Where can the average Canberra wage slave buy a house? If they want to avoid living on the city's fringes, Giralang is as close as it gets. Or Waramanga, if they prefer to be south-siders.
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And if they're prepared to junk the suburban dream of a backyard with chooks, they can probably afford to live as centrally as Civic or Braddon (albeit in a unit).
Last week, former long-serving ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope nominated Canberra's lack of affordable housing as his "greatest frustration or regret while chief minister".
He also said: "As we all know, there are virtually no houses in Canberra for sale for under $400,000 and very few available for under $500,000."
Yet there are ACT suburbs – almost one in three, according to April 2015 sales data – where most houses sell for under half a million dollars.
And the median unit price in almost five in six suburbs (among suburbs for which sales data is available) is within reach of the average Canberra worker.
So what do "within reach" and "average" mean? The average income of a full-time ACT worker is about $90,000 a year – a smidge above what a typical APS level 6 public servant earns. (And, in Canberra, more public servants are employed at executive level 1 than APS6.)
As for "within reach", home buyers generally risk falling into mortgage stress once their repayments exceed 30 per cent of their pre-tax income. So, as a rule of thumb, a property is "affordable" for the average Canberra worker if they are spending $2250 a month or less on mortgage repayments. (The data in the maps above assumes the buyer paid a 20 per cent deposit for a 30-year loan charging 5 per cent interest a year.)
Nontheless, as Stanhope says, a family relying on a single "average" income may well struggle to even afford a deposit. "It is insulting in the extreme to suggest to all those families that housing in Canberra is affordable."
In contrast, current Chief Minister Andrew Barr says Canberra is unlike Sydney or Melbourne and "affordability has been improving".
Who's right? Canberra homes are unquestionably harder to buy today than they were 25 years ago: the median house price is now five times the median income compared with three times back then.
However, Barr isn't necessarily wrong. When federal Treasurer Joe Hockey was asked earlier this month if housing in Sydney was affordable, he said one first needed "to get a good job that pays good money". Hockey was ridiculed for saying it but, on the point he made, Canberrans have a head start: fewer are unemployed and those with a job tend to be better paid (about 15 per cent higher than other Australian workers).
The challenge is to make available enough lower-priced properties to cater for low-income workers who will never earn "Joe Average" wages – a strategy that would undermine the value of existing properties, especially properties owned by investors. Is the government prepared to do that?
