CAMPBELLTOWN, Australia – Belinda has applied for more than 100 rental homes in the past year and been rejected every time.
The 39-year-old Australian single mother of four now lives in an temporary shelter in Campbelltown, southwest of Sydney, and has six months to find a home that costs under A$500 ($340) a week, or risk ending up sleeping rough.
“I don’t know where I’m supposed to go after that. I have got a house full of furniture that I don’t really want to get rid of. I don’t really want to get rid of my cat or my puppy,” said Belinda. “It is a bit scary to tell you the truth.”
Relentlessly rising rents, eight consecutive interest rate hikes, surging living costs and devastating natural disasters in the past few years have inflamed what was already among the world’s least affordable rental markets.
Every state capital city is experiencing a decline in rental affordability this year, according to the annual Rental Affordability Index report published by SGS Economics and Planning.
Across Australia, couples out of work and single parents on government aid face a market where only 0.1 percent of rentals are affordable, according to another report by not-for-profit welfare group Anglicare.
A person on the minimum wage is barely better off, as wages fail to keep up with spiraling rents. Sydney is listed among the world’s top 10 most expensive rental markets by property agency Savills, above cities including Miami and Paris.
In Demographia’s International Housing Affordability report this year, Sydney ranked the world’s second-least affordable market, behind only Hong Kong.
