Housing Terms Glossary
In this glossary, we aim to make it easy to understand what we here at TUA mean by these terms, and maybe introduce you to some innovative urban ideas. Keep this guide bookmarked, and you’ll be able to decipher any urbanist gibberish in no time.
Accommodation Supplement: A non-recoverable weekly payment to people who are not in public housing, to assist them with their rent, board, or the cost of owning a home.
Affordable housing: A home that a household could occupy for less than 30% of their pre-tax household income, as either renting or purchasing. This includes dwellings available through a housing assistance program that provides housing below market rent, i.e., council provided housing, Kāinga Ora housing. Affordable housing includes Assisted Housing.
Assisted housing: A category on the housing continuum that includes emergency and transitional housing. This is synonymous with Supported Housing.
Housing adequacy: A vision for, or condition of, housing that is habitable, affordable, accessible, secure and culturally appropriate, as defined by the UN Habitat goals and adopted by the NZ Human Rights Commission. This includes the concept of sustainable housing that is able to meet the needs of current and future households.
Housing choice: The revealed preferences through people’s actual housing market decisions and trade-off behaviour. Housing choice is influenced by the limitations and constraints of the actual housing environment and market conditions people find themselves in.
Housing continuum: A linear spectrum that categorises households into cohorts of people, and identifies a range of housing tenures available, on the basis of cost, affordability and/or ownership and management. This can be a visual tool for understanding housing delivery and intervention, illustrating the pathway from insecure housing (homelessness) through to private rental and home ownership.
Housing demand: The willingness and ability to purchase a house, or take on another housing tenure. Demand for housing is assessed at national and regional levels to ensure that public housing is provided in the areas that need it the most.
Housing ecosystem: An interrelated system that encompasses the affordability continuum, its cohorts, the housing tenures and models that exist in New Zealand and internationally.
Housing model: A comprehensive way to deliver a housing solution. This includes a clear resident formation and participation method, financial, legal and tenure structures, and design, management and governance processes.
Housing mobility: The movement of people due to a change in their usual place of residence. Housing mobility can occur due to changes in tenure arrangements, or moving from one geographic location to another for various housing, employment or lifestyle reasons.
Housing need: The number and type of houses required, related to household size and population growth. A household is in housing need if its housing falls below at least one of the adequacy, affordability or suitability standards and it would have to spend 30 per cent or more of its total before-tax income to pay a median rent.
Housing preferences: The relative attractiveness of housing, with an aspirational and long-term orientation. Preference is a relatively unconstrained vision of what someone seeks in a house, including longer-term aspirations and desires.
Housing product: A defined legal, financial and tenure structure for housing that forms part of a housing model.
Housing right/right to housing: The international standard, first recognised in 1948 by the United Nations, acknowledging access to adequate housing as a human right, not a commodity. We all have the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity.
Housing supply: The total number of housing units in a given area.
Housing tenure: The nature of a person’s or household’s legal right to occupy a dwelling.
These legal rights range across rights of use, control and disposal. Rental and home ownership are the most common tenure types in New Zealand.
- Land tenure: The legal relationship that describes how people, as individuals or groups, own or ‘hold’ land (legal or customary).
- Rental tenure: A housing tenure which offers someone who does not own the property the right to occupy a dwelling. Rental tenants agree to pay a mutually agreed rent to the owner periodically. This includes social rental, affordable rental and market rental.
- Security of tenure: A legal arrangement that determines the guaranteed length or extent of housing tenure. Secure housing tenure allows residents to live in their home (or sometimes an equivalent home) for as long as they want to, whether it is rented or owned.
Income Related Rent (IRR): IRR is a rent that is subsidised by the government to make accommodation affordable for low-income households. For qualifying households, an IRR equates to 25% of their net household income, and the government pays the difference up to the market rental rate.
Intermediate housing: The market of private sector renter households with at least one member in paid employment who are unable to affordably (“using no more than 30% of their gross household income to service mortgage expenses) purchase a dwelling at the lower quartile house sale price”. This cohort generally does not qualify for social housing, and struggles to afford market rent. Also called the Third Sector.
Licence to Occupy: A short-term right to occupy or use a property for a particular purpose, with no particular right to exclusive occupation or ownership of the land or facilities. Licences to Occupy are common with retirement villages and developments on Māori land.
Housing Models
Baugruppen: Literally, ‘building groups’, this term describes smaller self-organised housing projects, as separate from larger, more mainstream development entities. Baugruppen focuses on group self-build or group-based design processes that align housing design to clear community needs and housing is allocated to a predetermined pool of residents (usually buyers). Baugruppen is typically high density housing; multi-storey & multi family buildings such as an apartment complex.
Build-to-rent: A property development model that delivers long-term investment and returns, from purpose-built rental housing managed by a single ownership entity. Build-to-Rent provides longer-term security of tenure for rental tenants than is generally delivered by market rentals.
Cohousing: An intentional clustering of private homes, with some common facilities and shared neighbourhood life. Cohousing communities are co-developed & co-designed by future residents, then managed and operated by the residents, supported by a hierarchy-free decision-making process. This term is sometimes misunderstood and used to describe the broader range of Community-focused Housing models. While they both build on the concept of collaboration and purpose-built housing (built for residents, by the residents), cohousing differs from Baugruppen by density; where Baugruppen is high-density, cohousing is typically low to mid-density.
Coliving: A commercially operated form of build-to-rent housing, that offers a curated lifestyle, communal spaces, flexible tenure, and often, reduced private space. This term is sometimes misunderstood and used to describe the broader range of Community-focused Housing models.
Community-focused Housing (CFH): Describes a range of housing models that contribute to greater economic, environmental, social and cultural wellbeing of current and future generations. CFH models include Cooperatives, Cohousing, Community Land Trusts, Property Collectives and Coliving.
Community Housing Provider (CHP): A not-for-profit organisation that provides safe, secure, affordable and appropriate rental housing. These organisations provide, and largely self-fund, housing products and programmes for low-income households.
Community-led housing (CLH): A housing initiative where local people come together to solve housing problems in their community, with the purpose of providing affordable homes through construction, repairs and property management. “Community-led housing” is a term commonly used in the UK. Under this umbrella, other community or group schemes such as cooperative housing, cohousing, community land trusts, tenant management organisations, community self-build (Baugruppen) schemes, and self-help housing groups are also covered. Key components include community engagement, formal management and community benefits. Note: the group does not necessarily need to pick up a hammer themselves but depending on the skillset of the community group, some may do! The group will have an ongoing role in terms of formal ownership, management or stewardship of the homes and this is to ensure the benefits to the local area/specified community are protected. This definition was inspired by the work of Louise Crabtree et al.
Collective Tenure Models: A community sharing land access rights to benefit from economies of scale during production, to spread risk and to avoid the costs of enforcing individual property rights.
Community Land Trusts (CLT): A shared-ownership tenure model, where ownership of the land and house are separated to provide retained affordability. Occupiers own (or rent) their home but not the land: a long-term ground lease is established for the land. A CLT acquires and manages land with the intention of holding it in trust and developing affordable housing and other community amenities.
Emergency housing: Temporary accommodation (from overnight to 12 weeks) and support for households who have an urgent need for accommodation, because they have nowhere else to stay or are unable to reside in their usual residence. This is part of the Supported Housing category.
Housing cooperative: A form of shared ownership where residents purchase shares in a corporation. In this arrangement, the corporation is the development entity and retains ownership of either the land and housing, or just the housing (with a lease over the land). The residents purchase shares in the corporation, with each share corresponding to a dwelling unit or proportion of the overall roughly equivalent to a single dwelling. Cooperatives can be developed on a single site, or across various (scattered) sites.
- Equity cooperative: This is an umbrella term to refer collectively to both limited and market equity cooperatives, a form of shared ownership where residents purchase shares in a corporation, which correspond to a dwelling unit or proportion of the overall development.
- Equity cooperative: This is an umbrella term to refer collectively to both limited and market equity cooperatives, a form of shared ownership where residents purchase shares in a corporation, which correspond to a dwelling unit or proportion of the overall development.
- Rental cooperative: A form of shared ownership where residents purchase nominal shares in a corporation that correspond to a dwelling unit that residents rent or lease from the cooperative.
- Limited equity cooperative: Where share prices are set by a formula, usually related to average median income, and not by the market, in order to retain affordability.
Intentional communities (IC): A group of people who live together or share common facilities and who regularly associate with each other on the basis of explicit common values. Some IC are established as cooperatives as the cooperative principles can align well with IC principles.
Mutual housing / Mutual Housing Associations: A housing model which offers legal membership to tenants, service users and possibly employees, and takes active steps to promote membership and involve members in governance and decision-making. Note: The terms ‘mutual housing association’ and ‘cooperative’ are used interchangeably in the UK, under the umbrella term ‘mutual housing sector’, which can confuse discussion.
Papakāinga: A group of houses developed as a community on collectively-owned Māori land, to provide housing for people of all ages that have ancestral connections to the land. In a planning context, papakāinga is understood as – any activity which the owners of land held under Te Ture Whenua Māori Act 1993, that is in the traditional rohe of those tangata whenua, shall seek to undertake on their land to sustain themselves. Papakāinga may include (but not be limited to) residential, social, cultural, economic, conservation and recreation activities, marae, wāhi tapu and urupā.
Participatory housing approaches: Housing providers and developments which offer future residents the opportunity to participate in the planning, design and development process of housing.
Public housing: Rental properties owned (or leased) and managed by the state, Kāinga Ora (formerly HNZ), or a Community Housing Provider, that can be tenanted by people who are eligible for public housing. Also known as social housing or state housing (specifically housing provided by the state).
Progressive ownership: A collection of housing models which offer alternative entry into home ownership by reducing the financial burden of entry associated with market home ownership. Progressive Ownership can be categorised as subsidy retention or shared appreciation. This is an umbrella term which includes shared equity and rent-to-own.
- Rent-to-own: A housing model administered by a third party, Trust, or corporation where tenants rent for a predetermined period (e.g. 5 years), before they are offered the opportunity to wholly or partially purchase the property at or below market value. Restrictions are usually placed on the property to ensure affordability is retained for future households. This is a type of Progressive Ownership.
- Shared equity: A housing tenure arranged between a Trust, Incorporation and/or third party, and an individual household, that share in the ownership and cost of housing, at a price point the household can afford. Shared Equity can also be called ‘Co-Ownership’ or ‘Shared Ownership’. This is a type of Progressive Ownership.
Property collectives: A joint venture which allows groups of people to collectively design, finance and develop a series of homes. At the completion of the development, homes are generally owned individually by households in the joint venture, with no on-going collective responsibility.
Self-organised housing models: Housing development driven by a group of individuals acting together on the basis of a shared interest or objective. Note: Self-organised housing models can include various types of cooperatives, community land trusts, and intentional communities.
Supported housing: A support programme that provides short-term subsidised housing and related support services for households with acute housing needs. Supported housing aims to help people gain safe and secure housing and offers them support to gain independence in their community. This category on the housing continuum includes emergency and transitional housing, and is sometimes referred to as Assisted Housing.
Transitional housing: Short-term housing (12 weeks on average) and social services for people with an immediate housing need while support is put in place to transition them into sustainable public or private housing on a long-term basis. This is part of the Supported Housing category.
Wāhi Kāinga: A concept derived from traditional Māori society, where collective living was focused on extended whānau and hapū based collectivism and founded on whakapapa. It is a model that adopts principles of Māori living, but is not limited to Māori people, and does not have to be associated with Māori land.
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