There is increasing evidence that in response to Melbourne’s tight rental market, a new model of for-profit rooming house provider has emerged.

Boarding houses are an important source of low cost accommodation in most Australian cities. In this project the potential role of government in protecting and encouraging this form of accommodation is examined. The positioning paper and final report from this research project are now available online.

This paper has two specific objectives (i) to ‘locate'disabled people in nineteenth-century Melbourne by showing where and how they lived; and (ii) to illustrate the socio-spatial relations that shaped their lives.