Anglicare Australia has published its Rental Affordability Snapshot for 2019, highlighting Australia’s bleak reality for housing affordability. The organisation’s member agencies conducted the Rental Affordability Snapshot over a weekend in March 2019. The study revealed that it is almost impossible for people receiving welfare payments to find affordable housing across the country.

This year’s snapshot surveyed 69,485 private rental listings and found that, devastatingly, no capital city in Australia had properties affordable for a single person on Youth Allowance or Newstart. Only one property out of the 69,000 examined over the snapshot weekend was affordable for people on Youth Allowance. Just two properties – one in the Riverina and one in the Orange regions – were able to be rented by a single person receiving Newstart.

554 rental properties were found as affordable for a single person on Age Pension, and only 317 were affordable for a person on Disability Support Pension.

The Rental Affordability Snapshot also assessed housing affordability for those working full-time on a minimum wage. Just 2 per cent of rental properties were affordable for this demographic, and 75% of properties were unaffordable for couples who both earn minimum wage and have two young children. While the number of available properties for people on minimum wage has increased since 2018 in Greater Sydney, the majority of these are located further away from the CBD in areas such as Western and Southern Western Sydney, the Central
Coast and the Blue Mountains.

This report has once again highlighted the urgent need for a firm and long-term commitment to the supply of more affordable housing from all levels of government, community and business sectors. The 2019 Rental Affordability Snapshot also includes detailed policy recommendations.

Read the Rental Affordability Snapshot 2019 – Greater Sydney and Illawarra here.

Read the Rental Affordability Snapshot 2019 – Breakdown of Results by Statistical Area – Greater Sydney and Illawarra here.

There is always plenty of research, policy proposals and housing news, and too few hours to digest it all. Over the last month three particular pieces are worth your time and effort. In this issue we focus on two of those. The May issue will feature the third – Shaping Housing Futures.

On 25 February, an audience at Sydney Museum heard Professor Duncan Maclennan presented the findings from ‘Strengthening Economic Cases for Housing Policy.’ It was commissioned from UNSW, City Futures by a 17 strong consortium led by CHIA NSW and including organisations from the private, government and not for profit sectors. The research subjected selected housing economy effects (identified in an earlier ‘Stage 1’ study to econometric modelling). The project also involved the expertise of SGS Economics & Planning and Cadence Economics.

In essence, the project involved comparing the productivity gains from locating housing near to jobs and services by modeling outcomes for both well and poorly located neighbourhoods in Sydney. The results are startling. In summary:

• Individual workers could save the equivalent of $2,500 per year in travel time through shorter commute times, and with half the saved time used for working, this would lead to extra $1.13 billion of labour supply for the growing NSW economy;
• Moving workers closer to a wider range of jobs will see their skills better used and their incomes increased by between $12,000 to $41,000 more a year (depending on their qualifications) by locating to neighbourhoods with job densities;
• These increased earnings should lead to a $17.57 billion boost to the economy over 40 years.
• Even after factoring in the $7.8 billion it will cost to invest in 125,000 affordable rented homes over 10 years, the economy would still be around $12 billion better off.

Those of us working in the sector have long argued that safe, secure and affordable homes make a substantial difference to people’s life chances and overall wellbeing. What this work shows is that by failing to properly invest in affordable housing, we are throwing away potentially billions in lost income.

There is more work to be done on other economic effects. While we could estimate the ‘excess rental burden’ of lower income households paying more than 30% of their income on housing costs, we could not model what this means for savings and expenditure elsewhere in the economy. A stage 3 beckons.

A few days later, UNSW City Futures published a report estimating the costs of delivering new social and affordable housing to meet needs (across Australia) over the next 20 years. It builds on the AHURI research ‘Social Housing as Infrastructure: An Investment Pathway’ to extend that methodology to estimate the need for affordable rental housing from households in the second income quintile who are in housing stress.

Again the numbers appear startling. The one million homes that are needed attracted some comment. Of that, almost two thirds are required to play catch up i.e. to meet existing need, and is a consequence of failure to invest in the past.

The cost to government of meeting needs is modelled in the report based on a number of funding scenarios.  What stands out, is how land influences the development costs in many metro areas and thus how valuable government land contributions or inclusionary zoning can be. The report can be accessed here.

Together, these two reports set out the scale of the social and affordable housing shortfall, what an affordable housing program could cost, but also the positive impact government investment could realise in achieving wider economic gains.

– Wendy Hayhurst, CEO of CHIA National

A section of the recently-closed Coca-Cola Amatil manufacturing site in Thebarton will be transformed into social and affordable housing for people on low-incomes, InDaily can reveal.

The ageing Thebarton line produced its final bottle of Coke last week, ending 66 years of local production.

The 2.5ha Port Road site had been valued at almost $17 million in February last year when it was rezoned to allow for residential development of up to eight stories.

Anglicare SA CEO Peter Sandeman told InDaily this morning that his organisation had this week purchased a 9,500m² portion of the site for an undisclosed sum to build its third housing and services hub in metropolitan Adelaide.

The purchased site, approximately two-blocks in size immediately south of the bottling plant, will be developed into multi-storey affordable and social housing, an Anglicare services centre and a space for “back-room administration”. It will complement Anglicare’s two existing services hubs, located in Elizabeth and Noarlunga.

Coca-Cola Amatil had formerly used the site as a storage space and car park.

Sandeman said it was “enormously rare” to secure a plot of land so close to the city and he was “quite confident” that construction would begin in six months, with the build expected to be completed by about 2020-21.

“I suspect Anglicare will be the first to develop on the site so we will have to use due-care in making sure the design is appropriate and sets, I hope, a high standard of what will be developed along that stretch of Port Road in the future,” he said.

Read more here….