Despite the plethora of rental research, a significant gap remains in understanding the relationship between rental housing and ‘transport disadvantage’.

This project analyses the changing spatial concentration of lower-income renter households in Melbourne and Sydney and connects this with changes in transport opportunity. Extending previous research beyond affordable housing to affordable living, it addresses the question: Do lower-income renters, in being constrained to live in more outer-urban sub-markets, face significantly greater risks of transport disadvantage thereby potentially weakening employment opportunity and other life chances?

The analysis shows in detail how, to varying degrees, all classes of public and private housing available to people on low incomes are over-represented in areas of poor to non-existent public transport accessibility. This clearly shows that a marked restructuring of the low-cost private rental housing market has taken place in Melbourne and Sydney over the last three decades or so and the effect has been to locate many lower-income households in areas where they suffer significant transport disadvantage. This process is likely to become more marked as the years progress as there is little likelihood of inner city areas becoming more affordable.

The necessary policy responses are complex and are a mix or housing and transport initiatives with the emphasis on the latter. The transport initiatives to tackle transport disadvantage should be based on recent research which shows that, in the ‘dispersed’ cities of North America and Australia, residential density is less important as a determinant of public transport performance than the design ‘philosophy’ of transport planners (Mees 2010; Stone & Mees 2010).

Instead of incremental investment in new services in a fundamentally inefficient system of wandering, irregular and disconnected bus routes, significant benefits in service quality and operational efficiency can be achieved if new investment is coupled with the re-organisation of existing services into a coherent ‘network’. Such networks are at the core of public transport success in Canada and Europe, and have been employed in parts of Perth, with clear evidence of improved efficiency and occupancy (Mees et al. 2010; Stone 2011).