Affordable housing more than the mortgage
by Michèle Nardelli
Housing
- the lack of it, the cost of it, to rent or buy it, to simply get
access to it - home ownership is powerful stuff, striking at the
heart of what many people feel is a quintessential part of
Australian life.
So it is little wonder that affordable housing is looming large not only as an election issue but as a topic for serious research.
In conjunction with researchers at RMIT’s Centre for Design, UniSA’s Urban and Regional Planning researchers Professor Stephen Hamnett and Dr Jon Kellett are part of the most integrated studies on the issue ever undertaken.
The project Lifetime affordable housing in Australia: integrating environmental performance and affordability was awarded almost $340,000 in Australian Research Council funding for industry-linked research and will examine the complex factors that define "affordability".
Dr Kellett said the issues were very broad.
"It easy to assume that if you have a housing shortage you can just free up a bit more land and that will fix the problem, but there are a whole range of environmental, economic, ecological and sociological factors to consider," Dr Kellett said.
"To maintain and improve housing into the future we need to examine the costs of all aspects of housing development and evaluate them."
Dr Kellett said he hoped the research would inform future housing policy so that housing development was environmentally and socially sustainable.
"We have to understand the costs and trade-offs that are involved in particular development decisions," he said.
"If you open land up in the suburban fringes away from employment centres there are costs associated with that. People spend more money on travel and use more fuel. There are also potential social trade-offs – people can become isolated or find access to basic services more difficult."
Similarly, Dr Kellett said the redevelopment of urban brownfield and greyfield sites may have hidden clean-up costs and site preparation costs also may act to inflate land prices.
"We know some important things – that there is a growing housing shortage, that while household sizes are shrinking, the size of new homes built is increasing; that some recent policies such as the first homeowner grant, have probably contributed to rising house prices; and that house environmental performance in Australia is below par."
Dr Kellett said housing generally had a lifetime of 50 to 100 years so demographics, employment, climate change and other issues are all important in the planning mix.
"This project is funded for the next four years, which will allow us to build a national perspective on housing affordability and what factors will affect that for all Australians into the future."