Spatial typology of the private rental housing market at neighbourhood scale: the case of South East Queensland, Australia

Abstract

Affordability is thus a keynote of our enquiry, the aim being to shed greater light on the concept by interrelating household incomes and rental outgoings in finegrain, small-scale local areas. This nexus is important to challenge blanket statements about apparent unaffordability which are made by politicians or the commentariat and take in entire cities or provinces. Factually inaccurate assertions are amplified in the media and can become unnecessarily unsettling for numbers of actual or would-be renters. The concept of affordability has otherwise attractedand troubled scholars. To illustrate, Wulff et al. (2009) and Yates et al. (2004) studied temporal change in the private rental market in Australia and highlighted the need for low-rent dwellings. More recently, Wulff et al. (2011) show that the level of access to affordable rental housing for low-income households in Australian cities reduced between 2001 and 2006 due to the absolute shortage of affordable housing, as well as an increase in housing displacement, despite overall growth of the private rental market by 11% during the same period. The concept of displacement is theoretically important and offers a route to progress in studies of broader affordability. It refers to the extent to which higher income households have accessed low-rent housing stock and thereby reduced such stock for access by low-income households (Wulff et al. 2011; HUD 2007). However, apart from general observations on the spatial correlation between housing (and, to a certain extent, private rental housing) and concentration of social disadvantage, there remains insufficient account of the spatial disparity between private rental housing supply and demand at neighbourhood scale, and whether such disparity is related, or has contributed to, social disadvantage and its spatial concentration.