Welfare agency Anglicare has hit home with another survey saying that the housing and rental crises are at their worst yet. Doing something about housing affordability has been neglected by every Government jurisdiction in this country.
Proportion to population, less Australians than ever before own a home – Where nearly 70 per cent of Australians were in some form of home ownership 35 years ago, now only about 30 per cent are in some form of home ownership.
The State housing waiting lists are growing longer and with no prospect of demand being met. Homelessness is also on the increase.
Anglicare said it examined more than 4,000 listings across Western Australia, the wealthiest jurisdiction in Australia, and the snapshot findings indicate that mortgage and rental stresses are getting worse.
Western Australia is responsible for 46 per cent of Australia’s mining exports and the State has the highest median income wage in the country so if housing and rental affordability are getting worse in Western then what hope is there for the rest of the nation?
Anglicare found that the rental median price in Perth rose from last year’s average of $450 per week to $520 week.
Anglicare random cluster survey found that less than one per cent of Perth’s rental market is affordable for people on pensions or benefits. And only five per cent of those on the minimum wage are within some reach of rental affordability.
Anglicare looked at 56,000 rental properties nationally during the weekend of April 13 and 14.
Anglicare executive director Kasey Chambers said that only one per cent of those properties would cost less than 30 per cent of the family weekly income.
“It is not a pretty picture, it is dreadful,” said Ms Chambers.
There is always a lot of talk centred around ‘housing stock’ and that more needs to be built but this is not the solution. Housing needs to be affordable. Less than 20 per cent of Australians own more than 70 per cent of Australia’s housing properties and they do so in order to exact a maximum profit. The elephant in the room is the market price but few politicians and no political party has the fortitude to raise this issue let alone address it. Parliamentarians instead are pushing lines like ‘more housing supply’, ‘more creative housing options and subsidies to convert vacant space’, ‘high density living.’
Even the WA Anglicare CEO Ian Carter has gone down this old line.
“There is so little (housing) available and with the levels of public housing in WA still being at very low levels of around four to four and a half per cent of total housing stock, there are not many opportunities out there for people to be living on an affordable basis,” said Mr Carter.
The Renters Alliance Lea Keenan said the answer is to make existing housing affordable.
“We only require small growths in housing stock in accordance with population growth but the houses are there but they are being subsumed by a greedy investors market the likes the nation has never before known.”
“What needs to be done is to regulate the housing market accordingly so it is not the case as it has become that fewer Australians own a home. The market has to be regulated to such an extent that rents are not sky-high and that property prices are not sky-high. This is basic common sense. We don’t have anyone on the political landscape talking the economic language that will address the problems. Therefore the crisis will continue to get much worse before there is any hope to turning it around.”
Mr Carter said that in Western Australia “it is clear we are at crisis point, with the amount of housing stock available for people on low and fixed incomes deteriorating rapidly.”
The crisis is changing the social landscape and demographics of the nation. Mr Carter said this is a “genuine crisis”, with affordable rentals even less accessible this year than last year.
The crude arguments include raising unemployment benefits and rental assistance payments, and yes these should happen, but these will not create neither housing affordability or substantive rental affordability.
The Australian Greens have suggested expanding the National Rental Affordability Scheme. They are also promoting a Canadian scheme to convert to rent empty properties and this would require subsidising the property owners to make this happen.
“None of all this is the answer to housing and rental affordability. This is all so-called creativity but it is piecemeal. Someone has to start talking about market prices and regulating them, then homes became a natural right for all,” said Ms Keenan.
“One thing for sure shelter is not a natural right for all people as the Universal Declaration wants us to believe, it is still aspirational. While the market economy works against the people in unfair advantage to the few then shelter is not a natural right.”
Read The Stringer’s March 23 article: Rising renters stress – 2/3rds of Australians live in rent
https://thestringer.com.au/rising-renters-stress-23rds-of-australians-live-in-rent/#.UX49GLWnCaU
The elephant in the room is rampant population growth. it is only because of the Lib/Lab party’s penchant for unsustainable growth (1048 people per day arrive in this country) that the supply of housing can’t keep up with demand. That is the true cause of unaffordable housing. You won’t hear too many politicians in power saying that, though, as population growth gives them an easy way of obtaining economic growth (but per capita GDP is actually going down).