Joe Flood (policy analyst)

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
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. Flood 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.

Australian career
In 1977, Flood joined the CSIRO Division of Building Research 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.

He became an official of the CSIRO Officer's Association 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 for several years.

Later life
In Australia from 1996 to 2010, Flood's work included institutional lending models, maintenance in indigenous housing, asset management, factorial ecology, 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.

From 2015 to 2017 Flood was Research and Policy Adviser for 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 has co-ordinated 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, and has written a number of articles on genetic genealogy.

Controversy
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 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.

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. 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. 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." 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.

Personal life
Flood was married to arts educator and artist Adele Flood 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. Flood immediately brought Nathaniel to Melbourne for treatment, but Nathaniel finally died in Melbourne in 2010.

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

Publications
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)