You go to inspect a vacant rental unit, and the queue stretches around the block.
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In Sydney, renting pensioners are being evicted, while in South Australia a mother of eight faces a 39% rent increase. In a Queensland summer, renters' homes spend 19 hours a day above 25C. How did it come to this?
Housing should be the foundation of a decent life.
A stable and affordable home should provide a base for people to access education, employment, and the life of their local community.
It should be a sanctuary from a heatwave or the winter chill.
Whatever people might be dealing with - a scary diagnosis, a period of unemployment, family conflict - their home should be a refuge from stress, not the source of it.
If that's what housing is for you, you're part of a privileged group in Australia that is getting smaller every year.
For a growing number of people, not just renters, the struggle to find and keep a decent home is a daily contest. In his book In Defense of Housing, author Associate Professor David Madden points out that the housing crisis has long been the norm for working-class and poor communities.
But now that crisis is climbing the income ladder, grabbing at the ankles of more of us.
Last year I spoke with a public servant in Canberra on a good salary, struggling to afford her rent. She certainly isn't the only one.
Like ketchup out of a bottle, this crisis was coming gradually, and now it's coming on fast.
This isn't the result of a single policy decision in the last few years, but the consequence of multiple decisions over the past decades that have gradually steered us more and more in the wrong direction.
This wrong direction is commodification.
Instead of housing used as the foundation of decent life, commodification is the process of making housing primarily a source of wealth creation for whoever happens to be speculating on it right now.
In this system, the person in the property - the person who's home it is - matters only as much as they can keep paying the ever-increasing rent.
That person's need for a home, the work they do for their community - none of it matters.
As an example of what commodification looks like, consider how in the late '90s Peter Costello made it so that when people make money by speculating on real estate they pay tax on only half of that income.
Your barista pays tax on their whole salary, but a property speculator can hold an asset for just 12 months, make hundreds of thousands in income, and then pay tax on only half of it.
It's policies like this which change the thinking from homes for people to investment opportunities for the wealthy.
People who do actual productive work in our society get left behind, choosing between paying their rent or their energy bill.
Others get rich while they sleep.
There isn't a fix-all solution to this.
Rather we need a range of complementary interventions, some acting quickly, some slow.
It's going to take all of the above.
But, critically, every solution should be aiming at decommodification: making housing about homes, not about amassing wealth.
So in the short-term, changes to rental laws can help to reduce the brunt of rent increases and prevent forced moves.
Longer-term, we should be aiming for housing abundance: making decent housing as affordable and available as clean drinking water.
This is essential to address the power imbalance between renters and owners.
In an AHURI report late last year, researchers analysed the effect of tenancy reform on landlord investment patterns and couldn't find any clear pattern.
The upside of this is that governments can improve tenancy laws without having to worry about a loss of supply caused by landlord disinvestment.
The authors do note that in some cases landlords may leave the sector but they argue this is a good thing: if higher standards and expectations mean that people stop being landlords, perhaps those weren't ideal people to be responsible for an essential service like housing.
A lot of people are doing it tough in Australia right now.
Wages may be higher in nominal terms, but every other cost is shooting up: energy, petrol, groceries.
In this situation, wouldn't it be great if you could at least be confident in your home? That you could afford it, that it would be a decent standard, that you would move on your terms, not because somebody else wanted to get more in rent or start running an illegal hotel.
What a difference that would make.
This is what we should be aiming for. This problem took years to build, and it'll take some time to address it.
All the more reason to start now.
- Joel Dignam CF is the executive director of tenant advocacy organisation Better Renting. He recently completed a Churchill Fellowship, travelling to the US and the UK to research tenancy issues.
