Recognising the importance of affordable housing to social wellbeing and economic productivity, Australian governments are seeking innovative ways of supplying appropriately diverse forms of additional affordable housing. To help address this policy interest, the study has two main components:

• It examines how recently completed affordable housing development projects across Australia have worked. Six carefully selected projects located in different urban and regional markets are used as case studies to ascertain how affordable housing project costs, revenues and subsidies interact to produce affordable housing.
• Using the data collected, an interactive modelling tool is developed. The ‘Affordable Housing Assessment Tool’ is designed to calculate the impact of different cost and subsidy parameters on housing affordability for the various types of lower income households in need of affordable housing.