Affordability in the Sydney housing market has become a key battleground in the national tax reform debate and a preoccupation of Millennials struggling to save for a deposit. But this noisy debate has so far ignored the impact of affordability on Sydney's Indigenous communities.

The perception that inner city suburbs like Redfern and Waterloo are Aboriginal hubs is increasingly at odds with reality as gentrification and soaring land values push out residents from lower socio-economic demographics. A large portion of Sydney's Indigenous community now lives in south-west and western Sydney; 31 per cent of the NSW urban Indigenous population lives in Blacktown alone, according to the Bureau of Statistics. However, even peripheral suburbs more than 30 kilometres from the CBD, including Blacktown, are considered to be unaffordable in the Rental Affordability Index.

Shelter NSW says the lack of access to affordable housing in cities has pushed the NSW public housing waiting list to about 60,000, with most waiting 10 years or more to be allocated a property. A study of the Indigenous community of Western Sydney, conducted via the Aboriginal Medical Service of Western Sydney, found that prohibitively high rents and long waiting periods have combined to produce homelessness, insecure housing, severe overcrowding and having to accept accommodation in poorly-maintained premises.

Primary homelessness – or lacking a roof over your head – is mostly seen in remote Indigenous communities. However, secondary homelessness – relying on transient and emergency shelter, couch-surfing, and boarding-houses – was reported in the study as a major issue for households that had fallen behind on rent, been evicted and faced an unsupportable wait for public housing. This tallies with the most recent census findings in which Indigenous people were 14 times more likely to be homeless than non-Indigenous Australians.