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A concept used to measure the impacts of poor housing affordability. Housing stress is said to occur if an unreasonable proportion of household income is required to pay housing costs. There are a range of approaches to defining and measuring housing stress, with the most common in Australia being the ‘30/40’ affordability rule. This ‘rule of thumb’ defines housing stress as occurring when households in the lowest 40 per cent of the income distribution pay more than 30 per cent of income on housing costs, adjusted for household size.

A housing cooperative is a community of people who voluntarily work together to meet their common need for affordable, sustainable housing. Members actively participate in the management of the housing co-operative, including attending meetings and participating in the management and everyday running of the co-operative. Housing cooperatives can operate under a number of different legal structures, including forms of leasing and ownership.

Housing density refers to the number of dwellings on an area of land. Density is typically referred to as high-density (characterised as multi-storey apartment buildings), medium-density (characterised as attached townhouses and three or four storey low level apartment buildings), and low density (characterised as stand alone, detached housing).

Service response model to homelessness that provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate access to permanent housing integrated with intensive support services. The Housing First model is based on the conviction that having adequate housing is a human right (Tsemberis 1999) and an important precondition to be able to address other issues with which a person may be struggling.

The experiences and mobility of households and residents within the housing system is referred to as ‘housing pathways’. Housing pathways refer to: ‘patterns of interaction (practices) concerning house and home, over time and space … The housing pathway of a household is the continually changing set of relationships and interactions, which it experiences over time in its consumption of housing’.

The process whereby new housing is built to fulfil the demand for new dwellings from buyers.

The movement of households between dwellings and areas is referred to as housing or residential mobility. The study of housing/residential mobility is concerned with understanding what motivates households to move, the distance they move and whether they choose or are compelled to move and the socio-economic consequences of moving.

Forms of housing tenure that lie between the standard tenures of social rental, private rental and home ownership (e.g. shared equity).

A land use planning intervention by government designed to deliver affordable housing. It either mandates or creates incentives for a residential development to provide a specified proportion or number of affordable housing dwellings.

A comparison measurement approach whereby a household’s income is ranked against the distribution of all household income in Australia. The approach divides Australia’s households (i.e. not population) into five equal groups or quintiles, each comprising 20 per cent of the number of all households, based on their income. The income quintiles assessment leads to the recognition of the following categories:

• very low income households – 0% to 20% of income earners
• low income households – 20% to 40% of income earners
• moderate income households – 40% to 60% of income earners
• high income households – 60% to 80% of income earners
• very high income households – highest 20% of income earners.