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| Missing the mark on housing affordability |
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by Warren Gardiner At face value the report appeared to show that our police, teachers, nurses, fire-fighters and ambulance officers were facing a serious housing affordability crisis and that assisting these key workers should receive greater public policy attention. Download report: BankWest Key Worker Housing Affordability Report In fact the data released by the bank does not stand up to any serious critical analysis. The methodology used was simply to compare median house purchase prices across local government areas and compare this to the average salaries of the five occupational groups designated by Bank West as key workers. This methodology produced the startling conclusion that it would take 32 times the annual salary of a NSW police officer to purchase an average house in Mosman in Sydney. Given that the median house price in Mosman, as reported in the study, is $2,080,500 this is unlikely to come as a shock to most readers of NCOSS News. The fact is that the biggest problem with housing affordability is faced by private renters, not home purchasers. As well, the working households that face the biggest problem in meeting their housing costs generally do not include the workers that the Bank West analysis selected for exclusive attention. In its Research and Policy Bulletin of February 2006 entitled Housing affordability in Australia, AHURI estimated that 54% of households experiencing problems with housing affordability nationally were private tenants. The next largest group was home purchasers who comprised 34% of the total. There were relatively smaller numbers of home owners or social housing tenants experiencing affordability problems. Further analysis of the 2001 Census by Judy Yates, Bill Randolph and Darren Holloway for the AHURI Sydney Research Centre showed that the occupations that experienced the highest rate of housing (affordability) stress in Sydney included hospitality workers, sales assistants, receptionists, carers/aides, and cleaners. Their analysis showed that school teachers and police officers faced lower levels of housing affordability problems than the overall rate for all Sydney workers. Their study also included a strong locational emphasis. It showed that the greatest affordability challenge faces low paid workers who live in inner city areas, close to job opportunities; that the inner city is characterised by growing concentrations of young affluent renters without children; low paid workers face increasing pressure to relocate to more outlying areas where rents are lower; and if they do remain employed in inner city locations they face high commuting costs. (And this was written before the price of petrol reached $1.50 a litre.) So there is no doubt that Sydney and other centres face the challenge of housing workers close to job opportunities in an increasingly 24/7 economic environment. Polarisation in our cities is clearly increasing, not reducing. But the answer is not to just worry about the home purchase challenge facing a small group of predetermined ‘key workers’. We need a suite of measures to help low to moderate renters and home purchasers, and focus most of all on those who need access to social housing, which has not grown in size for a decade despite increasing need, and on those deemed to earn too much to access social housing but who equally earn too little to secure decent housing in the private marketplace in areas that provide good employment and educational opportunities. More information: Warren Gardiner
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(This article originally published in