July 2010 - ABC Lateline
Watch on the ABC website.
TRANSCRIPT
LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Boarding houses are often occupied by the unemployed, older people and those on disability pensions.
But the increasing price of city rents is creating a new boarding house tenant: people with jobs who can no longer afford to rent their own house or apartment.
Boarding house managers say they can now be choosy about who gets a room, which means in some cases, the unemployed and the needy are being turned away.
John Stewart reports.
JOHN STEWART, REPORTER: Andrew Chandler is a shift worker who sets up concerts and entertainment events. Despite being consistently employed, he's struggled to find a rental apartment that he could afford.
ANDREW CHANDLER, BOARDING HOUSE TENANT: It's insane. I've gone to look at quite a few places and you're battling against 200 other people. And it doesn't matter that I've been working for the same company for 14-odd years, the fact that it says "casual" on my resume, that's a black mark against me, 'cause they don't consider it a steady job, even though it is.
JOHN STEWART: Andrew says that moving into a boarding house in Sydney's inner-west has saved him about $150 a week.
ANDREW CHANDLER: I pay one sum a week and it means I don't have to pay for my electricity, gas, telephone - well, they're paid for, but it's all in one lump sum. So it makes it a lot easier to budget, a lot easier to organise.
JOHN STEWART: Boarding house manager Brett Philips says five to 10 years ago, most of the tenants were older men living on pensions with drug or alcohol problems, but that's all started to change.
BRETT PHILIPS, BOARDING HOUSE MANAGER: We have people, shift workers, workers, couples coming in, so the whole dynamics have changed in the houses. Instead of being the first rung, as I said, up the ladder from being homeless, we're now getting more of a lower middle class into the boarding houses that are just being pushed out of the rental market.
JOHN STEWART: As workers move into boarding houses, older people on pensions and people without regular work are more likely to be pushed out. In states like NSW and Western Australia, boarding house tenants have few rights.
JOANNA SHULMAN, CEO, REDFERN LEGAL CENTRE: We had a phone call today, actually, from a man in his 70's who had lived in a boarding house for eight years, was part of the community, had a local doctor down the road, friends, a support network around him, and today he was told that he had five days' notice to leave the premises.
JOHN STEWART: Last year the National Housing Supply Council found the lack of housing in Australia increased from a shortfall of 78,000 to 178,000 dwellings. The longer-term estimate shows a shortfall of 308,000 dwellings by 2014.
The federal Housing Minister says the Government is investing billions of dollars in housing, rental support schemes for lower income families and shelters for the homeless.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR HOUSING: We'll build around 80,000 new affordable homes over coming years. We've supported a quarter of a million Australians into homes of their own. But we absolutely need co-operation from local government and state and territory governments doing their share as well.
JOHN STEWART: The National Housing Supply Council says the current level of housing production is not keeping up with high levels of migration and population growth and wants state governments to release more land and local councils to approve higher density buildings.
OWEN DONALD, NATIONAL HOUSING SUPPLY COUNCIL: A much greater willingness on the part of councils and indeed local populations to accept denser development. Those are quite challenging issues politically and socially, and at a local level, can be quite divisive, but we do need to tackle those kinds of issues if we're actually going to make substantial inroads into this housing shortfall.
JOHN STEWART: For now, Andrew Chandler says the boarding house is his best option and he's saving for the future.
ANDREW CHANDLER: Unfortunately, some people, if they ask where you live and you say "A boarding house" there is still a bit of a stigma attached to it, but that's entirely up to them. It's working for me and it works for quite a few people I know and, yeah, it's going really well.
JOHN STEWART: But for those without jobs and the homeless, the prospect of inner-city boarding houses going up market may not be a welcome change.
John Stewart, Lateline.
