The Affordable Housing Challenge is an Initiative of Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation established in 2017 that encourages land owners to build affordable housing on underutilised land close to amenities.
**Enquiries for the 2024 Affordable Housing Challenge have closed. Please ensure you are subscribed to be notified about future grant opportunities.**
2024 Affordable Housing Challenge
This year's Affordable Housing Challenge will again focus on increasing affordable housing through the development of underutilised land, building or strata. The Challenge is intended to encourage a scalable and replicable solution to providing affordable housing.
Eligible land holders can be from the not-for-profit sector, including faith-based organisations, government land holders or private land holders. Land holders who are not charities must partner with an Eligible Organisation.
In this Challenge, we define affordable housing as housing for very low, low and moderate income households as defined in the Planning and Environment Act 1987 (Vic).
Projects selected within our Affordable Housing Challenges aim to demonstrate best practice in terms of a well located site (near services, amenities, public transport etc) and energy efficient design to enable lower recurrent costs and energy emissions.
We note that groups urgently requiring affordable housing include young people, older women and people with complex needs and applications tailored to these groups will be well-received.
Grants
The 2024 Affordable Housing Challenge has three types of grants:
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Feasibility grants
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Pre-development recoverable grants
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Capital works grants
1. Feasibility grants - Individual grants between $30,000 - $50,000
These grants are for eligible organisations to undertake a feasibility study to develop affordable housing on underutilised land in Greater Melbourne.
Feasibility studies allow organisations to analyse parts of a potential capital works development, and could include:
2. Pre-development recoverable grants - Individual grants up to $100,000
Pre-development funding is available to applicants to prepare government funding requests, including undertaking pre-development work on particular sites.
Applicants should already have undertaken a feasibility study, and be close to submitting a full funding request to a government entity within a year.
The funding will allow the applicants to undertake a thorough investigation of potential projects, allowing robust applications to be submitted to government entities.
Note that these are recoverable grants; successful applicants will be expected to return the funding if they are successful with government funding.
3. Capital grants - Individual grants up to $500,000
Capital works grants are for eligible landowners or developers who have already undertaken feasibility surveys and are committed to building affordable housing on existing land.
Potential for up to $1 million in impact investment funding.