Planning A Better Future

The Housing Affordability Crisis was the hot topic at Bond University today when a new industry research report called for reform of the State's Planning System.

Queensland Community Housing Coalition [QCHC], Bond University's School of Sustainable Development and LandPartners today launched a joint venture research paper; ‘Evolving a Planning Approach to the Provision of Affordable Housing: An Exploration of Potential Policy Directions for Achieving Affordable Housing Outcomes’ that drew on community, industry and government expertise.

The affordability crisis in Queensland means that:

• an increasing number of working families are economically excluded from home ownership
• many low income families are in housing stress and paying more than 30% of their income in rent or mortgage payments
• young people are struggling to get into the housing market
• 36,000 families are on waiting lists for social housing

QCHC Executive Director, Mike Myers said the idea for the report came from individual conversations with people across industry, community and government, all of whom had a genuine commitment to housing affordability.

“QCHC represents hundreds of community housing providers who deal with the daily consequences of housing market failure. They know that social housing alone just cannot meet the growing need and they have shown the good sense to look at all the policy levers that could improve community well being. This report is a tribute to their vision to bring people together in the search for solutions”.

“The project was not designed to discover some illusive magic bullet to solve the affordability problem, its uniqueness is in finding the common ground between industry, community and government experts and identifying a package of measures that could form the basis of a new consensus for planning reform”, said Mr Myers.

Head of the School of Sustainable Development at Bond University, Professor George Earl explained the importance of consulting with community, government and industry members throughout the research to ensure the report accurately reflected the current situation.

“We felt it was paramount to investigate this concern from a number of different perspectives to produce an accurate snapshot of the housing affordability issue at this time”, said Professor Earl.

“This enabled us to uncover the contributing factors of the crisis and develop plausible reform solutions”.

The Report highlights four main areas of government intervention that could improve housing affordability, including land supply, standardisation and improvement of the planning process, layered sub-concessions and progressive headworks and infrastructure charges.

Within its overall package, it calls for the establishment of a State Land Development Corporation, the establishment of a State-led affordable housing agency to co-ordinate action and measures to improve the efficiency of the planning system.

The call for progressive, rather than flat rate, fees and infrastructure charges is also aimed at rewarding environmentally sustainable developments as well as those providing affordability.

Although it has been eight months in the making, the report’s release has coincided with heightened political and community awareness of the growing affordability crisis.

“Kevin Rudd’s initiative for a policy roundtable on housing affordability next Thursday is a significant event that demonstrates the growing national importance of this issue, and Peter Costello’s proposal of a government land audit is also welcome. There can be no more excuses for national policy failure in this area, it is too important for family wellbeing and for the economy,” said Mr Myers.

The report is also a prelude to the expected announcement of further measures to improve housing affordability from the State Government, that are expected to follow from a task force headed by the Deputy Premier.

“The State government is continuing to develop an overall approach to housing affordability and we hope this report assists them. We also call on the Australian government to play a leadership role and develop a national policy framework to meet community expectations”, said Mr Myers.