The crisis of unaffordable and insecure rentals here is not news, but right now there’s a real opportunity to help fix it.
Nationally, the federal Senate is investigating the ‘worsening rental crisis.’ A tripartisan committee wants to hear the first-hand experiences of renters. They want to know what can ‘reduce rents or limit rent rises’, how leases can be longer, and ‘renters’ rights’ improved. Submissions close next week.
At the same time, the NSW government wants submissions on how to make rental laws fairer.
Given this region is among the least affordable and most unfair in the nation – where renters suffer the toxic inflationary cocktail of holiday-letting, covid migration, and floods – those inquiries want to hear from us.
‘The rental crisis is real and it’s happening in Ballina, Lennox, Byron, and Bruns’, says Cathy Serventy, general manager for housing at local non-profit Social Futures.
‘We’d been in crisis for years, and then a natural disaster turned it into a catastrophe.’
‘In Byron, even people who work at Social Futures can’t afford to rent a place by themselves,’ Serventy told me.
She and colleagues see families with children forced to leave schools and friends, to chase affordable rents. People facing the humiliation of invasive lease applications, and the brutality of eviction and homelessness.
Byron now has the highest number of rough sleepers in the state, surpassing even the City of Sydney. But even for renters with a roof over their heads, stress can breed sleeplessness and suffering.
Just ask any friends or family unlucky enough to be trying to make a home in the local ‘rental market’.
A third of Australian households now rent. Out-of-control rent rises directly damage the quality of their lives. In Byron Shire, rents have risen by around 60 per cent in six years.
A staggering 50 per cent of tenants here are in ‘rental stress’, defined as more than 30 per cent of income going on rents.
While there are complex causes, the rise of Airbnb, Stayz and other platforms is clearly a key factor.
Just months ago, the Independent Planning Commission (IPC) held hearings about Council’s push for a 90-day cap on short-term rentals. A local professor famously described the crisis as ‘almost dystopian… undermining the fabric of society’.
The key expert report to the commission was damning, finding that in Byron, ‘Airbnb is equivalent to 83 per cent of the total rental stock’. In 2022, there was a massive 34 per cent drop in availability of two-bedroom homes for private rentals, at the same time as a 20 per cent increase for Airbnb.
‘We can call it a crisis both in terms of affordability and availability’ wrote authors from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Essential workers including those in cleaning, hospitality, teaching, and nursing ‘will be increasingly unable to live and work in the township,’ they wrote, echoing what every local already knows.
The evidence and the community spoke. The commission listened. It recommended an even tougher 60-day cap, to incentivise the return of houses to long-term rental.
An expert on both Airbnb and the wider crisis is University of NSW’s Dr Chris Martin, who argues there’s been ‘far too much accommodation of landlords and property owners’ in housing policy in Australia.
‘We need to change our renting laws and give tenants greater security,’ Dr Martin told me this week, ‘and there’s an absolutely sound case for having regulation of rent increases for existing tenancies’, and letting the market set the price of new ones.
The current political context is the Greens’ push for rent caps, Labor’s resistance, and national cabinet due to meet soon on improving renters’ rights.
The wider structural context is the decline in affordable housing, as boomers like me benefited hugely from obscene inflation of housing prices, rather than from any special effort or skill.
One per cent of Australians reportedly own nearly a quarter of investment properties, with most investors over 50 and most renters under 35. Housing has become for-profit, not for-people.
In my years reporting from the late 1980s onwards – from the 7:30 Report to the Australian Financial Review – housing affordability was seen as boring. Journalists – also growing rich through housing – sought the limelight of the political beat, not the shadows of the housing round.
But change is coming. This week an influential giant of Labor’s left, former Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, publicly promoted longer leases and limits to rent increases.
‘There is a sound case to investigate some form of intervention in the private rental market,’ he wrote in The Guardian, ‘…the federal government should put pressure on the states to ensure rental prices are moderated.’
With home ownership impossible for millions, a third of us renting, and the cruelty of unaffordability under the spotlight, fundamental change to address the depth of this rental crisis is inevitable, if fairness means anything at all in Australia.
♦ Dr Ray Moynihan is an honorary Assistant Professor at Bond, who’s worked for ABC Four Corners and been a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard. Currently a Greens volunteer, his views are his own.
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