Almost regardless of the welfare system and market context, the changing housing landscapes in Western countries show a number of similar trends. Households are confronted with decreasing access to homeownership and social renting, and increased reliance on private renting in combination with growing housing shortages and housing affordability problems. This article reflects—from the perspectives of governance and politics—on recent housing tenure experiences in Australia and the Netherlands, which are also relevant to UK developments. Similar challenges, leading to increasing housing supply targets, do not necessarily elicit the same policy responses, as countries’ actions often follow their historical pathways. Australia maintains largely market-oriented policies, while the Netherlands has made a U-turn away from the market. With an increasingly fragmented and precarious lower end of the market, issues of income and wealth inequality are on the agenda.

The chapter provides a state-of-the-art review of regulation of the private rented sector focusing particularly price control and tenant security. It provides a brief context of the regulatory challenges in view of the key dimensions of private renting in comparison to other tenures. It details common typologies from first through to third-generation from the history of rent price control and rationales for intervention and effectiveness in terms of, inter alia, affordability and the recent urban affordability crisis. It considers theoretical dimensions as well as empirics, indicating potential costs and benefits of regulation which empirically are found to be mixed. These depend on housing market context, policy objectives and governance frameworks, as well as implementation details.

The literature on housing affordability has grown exponentially since Hulchanski’s (1995: 28) review of its origins and use, declaring that housing researchers should avoid using the term. The concept cannot be considered as a robust concept bringing structure and organisation to our observations. Since then, scholars have debated in great detail the definition and measurement of housing affordability as well as the prevalence of ‘housing affordability problems’ in particular countries. Amongst the many claims made are those about temporality (whether these problems are getting worse over time); spatiality (whether housing affordability problems are concentrated in particular areas) and distribution and duration of housing affordability problems (whether some population groups experience such problems to a greater extent than others, including duration over the life course or parts thereof). This paper, as think piece, takes a fresh look at the concept of housing affordability, which has persisted despite considerable contestation and scepticism about its use. It provides a critical and multi-disciplinary assessment of housing affordability in various dimensions: the social (housing as an opportunity to belong to community), the economic (housing as a commodity for investment and infrastructure), the legal (housing as social good/right, a decent place to live), the cultural (social expectations and cultural norms towards housing as a home), and the political (the distributional aspects of housing). It considers whether housing affordability focuses attention on housing typology and tenure changes rather than important temporal and spatial changes, such as in household income, employment conditions, wealth accumulation, intergenerational opportunities and urbanization.

The literature on housing affordability has grown rapidly since Hulchanski [1995, p. 489. The concept of housing affordability: six contemporary uses of the housing expenditure-to-income ratio. Housing Studies, 10(4), 471–491] declared that housing researchers should avoid using the term since it is not a robust concept and measurement often lacks validity. In the ensuing 24 years, however, scholars have continued to debate the definition and measurement of housing affordability as well as the prevalence and type of ‘housing affordability problems’ in various countries. This paper is a think piece which takes a fresh look at housing affordability as a concept which has persisted despite considerable contestation and scepticism about its use. It provides a critical and multi-disciplinary assessment of housing affordability starting with early conceptualization of the nexus between economic principles and social norms about housing and living standards to a reworking of housing affordability in the twenty-first century as an urban issue affecting lower and middle-income households in cities, as a consequence of the financialization of housing and urban restructuring. It argues that the housing affordability concept has been repurposed such that the focus is less on understanding housing expenditures in contributing to poverty and disadvantage within the domain of social policy and more on the urban policy challenges of growing inequities in access to urban resources. The paper highlights the challenges for urban policy in adopting and adapting rather than rejecting a multi-dimensional concept of housing affordability and consequently the importance of new ways of measuring urban housing affordability.