Young Australians struggling with rising rent costs have sent a brutal message to landlords.
On ABC’s Q+A program, media professional Jessie Stephens expressed the frustration of a generation and explained why rents are spiraling out of control.
“Rentals are so extraordinarily astronomical because you’re paying for someone’s mortgage,” she said.
‘Someone who may have several homes and you know you’ll never get (on the housing market), so you have no security, so you can be evicted at any time.’
Stephens also pointed out a major, but rarely mentioned, problem for tenants with school-aged children.
Media professional Jessie Stephens (pictured) expressed the frustration of a generation and explained why rents are spiraling out of control
“I have friends who are having their first or second child and are in places where they don’t know the school’s catchment area,” she said.
“How are you going to figure out where to send them to school if you don’t know where you’re going to live?”
She said rents are rising much faster than wages, compounding the problem.
“These rent increases are just suffocating and they’re not indexed by how much more we earn,” she said.
“So there’s a lot of resentment, I think.”
Stephens said the federal government could make many more homes available for rent by taxing vacant properties.
“The thing that makes the most sense to me is reading something about vacancy taxes and… the fact that we potentially have a million homes vacant,” she said.
“And then we have a whole lot of people who can’t find housing, it seems that math is not math to me.”
Jordie van den Berg, lawyer and outspoken critic of how difficult it is for young people to get up the real estate ladder, has also criticized the alarming pace of rent increases.
Before introducing Mr. Van den Berg, ABC News Breakfast host Lisa Millar read out an email from a landlord named Andrew.
“My mortgage payments on my investment property have more than doubled, insurance is up 25 percent this year,” Andrew wrote.
“The current call for rent increases and freezes will only exacerbate the problem, with many landlords, myself included, saying they will then sell their properties.”
But Mr van den Berg had no pity for Andrew. “You made a speculative investment in something that is a human right, and you lost.
“No investment is without risk… you shouldn’t be able to invest in a human right. (But) our current system allows that. You lost your investment (so) you pay,” he said.
‘In what other world – if your company loses a risky investment – can you pass it on to someone (other)?’
Jordie van den Berg (pictured right), lawyer and outspoken critic of how difficult it is for young people to get up the property ladder, has also criticized the alarming pace of rent increases.
It was revealed earlier this month that only one in 100 rental properties is affordable for essential workers.
Kasy Chambers, executive director of Anglicare Australia who conducted the snapshot, says the numbers help explain why essential industries are experiencing labor shortages, as workers cannot afford to live in areas where the shortage is greatest.
“Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on,” she said.
“They can’t afford to live in their own community.”
The study, conducted March 17, looked at 45,895 rental properties across the country and calculated how many were available for less than 30 percent of the pay rate for 16 categories of essential workers.
It turned out that educators, catering workers and meat packers could afford just 0.9 per cent of the available advertising in Australia that weekend.
Elderly care workers could pay 1.1 percent of the rent, nurses 1.5 percent and ambulance drivers 2.4 percent.
Even in regional Australia, where prices have historically been lower than urban centres, houses were generally unaffordable unless they were so remote that jobs were not widely available there.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers acknowledged that Australia has a huge housing problem and people need to be able to live close to where they work.
But he said the main problem was supply, which could be solved with the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund.
The bill stalled in the Senate, but the Greens have pledged to help pass the legislation if the government offered money to states and territories to limit rents and give tenants more rights.
“The whole motivation of our broad and ambitious housing agenda is about building more affordable housing,” he told reporters in Brisbane.
“We’re rolling out billions of dollars to support building more social housing and more affordable homes at the same time as we take some of the competitive pricing away from the high rents we’re seeing in the rental market.”
Tenants have been struggling for years with very high rents and few available homes. There are people lining up to view a rental property
The treasurer also berated the Greens for not supporting the government’s housing proposal.
Ms Chambers said the private housing market has failed low-income earners, with rental vacancy rates at a record low of 0.8 per cent, despite a record number of homes being built in the last decade.
“The best way to make renting more affordable is to build social and affordable housing,” she said.
“And we need tax reforms to put people who need homes, not investors, at the center of our system.”