Beyond supply: the case for social sustainability in Australian housing
This piece continues an ongoing series exploring human geography in practice, and how spatial thinking can help make sense of the systems shaping Australian cities, communities, and everyday life. Part 1 can be found here.
It is hard to open LinkedIn right now without finding a new post about housing supply and the delivery of affordable housing in Australia. And for good reason - it is one of the defining policy and social challenges facing Australian cities right now.
But I want to take a slightly different angle.
Australian housing policy has become very good at talking about supply, planning controls, density, and delivery timelines. Those debates have real technical depth behind them. What they do less well is account for the uneven social outcomes housing systems continue to produce. That is, who is being displaced, who is carrying climate risk, and who is gradually losing connection to the employment, infrastructure, and community life of the cities they live in.
That is the question social sustainability brings front and centre. Not just how much housing is being built, but whether the city being produced through those decisions is one focussed on people; where people can actually remain, participate, and belong.
Image credit: Liesl Codrington
The importance of nuanced data
One of the things I love most about this work is what data reveals when you look beneath the surface - the cross-correlations, the variations, the stories that aggregate numbers tend to smooth over. Australian housing affordability data is a good example. The headline figures rarely tell the whole story, and once you start disaggregating across household types, income groups, and different parts of a city, a very different picture tends to emerge.
The 2026 Anglicare Australia Rental Affordability Snapshot is a case in point. Across close to 49,000 rental listings nationally, there was just one property considered affordable for a person receiving JobSeeker, and none for Youth Allowance recipients. Even a couple on two minimum wage incomes could afford only 14.8% of listings nationwide.
Those figures tell a very different story to the broader narrative that supply increases will gradually improve affordability across the system. They point instead to where housing stress is being concentrated, who is carrying it most acutely, and how unevenly housing outcomes are actually being distributed.
The uneven impact of displacement
When lower-income households are pushed out of well-serviced areas, the standard policy response is to note the affordability pressure and point to supply pipelines. What that response does not capture is what displacement actually costs, not just to the individuals affected, but to the functioning of a city over time.
Longer commutes, higher transport costs, reduced access to employment, increasing social isolation, and forms of time poverty that accumulate incrementally and out of sight are outcomes that sit just outside the edge of most housing policy frameworks. They do not show up in dwelling approval numbers or median rent figures. But they are shaping how cities work, who can participate in them, and how resilient they are when conditions change.
These outcomes are rarely evenly spread. What appears diffuse at the city scale is often highly concentrated in particular places, for particular groups, over time. And once those patterns become spatially embedded, they begin shaping access to employment, infrastructure, services, and opportunity in ways that are difficult to reverse. Identifying them is not just an academic exercise - it shapes decisions about where housing is delivered, what conditions are attached to it, and what development briefs should actually be asking for from the outset.
Climate sits within this framing too, rather than alongside it. Extreme heat is already one of Australia's deadliest climate-related hazards, responsible for more deaths than bushfires, floods, and storms combined. People in older social housing stock, insecure rentals, or housing with poor thermal performance are experiencing that risk, during events that also strain access to healthcare, transport, support networks, and stable employment.
Social sustainability and climate resilience are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation about whether people can remain connected to the conditions they need to function, during everyday life and through periods of disruption.
Image credit: Liesl Codrington
Delivering housing that fits for people
The question we need to be asking is not just whether housing is being delivered, but whether it is being delivered in ways that allow people to remain meaningfully connected to the city - to employment, services, community infrastructure -and each other, over time and across changing conditions.
In practice, that changes the kinds of questions being asked at the development brief stage. It involves pushing back on feasibility framings that treat affordable housing as a cost to be minimised rather than infrastructure to be planned for. It means using spatial analysis to identify where displacement is already occurring and what individual development decisions are cumulatively producing across a city over time, and being more explicit about the social outcomes those decisions are reinforcing - not simply what is being delivered in numerical terms.
Planners have more influence over these questions than is often acknowledged publicly, particularly through development briefs, lease conditions, and land release processes. A lot of housing outcomes are effectively locked in well before public consultation begins, which is precisely where this kind of analytical work becomes most valuable.
The social frame matters
The recent comments from the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights urging Australia to do more to address poverty and housing are notable. Rights-based framing plays an important role, but it is not sufficient on its own if the frameworks guiding housing decisions continue to measure success primarily through dwelling numbers and median affordability ratios.
The Anglicare figures, the waitlist numbers, the PhD student who can't afford to live alone - these are not just data points about housing supply. They are data points about who is being left outside the city, and what that costs over time.
Because ultimately, housing decisions are never only about housing, they are about people. They shape who is able to remain connected to employment, infrastructure, community, and everyday urban life over time, particularly as cities become more unequal and climate pressures intensify.
Liesl is the founder of Vaere Social, a practice working at the intersection of human geography, urban planning, and social strategy. Housing, place, and social sustainability are questions that come up every day, in client work, in research, and in the cities she moves through.
If any of these questions resonate with work you’re currently grappling with, whether in planning, policy, housing, or community strategy, I’d be interested in continuing the conversation.
