 60 countries, hiring consultants, assisting with data design and collection, and visiting informal settlements. At the end of his tenure, Flood established the Global Urban Observatory network through a resolution of the Commission on Human Settlements.

In 1992, Flood won a large Commonwealth project to examine changes in internal migration. He found that employment had become a much smaller determinant of migration decisions than in the past, and quality of life had become much more important. With John Roy, he constructed an advanced model of internal migration.

He extended his industrial democracy work with CSIRO to a general participatory framework for indicators development, which he explored in 1992 during the National Housing Strategy. He used this system worldwide to develop policy indicators of different kinds, leading to a change in career.

He also provided input to several government inquiries during the period, assisting the House of Representatives and the Productivity Commission. In 1991 he was CSIRO’s representative on the Prime Minister's Economically Sustainable Development Task Force (Transport).

In 1988, Flood wrote several reports for the National Housing Policy Review. Up until that time public housing in Australia had been funded by loans from the Commonwealth. He pointed out this was not viable as tenants now had insufficient incomes to meet even basic operating costs and had no money for interest payments. The Commonwealth immediately converted all funding from loans to grants, which allowed public housing to continue.

His most influential project was the 1986 Housing Subsidy Study with Judith Yates, which enumerated about 200 Federal and State housing subsidy programmes in Australia. The study showed the subsidy system was unfairly distributed towards higher income earners and home owners, while private renters were receiving almost no support from government. Through the Cass Review, the Australian government then radically expanded Rent Assistance to low income renters in what became after the mid-1990s Australia’s largest housing subsidy program, with an annual expenditure of over AU$5 billion in 2022.

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, and resulted 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.

Flood became interested in organisation theory and science policy in 1982, and wrote on the changing structure of CSIRO. He became an official of the CSIRO Officer’s Association from 1984–93, during crucial battles for science funding and reorganisation. He was elected national Vice-president of the CSIRO Staff Association in 1993. He was also President of the Australian Council of Professional Associations for several years.

He worked in CSIRO from 1977 to 1993, where he was one of the first scientists to apply for external consultancies, winning about 25 research projects undertaken for all levels of government in Australia during 1984-93. His research contributed to several major changes in Australia’s housing policy, specifically the expansion of Rent Assistance, now Australia's largest housing programme. With university partners, he established the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) in 1993.

In 1977, Flood joined the CSIRO Division of Building Research at Highett, Victoria. Initially he worked on modelling the housing market, but switched to housing policy in 1982. He was one of the first CSIRO scientists to apply for government projects at open tender, and subsequently won nearly 50 research projects on his own behalf or leading teams. His first project, with SIROMATH, examined the employment created by housing construction and the market-purchase of public housing, using multi-regional input-output analysis. The study showed that housing had the best employment multiplier of any industry sector, because of a high labour component and relatively few imports. It was used by advocates to promote spending on public housing.

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

Flood showed promise in school subjects and in 1967 he topped the Western Australian matriculation exam in English, with the overall highest average across seven subjects. He completed a pure mathematics PhD in category theory and functional analysis at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1975, and wrote several other associated mathematics papers. 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, dial-a-bus modelling, and a national rail wagon study. Here he learned computing, simulation modelling and data analysis.

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

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. His boilermaker father Les Flood suffered from untreated schizophrenia, and the family fled to Perth in 1958 as Les became increasingly dangerous.