In the blistering heat of summer or the cold depths of winter, is your home liveable? Many Australians have experienced rental accommodation that seems ill-suited for the climate — in some cases feeling hotter or colder than the weather outside.
A pro-renter advocacy group wants to find out just how common this is by tracking the temperature and humidity of rental homes across the country and the experiences of those who live in them.
Better Renting is an organisation started five years ago in the ACT that works to promote policy changes for “stable, affordable and healthy homes”.
Executive director Joel Dignam said Australians were sicker and poorer as a result of living in low-quality rented homes. Tenants have to pay higher electricity costs, have worse sleep and suffer more from illnesses such as asthma as a result of living in homes that don’t adequately protect them from the elements.
Two years ago, the group launched a citizen science project, Renter Researchers, that provides participants with devices to record data from their rentals every minute in winter or summer. Combined with interviews with renters, Better Renting collates this data to understand what it’s like to live in rentals.
Predictably, Dignam said, the group has repeatedly found that many participants live in substandard rented accommodation.
“Nobody is surprised that their house is hot, but sometimes they’re surprised by the extremes that they get to,” he told Crikey.
“It’s striking when you realise you have the coldest rental in the group. We had someone get to 5 degrees inside their house in Canberra in the last group. In summer, it’s not only the maximum temperature but also how long some of these houses stay in the ranges. We had someone in Melbourne who lived in a loft [apartment] whose bedroom, according to the data, was constantly unbearable.”
The data is then shared widely with politicians, public servants and other advocacy groups.
Although Dignam concedes that policy moves slowly — ”the wheels move slowly” — he said there are benefits for the individuals involved. The group encourages participants to contact their local and state politicians with this information as well as their landlords. And while they’ve seen limited results with private owners, Dignam said there has been some success getting air-conditioning and other changes made to social housing.
Australia’s tight rental market and the expectation of a hot few months after two relatively mild seasons meant Dignam is particularly interested to see data from this summer.
“Part of what we’ve been hearing more and more is that renters who experience wild temperature fluctuations don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said. “The idea that a renter will go out with a checklist is absurd. People take what they get.
“I think it’s so important to document what is going to be a bad summer.”
Applications for this summer’s cohort closes on Friday.
Thanks for the article, Wilson. This whole, sorry mess just seems to get worse every week. How are those folk living in sheds, or in tents, or in their cars going to deal with the coming heatwaves? In the last fortnight, on 7.30 and The Drum, I’ve watched interviews with three people in any authority on the matter of the accommodation crisis. All of them sighed and said it would take two to three decades to sort out. How is this possible? People are suffering from malnutrition due to the expense of fruit and vegetables and the inability to afford both decent food and either an exorbitant rent or a mortgage repayment. We’ll spend hundreds of billions on submarines, but the lower end of the population goes homeless or hungry? In Australia? This is like some dystopian novel come to life.
Like myself, there’s plenty of citizens/residents starting to look elsewhere. Australia already had 1 million citizens living overseas before the pandemic, I’d hate to think how many are considering joining them now. Many of which are some of our best and brightest.
It is now, it is now our forever: cascading climate change. The people will continue to suffer in growing numbers now that we are over the precipice, our fall speed begins! The people’s pain will only evoke petty reactions as there is no longer salient solutions for something that is unstoppable.
It will be interesting for this NGO to research at the grass roots on accommodation and housing issues, including supply, sinc eour MSM is incapable of analysis and informing the public well?
Our MSM FIRE and related ‘experts’, focus on and present indirect short term headline migration data on property, then without understanding the mix of supply, where much caters to temporary residents, outside of ‘houses’ and is variable eg. students/traveller hostels and homestays; useful for a dog whistle and spruik property (FOMO).
Yet, we are still in the dark on the permanent population dynamics, demography and ‘housing’ when FIRE MSM has people focusing upon a temporary migrant minority aka more significant permanent and ageing population, but ignoring postcodes, council zoning etc..
Just don’t mention the war !
Australia undoubtedly has a homeless problem (and an increasing one particularly amongst women over-50s) but it also doesn’t have millions of people who are homeless.
The 43% or whatever who are renters do actually have a roof over their heads.
So there isn’t actually a ‘supply’ issue.
The issue is that EXISTING supply is appallingly mismanaged. And therefore any NEW supply will equally be appallingly mismanaged and may indeed compound how appallingly mismanaged the whole supply is.
The EXISTING supply is appallingly mismanaged for a number of reasons:
a) The EXISTING supply is treated as some sort of play thing for investors and parasites like they’re part of some really sick game show called Property Flippers and Floppers…so any NEW supply will just end up in the hands of that group;
b) related to (a) Australia has the worst rental laws on the planet which is the other part of the sick game show “Property Flippers and Floppers” where the lucky contestants then get to laud over some poor unfortunate renters – and the worst part is these investors actually think they’re doing renters a favour by being landlords – that somehow gobbling up all of the EXISTING supply and forcing up house prices and stable living conditions is exactly what the 43% or whatever need right now; and
c) Australia has some of the worst building regulations on the planet. The EXISTING supply is falling apart, and whatever of it is in tact has got less insulation than being in an open field, or his just some ginormous energy guzzling McMansion, or prison inspired apartment block or just terrible, terrible architecture, planning, engineering, human evolution….
I mean to call it incompetence would be understatement. A continent of just 24m people on one of the largest (yes driest) land masses on the planet has somehow managed to produce the most expensive property on the planet (I’m not having Hong Kong that is an island state of 7.4m people).
No, cities like Sydney and Melbourne with populations half the size of other major cities somehow managed to produce ludicrous house prices. Just ludicrous. It is utterly absurd that the average house price in Sydney is $1.3 MILLION. If Dr Evil said it we’d laugh at him. There is nothing normal about this situation.
And the most tragic comedy part of all this is that right now, in Australia, it simply doesn’t pay to work. If the number one reason for working is to be able to afford to live, when average wages don’t cover the cost of living (average debt on the other hand….).
If you want to make money FLIP AND FLOP properties. Make a MONZA!
If you actually want to get up and do some work – leave. There is no future.
And Australia is not like Singapore (for many reasons) because (relevantly to this discussion) it doesn’t have easy access to offshore workers. It can’t just ship in cleaners and other essential workers from its nearest neighbours. No – we are long, long, long way from the rest of the world and we have to convince either:
a) our own people to stick around – good luck with that; or
b) hoodwink some unfortunate abroad to come here.
A country – a society – cannot function without workers let alone essential workers….
It absolutely must all come crashing down.
That person living in that $1.3 MILLION house does not earn $250k pa or whatever. That pensioner who just outbid actual working people at an auction does not have millions of doller-y-doos to spend. Taking this equity from here and moving it over there is actually what you call a Ponzi scheme (note a population Ponzi scheme is a contradiction in terms because a Ponzi scheme grows without any real activity whereas population growth is very real which is why everyone moans about it and calls it a Ponzi scheme).
It absolutely must all come crashing down. This cannot go on. Australia is rapidly joining the Zimbabwe Weimar Republic of Paraguay. Whether its barrels of oil or loafs of bread or houses – the rapid growth of prices faster than any conceivable wage growth is hyper-inflation.
I started getting a really bad feeling about all this in the 90s, but the gravy train and koolaid trucks seemed to distract most everyone else from the obvious… And we have continued, and continue, to sleepwalk down this dark path.
The entire country has been largely coasting on the work of previous generations for 30-40 years. Housing, infrastructure, (increasingly less-so) public services, skills, etc. It’s like those dystopian stories where future generations have forgotten how to build the things that their society relies on to function.
Apparently too offensive for the modbot.
There is a supply issue. There has been for decades. There are a number of factors artificially constraining supply, including urban growth boundaries, zoning and developer land/dwelling banking. There are also some more genuine constraining factors, like materials supplies and increasing numbers of builders going bankrupt. There may even be some genuine labour shortages in this industry.
Supply constraints are one of the main reasons prices have become so inflated, especially before the population growth really kicked off in the mid-late-00s. Today it’s worst for rentals with vacancy rates at all time lows – effectively zero in some locations.
Of course, the other side of a supply problem is demand. There is an increasingly severe (over-) demand issue, as in there’s too much of it for the supply – even in ideal conditions – to meet.
(One of these variables is a lot easier and quicker to adjust than the other.)
Property flipping is not really a big thing here. The typical strategy is HODL and leverage the increased equity (and get that sweet negative gearing). For those seeking to cash out, live in each house for long enough to be a PPoR, then sell just before you’ve been out of it long enough to be liable for CGT (5 years? I think it is).
It’s only incompetence if you’re on the wrong side of the equation. If you’re old enough or lucky enough to have bought property, it’s [bleep] fantastic.
We are not in a situation that has been reached accidentally. That’s why even though the solutions are largely obvious and simple, nobody really wants to execute them, because the length of time the problem has been left to fester means they are also very painful (and becoming more so every day).
400k arrivals – on track for half a million – this year says otherwise.
The queue of people lined up to get into Australia is practically infinite. The only real limit is how quickly visas are approved (Labor is doing it’s best to minimise that problem). And most of them are headed straight those kinds of jobs.
No it’s not.
A Ponzi scheme is where the paying returns to existing “investors” is dependent on increasing numbers of new “investors” (and their money). It requires constant activity – new entrants – to function or it falls over.
That is why the current population growth programme is labelled a ponzi scheme. It’s relying on the continual injection of new people to keep the headline economic indicators like GDP looking good (or at least OK). Rather than, say, increasing productivity or encouraging innovation.
Sure. And it will. But good luck trying to pick when. Many thought post-GFC house prices would stagnate for a decade or two so wages could catch up. I made the mistake of thinking it couldn’t possibly go much further when we came back to Australia in 2011, because prices were already so high that even top 10% earners were stretching into the realms of unaffordability (>3-4x income) to buy pretty average houses. Then I thought the fallout from COVID would do it, but nup, the Government stepped in to make it rain some more.
Now prices are up 2-5x from the point I thought could not possibly be sustained. Wages are most certainly not.
This country will be economically and socially burned to the ground to maintain property prices. Even the Greens, who of the major parties have by far the least-worst ideas in this area (and even some good ones), still think if they just plant the accelerator and counter-steer carefully, they can drift out of the skid. It ain’t happening. We’re going into the barrier. Best we can hope for is not to go over the cliff on the other side.
> while they’ve seen limited results with private owners
Colour me unsurprised that folks who see nothing wrong with rent-seeking are callously self-interested….
Thanks, JHW
if you are poor in this country you got a real time indicator of the countries feelings via the referendum.. a lot of you voted with the well off ..hahhaah