Students living in ‘dodgy’ housing protest rental crisis
Image: Photo: Christine Lai.
By CHRISTINE LAI
Students from the GET A ROOM: Students for Affordable Housing campaign held a ‘rally swarm’ in the CBD on Friday evening, demanding an end to the housing crisis.
Greens candidate for Summer Hill Izabella Antoniou addressed the event attendees, condemning the million dollar profits that landlords have accumulated throughout the housing crisis while renters like herself were having to pay hiked rents and fees.
Antoniou criticised the “dodgy landlords and big property developers reigning supreme” over NSW, while the rest of the population were experiencing a “crisis point”.
“Over the past two years, community organisations have seen a 45% increase of people seeking their services, on the fringe of homelessness. Women over 55 are the group most likely to be unhoused these days…There is no stability, no security, no power, enough is enough”, she said.
UNSW Education Officer Cherish Kuehlmann echoed Antoniou’s sentiment, denouncing the state of homes that had been due to “failures by landlords to fix them”.
“Students are being forced into dodgy situations, sharing rooms with up to 6 people, paying up to a fortune to live in damp, mouldy apartments filled with cockroaches”, she said.
Kuehlmann stated that the housing crisis could be avoided if the government seized the over 100,000 properties lying vacant in Greater Sydney and the 1 in 3 properties lying vacant in Millers Point to be used for social and public housing.
UNSW student Theo Mongos criticised the dire rental situation which has left him paying $100 more a week in rent for his sharehouse than he was this time last year.
“There are single-bedroom apartments going for $600 a week. Rents in Sydney have gone up by an average of 30% in the last year meanwhile corporations are having a profitable bonanza, with the big 4 banks earning $28 billion in profits last year”, Mongos said.
Mongos criticised RBA Head Philip Lowe for raising interest rates 10 consecutive times since May last year, calling him the “same Philip Lowe who gets off scot free while families are having to raise their kids in caravan parks, while students are being forced to live out of their car”.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, vacancy rates have gone below 1 per cent (at its lowest point on record in January at 0.8 per cent) while rents have risen to the highest point over the past decade.
Renters experiencing housing stress at record rates
A new research report on Queensland’s housing crisis, titled “A blueprint to tackle Queensland’s housing crisis” has found that rents have risen in Queensland at faster rates than in any other Australian state or territory, declaring a need to build more social and affordable homes, and make renting fairer.
UNSW’s School of Social Science lecturer and co-author of the report, Dr Andrew Clarke, described the housing crisis as consisting of “declining home ownership, growing private rental stress, rising homelessness and shrinking social housing capacity”.
Additionally, new data has found that people seeking to rent within five kilometres of Sydney’s CBD need to earn a salary minimum of six figures, or face housing stress. Housing stress is defined as lower-income households spending 30 per cent or more of your income on housing costs.
Business NSW conducted a study which looked at over 200 postcodes across NSW, and found that the median salary that people would need to make to live “comfortably” was over $100 000.
Suburbs like Manly, Fairlight, Coogee and Barangaroo would require an income between $140 000- $150 000 in a single-person household in order to avoid housing stress.
Business NSW CEO Dan Hunter described the housing affordability crisis as affecting workers who faced extended commute times or being threatened with having to change careers because they faced high housing stress and costs.
