ABSTRACT

This chapter starts with a not on the recognition that housing affordability is an increasingly embedded element of housing experiences in growing cities of the Global North. Energy and mobility bills add to the costs of rent or a mortgage. There are immediate links between running costs, housing affordability and the low carbon housing agenda. The chapter integrates the ideas and concepts of housing affordability with those of carbon constraint through applying the concept of Lifetime Affordable Housing (LAH). In describing and demonstrating this concept, it is clear that policy efforts to maintain owner-occupied housing as a site of household wealth generation cannot be separated from the fate of interventions designed to ensure that housing is both affordable and sustainable. Following the global financial crisis (GFC), precipitated by sub-prime financing practices, a further distinction has been drawn between concepts of purchase affordability, repayment affordability and income affordability.