00:00Wow, so this is it?
00:03This is it, that's my intercom.
00:05Carrie-Anne Huddleston is settling in to her new affordable housing apartment in inner
00:09Sydney's Waterloo.
00:11The relief has been amazing.
00:13And then I had my family through and the tears, you know, the tears of joy.
00:20Like I do feel like I've won the lotto.
00:23That's how I feel.
00:24Faced with being unable to pay the city's skyrocketing rents, she'd found herself bouncing
00:29between the homes of family and friends.
00:31It has been so hard and so confronting and it's just the reality.
00:38Her new home is in an apartment block built and managed by community housing provider
00:42City West.
00:43Rents are capped at 30% of income to help people including care workers and older single
00:48women live there.
00:49This project has been partly made possible by a mandatory affordable housing contribution
00:54the City of Sydney imposes on new developments.
00:56Developers must either deliver affordable homes themselves or put money into a fund that
01:02does.
01:02Mandatory schemes are few and far between in Australia where most states rely on incentive
01:07programs that offer developers bonus floor space or extra stories in exchange for delivering
01:12affordable housing.
01:14But there are calls for that to change.
01:15The research shows that incentive schemes only work in certain markets and they are a very
01:22haphazard way of delivering affordable housing.
01:26Many housing advocates want mandatory affordable housing quotas in all new developments.
01:31They can be flexible, they can be site dependent but they need to be mandatory for them to work.
01:38I think the range needs to sit somewhere between 5% and 20%.
01:43But plenty of developers warn against it.
01:46More likely than not a mandatory position is going to make that product unfeasible and so
01:50therefore the housing project or apartment building won't even start.
01:54Advocates of mandatory schemes say there have been game changers in overseas cities like
01:59London and there's no reason they wouldn't work here.
02:01The one reform that would make a big difference in terms of delivering affordable housing hasn't
02:08seemed to be on the table.
02:09Something for policy makers to ponder.
Comments