What Is Affordable Housing, and Why It Matters More Than Ever
Under a Roof exists because of one belief: everyone deserves a safe, secure place to live, and right now, a lot of people don't have one. "Affordable housing" is the phrase we reach for to describe that gap, but it gets used so often, for so many different things, that it's worth actually defining before talking about how to fix it.
What affordable housing actually means
There are two related ideas hiding inside the phrase. The first is housing affordability in general: whether typical incomes in an area can reasonably cover typical rents or mortgage repayments, usually benchmarked around spending no more than 30% of a household's income on housing before it's considered housing stress. The second is affordable housing as a specific category of homes: dwellings delivered below market rate, often through community housing providers, government programs, or planning requirements on new developments, targeted at people who can't be adequately housed by the private market at all. A city can have relatively affordable market rents and still have a severe shortage of the second kind, and vice versa. Both matter, but they need different solutions.
Why it matters this much right now
The numbers have moved in the wrong direction. The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council's 2025 State of the Housing System report found the median Australian household now needs 33.1% of its income just to rent, a record high, and that saving a 20% deposit takes an average of 11.2 years. On supply, the Council forecasts Australia will fall roughly 262,000 dwellings short of the 1.2 million home Housing Accord target by mid-2029.
Behind those figures are the people we work with every day: families choosing between rent and groceries, workers priced out of the suburbs they grew up in, and people who can't leave an unsafe home because there's nowhere else affordable to go. Stable housing isn't a nice-to-have sitting alongside health, education, and employment. It's the foundation those things get built on, which is exactly why we lead with Housing First in everything we do.
Our take: it's a supply problem and a security problem
Price is only half the story. A home that's affordable this year but disappears at the next lease renewal, or the day the owner decides to sell, hasn't actually solved anything for the family living in it. Real affordability needs security of tenure alongside a fair price: housing that's designed, financed, and owned in a way that keeps it affordable for years or decades, not just at the moment someone signs the lease. That's a big part of why we focus on partnering with developers and councils to create new housing stock built to stay affordable long term, rather than chasing whatever happens to be cheap today.
What we think would actually move the needle
None of this has one fix, but a few things consistently show up wherever progress is being made: building meaningfully more social and affordable housing directly, rather than hoping general market supply eventually trickles down; faster, less adversarial planning approvals so affordable projects aren't stuck behind the same queue as everything else; stronger baseline protections for renters, so a good home doesn't come with constant insecurity attached; and delivery models, like community housing providers and long-term partnerships with councils and developers, that are built from the start to keep homes affordable rather than treating affordability as a temporary condition.
We can't solve a national housing shortfall alone, and we don't pretend to. But every partnership we form with a developer or council, and every dollar given to Under a Roof, goes toward exactly this: more homes that stay affordable, for longer, for the people who need them most. If that's a mission you want behind, our giving page shows exactly where the money goes.
If you want to see the numbers behind this laid out visually, or check your own rent or mortgage against the 30% affordability benchmark, we built a simple calculator for exactly that on our affordable housing page.