You're not alone as you ponder that puzzle, one the experts can't agree on, let alone if there even is a problem.

We're told the ACT remains the most affordable place in Australia to buy a home – but you won't agree with that if you're in a lower paid job and seem destined to remain in the rental rat-race.

Today, the affordable new housing in Canberra is defined as a "unit" – and aren't there lots of them springing up.

One approach to improving housing affordability might be to build more and more apartments, even though they were once associated with inner-city living.

A key factor in housing affordability is land supply – and here opinions vary widely on whether the rate of land release is keeping up.

Also in the sometimes baffling mix are historically low interest rates, the impact of stamp duty and the Mr Fluffy saga – most of the owners of Mr Fluffy houses are cashed up, bidding and buying, putting pressure on prices.

And the elephant in the room is immigration: with almost static population growth, Australia relies on migrants to swell our ranks and generate economic growth. You will not hear the major political parties question immigration levels or the notion of constant growth to create more jobs for school leavers – and expand our cities.

In Canberra, good houses are selling well whereas Sydney and Melbourne appear to be in the grip of a housing price bubble.

Figures released on Tuesday show Canberra recorded the second highest jump in residential property values in the March quarter. And the ACT's residential property prices have risen by 3 per cent compared withthe same time last year, the fourth-highest jump among Australian capital cities.

That's good news for home owners worried about the impact of public service cuts, and bad news if you're saving for a deposit.

The housing affordability conundrum is being examined by yet another federal parliamentary inquiry. The House of Representatives standing committee on economics began its hearings on Friday, with appearances by officials from several government departments.

However, the task before the MPs is problematic – such inquiries are held every few years, the government of the day routinely ignores the recommendations, house prices keep rising.

In Canberra, the ACT Government routinely gets blamed for high house prices, with complaints about the lack of land releases.

The government is phasing out stamp duty, albeit over a longer time period than the Chief Minister's promised two decades, but the changes to the first-home owners scheme are a blow to buyers. The grant no longer applies for purchase of established properties and it will be reduced during the next two years.

Chief Minister Andrew Barr concedes housing is always a complex issue. "If prices go up, homeowners are happy. If they go down, then first-home buyers are happy," he says.

"What the ACT Government looks to achieve are steady and stable increases in house prices that more closely reflect income increases across the territory. The government uses the levers available, primarily the release of land, to ensure there is enough supply for new homes without flooding the market."

Barr says house prices in the ACT have remained relatively steady in the past few years, despite significant shifts in the employment profile through APS jobs cuts.

"Affordability is actually comparatively high, but this is largely due to the relatively higher incomes enjoyed in Canberra," he says. "Importantly, we aren't seeing the ludicrous prices the residents of Sydney and Melbourne face trying to purchase properties close to the CBD.

"One of the keys to having good housing affordability is through innovation and diversity in land release. "Having a selection of standalone houses, townhouses and apartments in areas across the city provides options to all sorts of buyers. This includes new developments in the suburban areas of Molonglo, Lawson and Riverview, and urban infill in areas like the CBD, NewActon and the Kingston Foreshore. The ACT Government will continue to seek diversity in our land release program to ensure points of entry for all buyers."

A person who knows this issue well is Neil Evans, ACT/Southern NSW executive director of the Housing Industry Association.

His organisation applauds the ACT government's moves to remove stamp duty but is concerned about the overall level of fees, levies, taxes and charges that apply to new houses and land packages.

Evans says another ACT-specific factor is costs are being pushed up by the lack of land releases.

"The numbers are just not high enough," he says. "We've always got more people wanting to go to ballot and buy the land, probably in some cases 50 to 60 per cent more people wanting the land that's available in some of these ballots.

"If we had more land coming out on to the market that was ready to build on and the numbers were more closely tied to prospective purchases, we wouldn't have three or four people scrabbling to buy the same block of land."

It's a tricky balancing act for the ACT government.

"It's a knife edge," Evans says. "If they develop too much, they're going to hold the cost for too long. If they develop too little, the consumers are paying higher than what's needed. So to get that fine line in the middle where supply is meeting demand is tricky and they have been trying to do that, but I think they could do a little bit better."

Another person with his finger on the pulse of the housing market is Real Estate Institute ACT chief executive Ron Bell.

He says a key problem in Canberra is the lack of land for detached housing. "We simply don't have enough stock to provide choice for people. The drip feeding of land going out gives you the impression it's a revenue chase," he says.

Bell says there are far too many apartments going up.

"The planners in the new suburbs are almost dictating the fact that you've got to have a massive amount of medium-density housing along with detached housing in the outer suburbs and that just seems to be wrong to me," he says. "The new suburb of Denman will be about 2500 dwellings – half of those have to be apartments and townhouses and that's ridiculous, I mean, that is way down in the Molonglo Valley."

He says Canberra is not in a housing price bubble.

"In April 2014, the median selling price in Canberra was $555,000 and rent was $430 a week for a modest three-bedroom home. In May 2015, the medium price has jumped by a massive $12,000 to $567,000 and rents have dropped by $6.

"We're still the most affordable state or territory in Australia but that's predominantly because our disposable income [per household] is the highest and therefore there is a distortion. Our medium price obviously is well behind Sydney now but at one stage there wasn't a huge difference in the median selling prices, it might have been $100,000 and now it's probably $400,000 or $500,000," Bell says.

"If you've got much higher income then obviously your affordability to be able to go out and purchase is far greater than anybody else around the place but that is a distortion if you want to make comparisons against like-minded families or whatever. It just seems to not be the way to calculate [housing affordability] to me but the economists do it that way and therefore who am I. I don't have a degree in economics to start saying, I don't think we're doing this right."

The Property Council wants the ACT government to keep its promise to reduce stamp duty as compensation for rate increases.

Prominent property developer Bob Winnel says the ACT government's land release strategy threatens to leave the 20 per cent of people on lower incomes out of the housing market. The government's failure to deliver sufficient land to meet demand was pushing up prices.

He made his comments at a seminar on housing affordability recently where a former senior Treasury official, Khalid Ahmed, released figures about what he assessed as highly inflated prices paid for land in recent government land releases.

There is concern the auction at Lawson pitched prices too high, while the ballot for land at Moncrieff produced a more reasonable result.

Ahmed said Molonglo residents paid about $100,000 more per block than the real economic value of their land, in an overheated market, artificially inflated by the way the Land Development Agency designed its first auction. It sold just 100 blocks, with 1600 bidders, and the inflated prices had set the price for the entire suburb.

Agency deputy chief executive Dan Stewart rejected claims the agency was constraining supply, saying 19,500 sites had been released during the past five years compared with 11,000 in the previous five.

University of Canberra economist Ben Phillips also rejected the idea that Canberra was under-supplied, saying there had been a big increase in the number of new homes on the market, from about 2500 a year 15 years ago, to 5000 a year more recently.

The seminar was organised by Jon Stanhope who said he was mystified about what had happened with an affordable housing action plan developed when he was Chief Minister. This had recommended a year's supply of land always be development-ready.

He is worried about people being priced out of free-standing homes which had become "the great Australian pipe dream" as affordable housing was redefined as apartment living. He nominates the issue of housing affordability, and land planning and supply as his greatest frustration or regret as Chief Minister.

ACTCOSS is advocating for major change to help lower-income families who are locked out of buying a house. Director Susan Helyar says the rise in property prices means it is very hard for many families to break into the property market.

"Rents are going up in line with property values rising but for people on income support payments and those in minimum wage work, their incomes aren't going up at the same rate," she says. "That's been one of ACTCOSS's key areas of advocacy, that we need a completely different product in the purchasing market, products that are under $150,000.

"You do that by changing planning arrangements and making more flexible planning arrangements, by changing the size of properties, so you have smaller properties and you focus instead on good, compact design, not smaller properties that are horrible to live in and impossible to heat and keep cool.

"We need properties that are well-designed, energy-efficient and at a cost that actually reflects the incomes of people who have been locked out of the housing market, either to buy or rent."

She says negative gearing needs to be re-examined as part of an overhaul of the tax settings. "It is supporting people who want to buy more than one home, it's actually not supporting people who just want to get a foothold in the market," she says.

"The community recognises that housing affordability is reaching such a crisis point that there's an appetite for conversation, for everything to be put on the table. Politicians need to show some courage and the community is open to that conversation."

Zed Seselja, a former ACT opposition leader and now an ACT senator, says housing became unaffordable when Stanhope was Chief Minister.

"He was the Chief Minister who put in place severe restrictions on the way we do land release; there is too much government interference leading to very unaffordable housing for first home buyers in Canberra," he says

"What needs to happen is proper forward planning where we have more land ready to come on the market than is necessary and that involves some forward infrastructure spend and that allows governments to properly respond to demand rather than constantly playing catch up as they have been doing for at least the last decade or more."

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