Housing affordability and homelessness: Probing Australian evidence
Housing affordability and homelessness: Probing Australian evidence Journal Article
European Journal of Homelessness
Abstract: In Australia, as in many other countries, housing affordability has become a more prominent policy challenge in recent years. While policymaker and media attention tend to focus on the house price threshold for first home ownership, the linked problem of declining rental affordability for low-income tenants should be a matter of equal or greater official concern. As embodied in Australia, this damaging trend is apparent through a variety of metrics. Importantly, while it is usually only implied or asserted rather than conclusively proven, there is sound statistical evidence of the inverse relationship between housing affordability and homelessness in the Australian setting. Surging rental prices seen during the latter phase of the COVID-19 pandemic – particularly in non-metropolitan areas – therefore seem likely to foreshadow a reconfiguration in the geography of homelessness in the immediate post-pandemic era.