Australia struggles to plan for affordable homes

An Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute report, led by the University of Sydney, outlines suggestions for how to leverage the planning system to create more affordable housing. Requiring developers to including affordable housing when land is rezoned and incentives for projects offering lower rents or sale prices are two ideas outlined in the report. The research examined how land-use planning mechanisms could help supply affordable housing in Australia, nearly a decade after NSW introduced incentives for developers to produce affordable rental housing. South Australia introduced a 15 percent affordable housing target in 2005, which has been progressively implemented when residential land is zoned. Recent experience in the UK and US, where inclusionary planning mechanisms for affordable housing are long established, was also examined. The study found that between 2005 and 2016, the NSW voluntary incentive approach delivered around 1,300 affordable rental dwellings in greater Sydney, which is equivalent to about 0.5-1 percent of total housing output for the period. By contrast, the South Australian model has yielded 2009 affordable homes to date, with a further 3,476 underway.