It was Alice and her family’s sixth move in as many years that pushed them over the edge. They’d relocated from their home city of Sydney to the Central Coast and back, paid $700 a week for a Lilyfield rental complete with weeds – inside the house – then moved to a $900-a-week house in Drummoyne, which their landlords promptly sold, making a $1m profit and leaving the family of four high and dry.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the small business co-owner says. Exhausted, financially depleted and with no trust in landlords, she and her partner stored their belongings, bought a caravan and – with their now six- and 17-year-old children and two dogs in tow – travelled for seven months.
They are now renting in Jervis Bay, where they get more space for less money than in Sydney, saving extra by sharing the property with an artist’s studio. Alice’s partner commutes two and a half hours to their boat detailing business, sleeping on a friend’s couch in inner Sydney from Monday to Friday.
She is one of more than 160 Guardian Australia readers who told us about their experiences of living amid a housing crisis wrought by low housing supply, high interest rates and the Covid-19 pandemic – not to mention tax settings that favour investors.
Today a median-income household would hypothetically need 50.6% of its income to service a new mortgage on a median-value dwelling, according to Corelogic data.
And nowhere is the affordability pressure more keenly felt than in low-income households: even at the low end of rent values, low-income households use more than half their income to pay rent.
For people like Alice and her partner, the crisis is forcing moves away from community and support groups, creating hyper-long commutes and disrupted family lives – all with the hope of one day being able to leap the ever-heightening deposit “hurdle” and afford a home of their own.
“I’m super grateful to have this little sanctuary for the moment,” Alice says. “But it’s not mine and I’m 35 years old, my partner is 42. When do we get to relax and have our own space where we can have a vegetable garden and paint the walls the colour we want to paint them? Just simple things that I think older generations took for granted.
“I lie awake all night worrying because if the bank won’t give us a mortgage, we’re stuck.”
Forced to move
Alice’s involuntary tree change is not unusual. In search of affordable places to call home, readers have moved from Sydney to outer Perth and from Brisbane to Melbourne. They are considering leaving Canberra, trying out Adelaide and giving up on their own homes altogether.
Stories of adaptation and resilience have emerged, despite some saying they now funnel 60% to 75% of their income directly to the cost of a roof above their heads. While house and rental prices are showing signs of easing, experts say it will take time to be felt.
In the meantime, many of those who don’t own homes are on the move.
Rising rents have pushed Greg, 42, a father of three and freelance film editor based in Melbourne, further from the inner city each time he and his partner have moved over the past 13 years. He now lives in Preston – or, in the words of the singer Courtney Barnett who captures the drudgery of home viewings and suburban relocation for affordability’s sake, “Depreston” – where young families are increasingly priced out.
His seven-year-old’s public school class sizes have shrunk, he says, while kindergartens and schools in the more affordable suburbs they are looking at buying in “are absolutely swamped” with families moving to the area.
School enrolments are a helpful, if limited, indicator of demographic flux and a lack of housing diversity: while the reasons are far from straightforward, public school enrolments have fallen in some of the country’s most expensive suburbs. That includes Bondi Beach and Bronte, where New South Wales Department of Education figures show enrolments dropped by about a third between 2019 and 2023. Over the same period, schools in some outer Sydney suburbs struggled to accommodate an influx of families.
And with more families renting where they once might have owned a home, schoolchildren – rather than the unencumbered twentysomethings of yesteryear – are increasingly at the mercy of an unbalanced and outdated rental system. One reader’s son was in the middle of his higher school certificate exams when they were forced out of their rental home.
Changing the way cities function
Dr Michael Fotheringham, the managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, sees the march of young people further into the urban fringes as fundamentally shifting the way cities function, altering where transport, schools and hospitals are needed and the social infrastructure that flows on from that. He says dropping new suburbs on to the edges of cities is a “trap” that comes at a cost.
Quick and cheap urban sprawl is no sign of a livable, efficient city. The ripple effects are far-reaching and intertwined, from environmental and health impacts to dependence on cars, lost family time, detachment from friends and entertainment and isolation because of poor public infrastructure.
In Victoria, Andrew travels from his home in Highett to work in central Melbourne – a two- to three-hour commute he has been making for 17 years. The 37-year-old lawyer and his wife, Shaynee, are lucky to be homeowners, he says, but the commute has taken its toll on his mental health, family time and on “enjoying life in general”.
They’re now considering moving to find more space for their growing family – a leap that brings with it new stresses.
“The notion of moving further away from our support and social networks is a slap in the face to us, especially when told to do so by politicians, experts or older generations that never had to experience the same thing,” Andrew says. “The mental health and quality of life impacts are exorbitant.”
Likewise Diana, 36, a nurse from Melbourne’s middle suburbs, and her partner will commute for up to three hours a day if they buy a home in a far outer suburb. It’s “a huge consideration when you have 9.5 hours between shifts to commute, shower, sleep, eat and commute again,” she says, “never mind seeing your family.”
They touch upon a facet of city living that urban planners have long understood: housing affordability is about far more than cost.
The classic trade-off between a longer commute and a larger home and garden is nothing new – Australians have been living in the suburbs for many decades, with the 1933 census showing just 16% of greater Sydney’s population lived in the inner city, according to Paul Ashton, a professor of public history at the University of Technology Sydney. But today’s imbalance between the locations of homes and jobs is skewed to the point readers say they are driving two hours or more to their workplaces.
Plus, says Prof Nicky Morrison, director of Western Sydney University’s urban transformations research centre, today’s moves are often dictated by constraint over choice. Over and over again, we heard of families and individuals who were having to move from their communities and support networks to be able to afford to rent or buy.
For others, the financial imperatives have not tipped the scale.
“[I] tried living further out where it was cheaper to rent, but both times I ended up paying for taxis to get to work as the buses were terrible, plus I was really isolated from my community,” one Sydney renter in her late 40s says. “So I resigned to pay more rent and at least be closer to where I need to be.”
Allen, 45, a teacher in Hornsby, has decided against moving his family of four to a more affordable but distant suburb because of less time spent with his children in the evening.
And, where double-income-no-kids couples were once able to pick and choose, one 33-year-old told us she and her partner “had no choice but to move to an outer suburban area” to buy. The move has been positive – but they worry about their budget, see friends less “and have no idea how others on lower incomes are making it work”.
‘Prices literally doubled for fibro shacks’
For those who sought lower prices in regional areas before the pandemic, today’s picture is barely recognisable. In March 2020 in regional Australia, a median dwelling cost 5.6 times the median income, according to Corelogic; by September, the figure had risen to 7.6 – just a fraction below that in capital cities. With Regional Australia Institute figures showing 40% of city dwellers are considering a move to the regions, that pressure is unlikely to reduce any time soon.
“For a long time, regional Australia or outer suburban markets of cities were heralded as these relatively affordable markets that people could look to as an opportunity for home ownership,” says Eliza Owen, the head of research at Corelogic. “That’s no longer the case – in regional Australia, the housing market has become almost as unaffordable as the capital city market.”
It’s a reality that one nurse from Long Jetty in NSW knows all too well. The 35-year-old moved two hours from her family to save money. Then came Covid and “prices quite literally doubled for fibro shacks and rent increased from $450 to $650”. She watched as run-down homes were replaced by luxury houses costing triple the price – a march that delivers paper wealth alongside grave consequences.
“The local people in the area are being pushed out – but where to? Homelessness is up, food bank use is up, this is a low socioeconomic area suddenly influxed by Mercedes and Range Rovers.”
As another renter in Queensland – the state most Australians moved to in the five years until 2021 – put it: “We [moved to] an area of the Sunshine Coast that is supposed to be a small and affordable village … But city prices arrived and we are now stuck.”
Owen looks to Melbourne and Hobart as bright spots of relative affordability. Lisa, 51, is leaving Brisbane’s “white-hot” housing market to live in Melbourne, where she can end a highly stressful year of housing insecurity by buying a studio. Beyond that, some readers are throwing in the towel altogether, moving overseas to make their dollars go further.
Expats coming the other way have felt the shock of the move in more ways than the physical upheaval, aghast at how house prices have changed in their absence. One left Europe after Ukraine was invaded but regrets swapping even that insecurity with Australia’s “highly geared, super vulnerable, and inegalitarian society”.
For now, Alice remains circumspect about her life in Jervis Bay. “It could be worse,” she says. “And it could be significantly better.”
– Some names have been changed
