An Australian Tragedy, By James Reed
One spends all one's life working and dutifully paying blood money to the ATO so the government can waste most of it on their bs, and then you find in your twilight years housing insecurity, not owning your own home, and insecurity of rents. When you think about it, even the cave men had it better in some respects than modern Australians, especially the ageing, as covered below, as it was just a matter of finding a cave that a bear was not living in:
"Too old to be renting" is how Thomas, a 65-year-old Queenslander sums it up. He and his partner had been saving to buy a home before rent rises ate into much of their savings. "Home ownership opportunities have vanished," he says.
A country that once considered home ownership a pillar of adult achievement is becoming a land of older renters.
The managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Dr Michael Fotheringham, expects the Australian home ownership rate of 66% to fall to 63% by 2026, while research for Housing for the Aged Action Group found that the number of private renters aged over 55 increased by 73% between 2011 and 2021.
"Both of us are ageing," says Thomas, "meaning all our available energy goes into work … There is no upside."
Thomas is one of more than 160 people who answered a series of questions posed by Guardian Australia about readers' experiences of the housing crisis and one of many older Australians struggling at a time when they hoped life would get easier.
While much has been written about young people being more affected than any other demographic, responses to Guardian Australia showed that close behind them is a quiet cohort whose retirement years are not being shaped by the accumulated wealth commonly associated with baby boomers, but by the mounting strain of unaffordable rents in the throes of a crisis that is being felt across generations around the world."
"Accessing a comfortable retirement assumes that you own your home outright and you don't face rent or mortgage costs by the time you're on a lower income," the head of research at Corelogic, Eliza Owen, says. In reality, there are now more than half a million people over 55 with low to moderate wealth and incomes living in private rentals or paying mortgages into retirement, according to a new Swinburne University of Technology report funded by the Housing for the Aged Action Group.
"All of the assumptions around older people owning their own homes is increasingly not the case any more, and it has a flow-on effect to all areas of what it means to be ageing well in this country," the group's executive officer, Fiona York, says.
John, a 64-year-old in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales pays 50% of his income to his landlord. The casual retail worker is no longer day tripping in his spare time or going out much with friends. "I am watching every dollar I spend – something I never had to do three years ago," he says. "I find myself doing the sums in my head continuously when it comes to regular bills. I am learning to do without when it comes to discretionary spending … If I had a major expense come up unexpectedly, I would be stuck. There is a lot of finger crossing going on."
The aged pension 'barely covers rent'
One of the crisis' myriad and entangled effects is the rise in numbers of "forever" renters.
"Although most renters would prefer to go into home ownership, the majority believe they never will – and the sad reality is that many of them are right," says Fotheringham, citing new AHURI data that shows only half of renters expect to own a home in their lifetime, despite 80% wanting to. The experts Guardian Australia spoke to said the principle of renting in perpetuity makes a lot of sense – they look to Germany as a working example – but it cannot exist without fair and robust housing and tax systems.
Nobody wants to be in share housing when they're in their late 70s, but that's what they're having to do
Fiona York
Despite rising rents, the data suggests the insecurity baked into the private rental system is at least as detrimental as its cost: renters are willing to pay more for rent protection, property maintenance above minimum standards and the ability to extend their lease indefinitely.
"How do we actually fix our rental system so [rental homes are] not designed around this transitional idea?" asks Fotheringham. "Rental systems in Australia and tax settings surrounding property investment are really a lot better at sheltering and growing our money than they are at sheltering and growing our families."
Facing diminished income and rising costs, older renters face a problem that is beginning to unravel the way pensions and superannuation work, he says. Multiple readers told us the aged pension – now $1,144.40 a fortnight – barely covers rent.
It's the "missing middle"– those whose savings aren't enough to buy a home yet are too much to access housing assistance – who have the fewest options, says York. Given banks will usually not lend to older people, even those with up to $500,000 can no longer afford to buy."
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