“That’s the reality”: Older Aussies forced into shared living
Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe’s suggestion that more and more Australians would need to consider life in a share house if they had any hope of bringing rental prices down hasn’t landed as he would have hoped.
“We’ve got a lot of people coming into the country, people wanting to live alone or move out of home,” he said.
“The way that this ends up fixing itself is unfortunately through higher housing prices and higher rents.
“We need more people on average to live in each dwelling, and [higher] prices do that.”
But for those wrestling with Australia’s cost of living crisis and high rental demand with even higher costs, the suggestion is hardly cause for comfort.
And as 51-year-old Mandy Pritchard - a recently single NGO worker hoping to move closer to friends in either Sydney or Wollongong - told The Guardian, the reality of shared housing isn’t so straightforward anyway.
“It’s challenging because I’m obviously not the first choice for a household of twenty-to-thirty-somethings,” she said of her struggles to secure a new home - and potential new roommates - for herself. “I didn’t think I’d be going back to share accommodation at this age, but that’s the reality because of the cost of rent.”
According to Pritchard, it could take up to 50% of her full-time wage to rent a one-bedroom property in Sydney’s Newtown suburb if she wanted to live alone.
“It’s not as if I am on low income, I make a decent wage,” she pointed out. “I wanted to live even in just a studio apartment, but it just isn’t feasible.”
However, as Lowe noted during Senate estimates, the problem and ‘solution’ were a case of supply and demand.
“Higher prices do lead people to economise on housing. Kids don’t move out of home because the rents are too expensive or you decide to get a flatmate,” he said. “That’s the price mechanism at work.”
He went on to state that the nation’s population was set to rise by 2% with the arrival of migrant workers and international students, and that the only way - in his opinion - to combat the pressure on the housing and rental market was through supply.
“Are there 2% more houses? No,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of people coming into the country, people wanting to live alone or move out of home. The way that this ends up fixing itself is, unfortunately, through higher housing prices and higher rents.”
Lowe’s comments drew a wave of criticism from housing advocates - with data suggesting that Australians are beginning to share more - as well as the argument that the government actually needed to construct and provide more housing.
As Flatmates.com.au’s Claudia Conley said, the share housing website had actually just experienced its busiest April on record.
“This year has been unusually busy and we started to see a real increase in traffic around October, which has not died down,” she said.
“Month after month we’re breaking new records, with April just gone our busiest ever. March recorded the highest number of new property listings in over two years, since January 2021, up 14% month-on-month to be 33% above March 2022 levels.”
Images: Getty