Anglicare’s 2022 Rental Affordability Snapshot has been released, which surveyed over 45,000 rental listings across Australia and found that affordability has crashed to record lows.
According to the report, “it has never been harder to find an affordable rental” with “the number of advertisements for rental homes [having] plummeted by over a third – an unprecedented drop”. The national vacancy rate has also “fallen to record lows, halving from two percent in to one percent over the past year”.
Alarmingly, “only five rentals were affordable for a single person on JobSeeker out of more than 45,000 listings” across Australia. All are rooms in share houses.
“Couples out of work, single parents on Centrelink payments, and people on the Disability Support Pension all face a market where 0.1 percent of rentals are affordable, while a person on the Age Pension can afford 0.1 percent of listings”.
Moreover, “working people are hardly better off. A single person working full-time on the minimum wage will find that 1.6 percent of rentals are affordable”.
To add further insult to injury, Anglicare’s analysis includes Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA), as well as other available payments such as the Family Tax Benefit. And yet rental housing is still highly unaffordable. “Indeed, nationally, 46 percent of households that receive CRA are still in housing stress”, according to the report.
Anglicare concludes with the observation that “after thirteen years of producing the Rental Affordability Snapshot, it is clear that housing in Australia is broken”. Accordingly, “more and more people have been pushed into rental stress and homelessness”.
Anglicare also does not believe that “the solutions advanced by the developer lobby and many politicians – increasing land supply, relaxing planning laws, or reducing “red tape” – will make renting more affordable for people on low incomes”. Instead, “Australia’s Government must reclaim responsibility for
housing. The most important first step is to tackle the social housing shortfall”.
Sadly, I am expecting Australia’s rental crisis to worsen over the year ahead as immigration ramps-up. This will drive rental vacancies even lower and rents higher, punishing lower income Australians the most.
