In January 2016 the Australian Government announced the establishment of an Affordable Housing Working Group to investigate ways to boost the supply of affordable rental housing through innovative financing models. One of the challenges for any national system to improve the supply of affordable housing proposed by the Affordable Housing Working Group will be to respond to the very different circumstances in the State and Territory capitals.
Although the 2011 Census data are now some years old and property markets in these different capitals have had different trajectories since this time, it shows that unaffordability had increased by vastly different amounts in different cities over the time period 2006 to 2011, particularly for Q2 households.
Figure 1. Percentage of Q1 and Q2 households paying unaffordable rents, by capital cities: 2006 and 2011
Source: Hulse, K., Reynolds, M. and Yates, J. (2014) Changes in the supply of affordable housing in the private rental sector for lower income households, 2006–11, AHURI Final Report no. 235. Table 6 and Table 7.