This report provides an overview of the major findings that have emerged out of the third AHURI-funded National Research Venture (NRV3), Housing Affordability for Lower Income Australians. It identifies the major risks and challenges in relation to Australia’s housing problem in the 21st century, as well as drawing out policy implications. The major conclusions of the three-year NRV3 research program. Housing affordability is a large and widespread problem. Housing affordability is a structural problem. The causes of affordability problems are complex and diverse. Major driving factors can be found both within the housing system and beyond it. Housing affordability problems are predicted to increase in the first half of the 21st century as a result of anticipated demographic and housing market changes. Affordability problems have specific spatial and cyclical dimensions.

The households most at risk of facing the multiple problems that arise from a lack of affordable housing are lower-income households in the private rental market. Housing markets have failed to provide an adequate supply of affordable housing for lower-income households. Individual households experience and address housing affordability problems in different ways. While housing provides shelter, it also influences a raft of non-shelter outcomes for individual households, such as workforce participation, access to jobs and services, family stability, and educational attainment. Declining affordability has implications for economic performance and labor market efficiency, social cohesion and polarization of cities, environmental considerations, and the creation and distribution of wealth through home ownership.