To Housing Minister Peter Tinley who gave the keynote, an affordable house meant one around $380,000, accessible to just about anyone employed and eligible for finance (though what you got for that varied wildly depending on location). But it did take the average household about 11 years to save a $20,000 deposit, he said. As Mr Tinley said, affordable rental housing was agreed to mean rent that cost no more than 30 per cent of a household's income. But he thought of this as the median household income, meaning such a household could afford up to around $480 a week rent. Mr Tinley in conversation with UDIA WA's Allison Hailes. Credit:David Broadway.

Shelter WA chief executive Michelle Mackenzie thinks about this differently. Affordable rent for a low-income household making $23,000 a year means $132 a week, or $288 per week for a household earning $50,000. Only one per cent of Perth's housing qualifies as affordable for these households. So 9000 people are sleeping rough or couch-surfing every night in WA and 14,000 people are on the social housing waitlist. Asked if there was going to be a rental housing crisis in two years, Ms Mackenzie said one was happening now.

“There are 7000 rental vacancies right now,” she said. “There are 14,000 people on the social housing waitlist. “That is a rental crisis.” To BGC residential executive general manager Troy Gorton, affordability came down to what people could afford to borrow. And UDIA chief executive Allison Hailes said it would be a mistake to assume recent declines in the property market addressed housing affordability. “The cost of buying a home is now more than 7.2 times the average household income and it’s rising," she said. But all agreed that looking at affordable housing from only one perspective, whether it be one of social justice or the economic perspective of the retail market, missed the big picture.

That splitting the debate into opposing viewpoints was failing to prompt real conversations about what Perth people need and want for their future suburbs. In reality, anyone with an ageing parent looking to downsize, a child approaching adulthood and looking to get a foothold in the market, or a divorced sibling needing to start over on their own, needed to sit up and take part. Nigel Hindmarsh, director of business development at the Department of Communities, said conversations about affordability, density and diversity had to expand into conversations about intergenerational living. “Do you want your parents to have downsizing options?” he said. “Do you want your kids to be able to buy in your area? Do you want their teacher to be able to buy in the area as well? And not everyone wants to own.” Ms Hailes said this was a real issue and it was not going to go away.

“If you have ageing parents or divorced siblings, you have a real interest," she said. Knowing population projections show 1.4 million additional people will call Perth home by 2050, the state government must plan to provide 35,000 affordable homes, despite Perth now undergoing one of its biggest ever property market slumps. Housing Minister Tinley said while it was encouraging to see a slight uptick in interstate migration as mining recovered, there remained a “legacy” oversupply of certain types of housing. “We have an interesting situation here in WA,” he said. “We’re good at planning in a boom but we’re not good at planning for a boom. Now, while we’re cash poor, we must get ready.”

Minister Tinley said Perth needed a solid understanding of what was meant by higher density housing options. “Never before in the history of this country have we seen housing affordability so central to the national agenda,” he said. “The banking royal commission is not going to provide an easier lending environment. “We can’t shy away from the debate ... there’s a conversation happening at the federal level about gearing. “We’ve made the single lot dwelling the single biggest deliverer of wealth in this country.

“It’s important that we are brave about this conversation. Loading “Why are we doing what we are doing? Why do we want to do Metronet? “Do we want to have zero homelessness? Do we want our kids to be part of a liveable city [that’s] economically attractive ... to be part of the biggest shift in world demand in human history? “Let’s switch the lights on. People will be looking for somewhere to nest in the Asian century ... a stable, well-thought-out community ... that is the ‘why’.”