While the headlines are filled with terrified portents about the slowdown in the housing market, the pointy end of Australia’s decision to treat housing like a winner-take-all casino game is happening to those who aren’t buying at all. Specifically, renters. More specifically, renters on government benefits.
If you’re a person eking out an existence on the age pension, disability pension, parenting payment, Newstart or Youth Allowance, you already know that the private rental market is impossibly expensive. What you might not have noticed is that, technically, you now have zero options for affordable shelter.
Fortunately the charity Anglicare have crunched the numbers for their annual Rental Availability Snapshot and worked out just how screwed you are.
By comparing what properties were available nationwide in March and the amounts available under the various benefits, and using the rubric that “affordable” means no more that 30 per cent of one’s income used on housing, they established that someone on the aged pension had a choice of 2700 places out of the 66,000 properties up for rent.
Spoiler: there are more than 2700 aged pensioners in Australia.
And they had it good compared with everyone else. Single parent with two kids? 413 properties are within your budget. Getting a disability payment? Anglicare reckons you have a shot at a mere 406 properties in Australia. On Newstart? Three. On Youth Allowance? There were two – TWO – properties in your price range in the entire country.
Not even JT makes that sound reasonable.
And given that all these people were competing with folks not on benefits in a market where landlords prefer their tenants gainfully employed… yeah, none of them were going to get their application accepted.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that this assumes that anything above 30 per cent of one’s income is unaffordable outlay on rent, which is definitely true but also inarguably less than what a lot of people in the larger cities are forking out.
And of course thirty per cent of one’s income looks very different to a single parent or a pensioner than it does to a person house sharing with a bunch of mates.
Even so: this either needs to be addressed with a massive refocus on affordable public housing (of the sort that state governments have been spending the last few decades merrily selling off) or, at the very least, greater availability of tents and pieces of corrugated iron.