Housing affordability

This brief paper looks at the problems of measuring and conceptualizing housing affordability and the uses to which such measures are put. I do not want to repeat the ground paved by King (1994), Bray (1995) and Landt and Bray (1995) in their papers which focused largely on the technical problems in the major measure of affordability used in Australia, the 25 or 30% housing cost to income benchmark This paper takes a different perspective and includes, first, a new method of measuring affordability not discussed in either of these papers, the budget standard method, and second, raises concerns that we have become trapped by the current affordability measures and we need to move on to new ways of thinking about affordability if we are to put affordable houses on the ground rather than debate how big the problem is and what are its causes. [Introduction