Three bills to go before parliament confirm the Albanese government is restoring the Commonwealth to a leadership role on housing issues. But there are still gaps in its approach.
JobKeeper and the COVID Supplement to JobSeeker benefits will be gone in a week. The combined effect will be to halve some recipients’ incomes and the rent they can afford.
Even before the pandemic added to their financial stresses, a survey of international students suggests more than 20,000 were renting beds that are available to them for only certain hours.
Analysis of online listings on common online platforms shows even modest reductions in Airbnb listings increased supply of longer-term rentals. The result was lower local rents.
The impacts of the pandemic on jobs and incomes have been so widespread and severe that low-income households can afford very few properties despite rents falling in some parts of our capital cities.
High rents and insecurity are constant sources of financial and emotional stress for low-income women. They describe what it’s like struggling to survive and being one step away from being homeless.
Representatives of tenants and agents agree that leaving individuals to try to sort out rent reductions has created a mess. It calls for government to step in to look after both renters and landlords.
Rent strikers from Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood and fellow protesters gather outside Social Justices Tribunal Ontario in February, 2018. The group refused to pay rent after the landlord applied for an increase in rents.
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Platforms like Airbnb have been blamed for reducing the rental housing supply and pushing up rents. But investors seeking more security might now want to offer their properties to long-term renters.
Morrison government assistant minister Luke Howarth argues that finding jobs for people in social housing will help free up dwellings for other people on the waiting list.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Helping tenants find work supposedly creates a pathway into private rental housing, freeing up social housing for others. Private rental costs and the situations of many tenants make that unrealistic.
The Grattan Institute has condemned the National Rental Affordability Scheme as a $1 billion windfall to developers.
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Labor’s rental affordability scheme had its problems, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even when sharing a house, the average cost of rent means very little is left over from the Newstart allowance for food and living costs.
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Once rent is paid, having to live on only $14 a day doesn’t cover the costs of job seeking. The evidence of the need to increase Newstart and Rent Allowance is overwhelming.
Beds for rent: a shared room listed in Castlereagh Street, Sydney.
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Living in shared rooms is on the rise, because it’s more affordable – and more profitable for landlords. But it’s also a more precarious, often overcrowded and poorly regulated form of housing.
Labor leader Bill Shorten has announced a policy based on a solid principle of fairness, but with a second-best model of delivering social housing.
Julian Smith/AAP
Labor has made a substantial commitment to tackling inequality in Australia, but has taken a second-best approach to overcoming the huge shortfall of social housing.
Many tenants who lit up their apartments in the ‘We Live Here’ campaign see redevelopment of the Waterloo housing estate as a ploy to move them out of the area.
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Working-class residents of Waterloo have a history of resisting threats to their community. Many tenants see the redevelopment of public housing as state-led gentrification to squeeze them out.