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The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability's Final Report identified multiple barriers preventing people with disabilities in Australia from living in suitable housing, and from being able to choose where they live, with whom they live, and how they live. The issues discussed in the Report include tenancy insecurity, difficulties accessing social housing, difficulty finding physically accessible homes, poor response to high rates of homelessness among people with disabilities, and substandard housing and living conditions in supported boarding houses. Addressing these concerns, the Report makes a number of important recommendations that span a range of housing tenures and both housing and disability policies and strategies. Focusing primarily on "mainstream" housing options, where the majority of people with disabilities live, in this article I argue that if implemented, these recommendations will have a transformative impact on housing for people with disabilities, and on people with intellectual disabilities more specifically. However, I also argue that for this to happen, a new supply of affordable housing needs to be developed and delivered at scale, and note the Commission's aversion from directly tackling this issue in its recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since all of its service users have an intellectual disability, Arts Project might be classified as a specialist disability service. As expressed by the program's Executive Director: "We're not a disability organisation, we're an arts organisation, where the artists happen to have a disability. An illustrative example is the Arts Project investigated by Anderson and Bigby ([1]), an art program for people with intellectual disabilities. [Extracted from the article]

Ineland's ([4]) article has offered an original and productive framework to understand and navigate the challenges of mainstream participation by people with intellectual disabilities. In disability policy, people with intellectual disabilities moving into social housing are considered to experience a form of "mainstream participation", as opposed to Specialist Disability Accommodation. In contrast, in disability policy debates, merely residing in social housing is often understood as a form of mainstream participation by people with intellectual disabilities, regardless of their level of involvement in housing management and governance. [Extracted from the article]

Social inclusion has been an enduring policy aim of intellectual disability policy since the early 1980s, which has been difficult to achieve. It has often been conceptualised as the binary between social presence or social participation. This article synthesises the findings from a program of Australian research that explored the application of "encounter" and "conviviality" – concepts from urban geography, as lenses for understanding the types of places, activities, and practices that facilitate or obstruct social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. Three types of convivial encounter were identified: moments of shared identification, everyday recognition, and becoming known. Most common were fleeting convivial encounters of everyday recognition in public places or commercial premises. Convivial encounters were facilitated by: places where activities were non-competitive, there was a shared purpose for being there and opportunities for spoken and other forms of communication; community members' with experience, confidence, or comfort in interacting with people with intellectual disabilities; and skilled judgments and assistance from support workers in the moment, and their decisions about use of non-segregated mainstream places. The final part of the article reviews studies by other disability studies researchers, who using ideas about encounter have found that the presence of a dog, and places where there is clarity about rules and roles, are facilitating factors, and have begun to investigate more systematic ways of creating opportunities for convivial encounters through social enterprises, community groups, classes, and volunteering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]