City Futures is partnering with RMIT, Swinburne, UQ and UTas to conduct an  Inquiry into Affordable Housing Industry Capacity for AHURI.

We’re looking at Australia’s small but growing affordable housing industry – including community housing providers, their funders and other partners – and investigating the capacity of this industry to restructure the social housing system to better deliver housing for low-moderate income households.

The background to the Inquiry is the decline, over the past 20 years, of Australia’s social housing sector relative to the wider housing system, led by the decline in public housing provided by State and Territory governments. At the same time, community housing providers (CHPs) have grown ­and developed their functions beyond their traditional social housing role, and other actors – including some for-profit players – have begun to play a part in the financing, development and delivery of affordable housing.

Governments have looked to the emerging affordable housing industry to lever private sector finance, increase housing supply, effect urban renewal, innovate in the delivery of housing services and other programs for social inclusion, and achieve greater tenant satisfaction. To those ends, governments have taken steps to expand the affordable housing industry through transfers of housing from the public housing sector to CHPs; develop a CHP regulatory regime; and adjust housing subsidies (for example, restructuring CHP rents, and offering incentives to private investors in affordable housing under the National Rental Affordability Scheme).

As governments look to further restructure social housing, the question of the capacity of the affordability housing industry – and how properly to build it – is crucial.

For the Inquiry to be successful, we need industry stakeholders to be involved. In particular, we’ll be asking affordable housing industry stakeholders to participate in two major research projects over the next 12 months:

• Public housing transfers in Australia: recent programs and implications for industry development. State and territory governments have in the past carried out mostly small scale programs that have transferred public housing management and, in a few cases, assets to affordable housing industry landlords. Now, several large transfer programs are proposed or underway in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania. This research project will consider how these programs have addressed capacity constraints in their pace, processes and resourcing. The research will involve document analysis and modelling, and interviews and focus groups with housing providers involved in transfer programs and other stakeholders.
•  Building Australian affordable housing industry capacity: a review and a road map. This project will review the present structure and capacity of the Australian affordable housing industry, critically assess government and industry-led capacity-building strategies and initiatives, and develop support plans to guide the industry’s future development path, in the context of possible large-scale transfers of public housing to alternative providers. The research will involve a nationwide survey of capacity issues identified by affordable housing providers, an assessment of the current level of investment in capacity building, and interviews and focus groups with CHP executives and board directors, finance and development partners, training providers and regulators (to be conducted in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney). A review of leading practice in building organisational capacity will also be included.

We’re also asking stakeholders now for their views on on some of the basic concepts proposed for the Inquiry. By ‘affordable housing industry‘, we mean:

• non-government organisations that produce and manage housing subject to affordability requirements set by governments (registered community housing providers, Indigenous community housing organisations, for-profit providers), and
• the organisations that work with them (funders and regulators, industry and consumer groups, professional associations, financiers, developers, consultants, training providers and joint venture partners).

Have we left anyone out? Should we?

And by ‘capacity’, we mean the ability of the industry to effectively carry out some amount of housing provision and management, considered in terms of organisations’

• mission, vision and strategy;
• governance and leadership;
• finance;
• internal operations and management;
• program delivery and impact; and
• strategic relationships.

Are there different concepts or frameworks that we should consider?

Please contact the Inquiry’s City Futures research team to share your views, and see the Inquiry’s project page for more information and updates.