By my 28th birthday, I expected, naively, to own a little terrace house in a cute, leafy suburb – a two-bedder with a courtyard and an impressive bookshelf.
Instead I am marking the milestone in the spare bedroom of my parent’s house in Melbourne, while I search, remotely, with my three now ex-housemates for a rental in Sydney that costs less than $2,000 a week.
For the first time in my life, I have no fixed address, and have spent the past week alternating between my newlywed friends’ flat with their two sausage dogs and my family home.
All my big life things are in storage, while I get by with a backpack of items packed haphazardly with a hangover.
A few pairs of underwear, jumpsuits, a couple of shirts. A David Sedaris novel. A toothbrush. This is my new reality – to float between homes like an urban nomad or a modern-day Jack Kerouac totally unmoored. “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
But I’m not a beat poet and my situation isn’t romantic. I am just a victim of Sydney’s rental crisis. My crime? Owning a 40kg labrador and not being ridiculously wealthy.
Sydney is the most expensive city in Australia to rent. Houses cost $1,044 a week on average – 15% higher than 12 months ago. Meanwhile, vacancy rates are at near-record lows of 1.7%.
For a while my housing situation in Sydney was not horrific. After discovering our landlord was selling our six-bedroom share house in the inner west – fondly referred to as our “Barbie Dreamhouse” – we had three months to secure a new property.
Dozens of inspections later, my upbeat disposition was wavering. One property ($1,300 a week) was a 1960s brick box with triangular windows and a granny flat that looked like a crime zone. Nevertheless, we stood in the garage seriously discussing whether one of us could hang up some curtains and live there to bring the rent down.
“Maybe this is the time in my life to live in a basement,” my housemate said, staring at the cobwebbed concrete floor.
At other inspections, we were one pack among dozens of desperate would-be tenants, crowded on stairwells or filming ugly rooms to show our prospective housemates later.
In Marrickville we looked at a dump ($1,350 a week) that had cockroaches in the bathrooms, cracks in the ceiling and an oven that didn’t work.
Another ($1,450) smelled strongly of mould – although our take on that house may have been tainted by a topless elderly man staring at us from the neighbouring property.
Finally, just before our eviction date, we secured a rental ($1,350). It was small and too expensive but cute and functional (with working toilets). Of course it was also too good to be true.
The weekend before moving in we were allowed to drop off some plants and camping gear. We discovered, to our horror, that the landlord lived across the street.
With this new insight came a bigger, four-legged problem. I had neglected to mention my dog on the rental application, given New South Wales’ strict rental laws regarding pets.
Under the rules, NSW landlords can refuse to allow tenants to keep an animal without providing a reason and apply a blanket no-pet rule when listing rentals.
NSW Labor promised in the lead-up to the state election that it would make it easier for renters to own pets – with plans to require landlords to provide a legitimate reason to prevent tenants from owning pets. But there’s still no legislation and any changes are under review.
So I had to discuss the dog. After hiding in the boot of my housemate’s car for a while (I fear confrontation) I had an anxiety-filled meeting with my landlord-to-be beside his herb garden.
I detailed my dog’s excellent behaviour and sensibility. But on Monday we received an email from the real estate agent informing us the landlord had thought about it and decided he didn’t want a pet in his rental property.
I was furious. It was 24 hours before we were due to move in. I told the landlord I couldn’t abandon my dog to the pound because I loved him too much.
But begging didn’t work so we kicked into gear. We cancelled utilities and frantically called storage spaces, all the while doing the last of the cleaning and tip runs at the gigantic house we were moving out of.
Then, instead of moving into our new dream home, we watched removalists take our stuff off to storage. I paced the house, deliriously feeding the dog treats to calm his anxiety, and calling my parents to declare, “I’m fine!” (I wasn’t.)
That night we ate pizza on the floor of our empty mansion, sweaty and smelling of cleaning products. I was angry at a system that caters to the haves while the have-nots beg for basic rights or stay silent out of fear.
How much tougher again would it be for people who didn’t have full-time incomes, or had to rely on welfare support, and were plunged into rental stress or forced to move far from work with limited transport and other infrastructure?
Ruffling my labrador’s neck, I vowed that if I were ever to become a landlord I’d let my tenants own as many dogs as they wanted. Then I turned my mind to getting myself to Melbourne.
Caitlin Cassidy is Guardian Australia’s higher education reporter
