When Phil moved in with his grandfather and parents in 2018, he was a rarity in the neighbourhood. An adult with a full-time job, he was one of just two children on the Logan, Queensland block to have returned home. Six years on and now 30, he guesses he’s one of about 10 adult children back living with their parents.
“It’s not a big house,” he says of four adults, plus a cat and a dog, sharing. “Because my grandpa has a schedule – and God help me if anyone interferes with that schedule – we just work around him.” They split bills and groceries and, if money is tight – as it was when he needed four new car tyres – his parents help.
He puts away a minimum of $250 a week that would otherwise go towards a room in a shared house and aims to buy a unit with his father, who is in his 60s – a mutually beneficial plan that extends both the amount they can borrow and the mortgage term. But, those savings have come at a cost: Phil says his independence has taken a step backwards, as any kind of romantic relationship is “near impossible”.
It’s this, he says, or “rent for the rest of your life”.
A potent cocktail of skewed taxation, low housing supply, high interest rates, cost-of-living strains and a once-in-a-century pandemic have foisted a housing crisis on to many Australians – and nowhere is it felt more than in low-income households. Via survey responses from more than 160 readers, Guardian Australia has been able to piece together a picture of insecurity, stress, frustration and fear as house prices have soared and rental costs have kept pace.
Many of the replies come from nurses, teachers, single parents and people living on disability and aged pensions: they can vouch for new CoreLogic figures that show even at the low end of rent values, low-income households struggle, requiring more than half their income to pay rent. Multiple readers say 60% to 75% of their income goes to their rent or mortgage.
Those earning well also tell us they are not immune. According to the same data, a median-income household would now hypothetically channel 50.6% of its income to service a new mortgage on a median-value dwelling. The rule-of-thumb determining rental or mortgage stress sits at 30% of household income.
Growth in rents and home values are softening but the impact of this is yet to be felt by households, who are reeling: one 33-year-old Mascot tenant’s rent rose from $595 in 2021 to $1,150 in 2024. Zoom out and housing affordability is now a “critical concern” across generations around the world, GHD’s Crossroads report found. Many Australian households remain on a precipice – and you have described how it feels to be there.
‘I have put life on hold”
To counter housing unaffordability, older Australians are learning to live together in ways previously associated primarily with students and twentysomethings. Household sizes fell during Covid, but the Reserve Bank’s chief economist, Sarah Hunter, told a Senate hearing in October they had risen since May, possibly because children are spending longer living at home and spare rooms are no longer needed as home offices. Tenants are banding together to split the costs of rent, while some in their 30s and 40s are moving back with parents.
Commonwealth Bank analysis in August found that household behaviours were adjusting to “economise” on housing: more people were living in share houses, fewer were living with just their partner and more people were living with grandparents, cousins and siblings.
Phil is one of many readers who tells us that to have any hope of buying an apartment, he had no choice but to move home. Rob, a 34-year-old psychologist from Adelaide, moved into his parents’ rumpus room in 2022. He’s not travelling, holidaying or socialising at weekends, afraid that a missed inspection might mean missing out on securing a home.
“I have put life on hold whilst trying to buy a home,” he says. “Even the thought of one day possibly having children is on hold just to focus on securing my own home to live in.”
Given his work, he understands the mental health value of staying rational, connected and hopeful, “but it can be incredibly hard at times. When closed out from something so fundamental and necessary … you can’t help but feel somewhat left out and disconnected from society and others.”
The reverberations of the housing crisis, says Dr Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, are “totally foundational”.
The signs are also clear on the streets. In Blacktown, New South Wales, a reader tells us that because of the increase in share housing and multigenerational households, “streets are often hard to drive through”, given that four or more cars are parked in driveways. In Western Australia, Chris has watched as two-bedroom units in his Perth complex have moved from single or double occupancy to housing four tenants. Parking is hard, “I do like the family atmosphere though,” says a respondent in Dubbo, NSW.
‘The norm in human history’
Much of the way home life is shifting harks back to centuries past: rooms for rent on flatmatefinder.com are a modern version of Victorian era lodgings and multigenerational living is “the norm in human history” according to Fotheringham. The “nuclear family in a separate dwelling concept” is an invention of the west and emerged in the 1930s. Crucially, though, where generations – and some migrant families still do – once lived together for cultural reasons, the impetus nowadays is financial.
“It does make me quite upset, I want to keep living this life that I have where I’m away from my parents and free to do what I want,” says Anders, a public servant from Brisbane. The 28-year-old’s rent has hit a rate that means to save for his home deposit he has no option but to move back to his mother’s home, a two-hour commute away on the Sunshine Coast, when his lease ends in February.
“The lack of security in renting and the uncertainty as prices continue to increase faster than I can save money and beyond what I can afford have made me feel constantly stressed to the point where it got in the way of my relationship,” he says.
“I have had multiple panic attacks in recent weeks as my life feels extremely uncertain and I have been feeling like my efforts in life have been a complete waste of time.
“Everyone says if you work hard, you should be able to do this, that and the other, but I’m working hard and I can’t afford to do those things. Even a few years ago, people had opportunities that aren’t open to me.”
For others, the system is glued up. Families who would have once flowed up the property chain are now sitting still, unable to upsize because of the cost. And, partly because of a lack of viable alternatives, larger homes that would have once become available for families remain in the hands of retirees.
Jac, a 44-year-old public servant living in Melbourne, has watched her neighbourhood go “from being singles and couples to families in two-bedroom apartments”. Diana, 36, a nurse in the same city, is one of a number of readers who has noticed “retirees still living in their sprawling family homes … meanwhile, millennials are cramming their families into small apartments”. One reader, whose family of six lives in a mortgaged two-bed unit in Penrith, NSW, says the set-up is “very challenging for our relational and mental health, but, we do what we can to make it work”.
People are “grabbing whatever the hell they can find”, says Fotheringham, because there isn’t enough flex in the system – even if that means overcrowding.
For Anders, the speed of the shift has felt whiplash-inducing. But University of NSW studies of census data from 1986 to 2011 found that the number of multigenerational homes has been quietly rising for decades. A senior researcher from the university’s City Futures Research Centre, Dr Edgar Liu, said his 2015 and 2016 analysis showed there were more multigenerational homes in Brisbane and Sydney than ever, with finances cited as the main driver for children, parents and grandparents choosing to live together. Many multigenerational homes were in the cities’ outer suburbs, raising the spectre of long commutes and isolation. Eight years on, the Covid-19 pandemic has kicked a simmering trend into overdrive.
“One of the challenges with the word ‘crisis’ is that it sounds like something that happened to us as a sudden flash … These are profound challenges for us – it’s measurably true that things have worsened, but they were heading in that direction already,” says Fotheringham, who expects home ownership to fall from 66% to 63% by the next census.
‘That’s not what we created society for’
The social ramifications of the housing crisis are as “massive” as they are intertwined, says Prof Nicky Morrison, director of Western Sydney University’s Urban Transformations Research Centre.
“Boomeranging” home, as her research has shown, is problematic. Children in their 30s are increasingly either living with parents and grandparents or in shared houses without privacy, stability and security. “That’s not what we created society for. There ought to be a stage where household formation happens – and they’ve been denied that.”
As Fotheringham puts it, “You kind of expect to go out there and be independent and to have fun and make mistakes and do all these rites of passage. But if you actually end up staying with your parents until you’re 33, do you do that stuff?”
As the age of independent household formation creeps ever higher, Morrison has spoken to young people who resent being unable to leave home and sandwiched parents who feel stressed by the set-up. The effect is “mass strain” across generations, she says. And that’s among the people who have the option to live multigenerationally.
“People say multigenerational living can strengthen family bonds, but it also cuts off people from their broader community networks,” she says.
Liu found that while multigenerational households are on the rise, acceptance of such households has not grown in step. They’re still looked at as a “special arrangement”, he says, complete with the stigma that children sponge off parents, while elderly people play a diminished role – both of which are usually not the case.
There are benefits of living together for longer, of course. Provided children have been able to meet partners and have babies, there’s the possibility of built-in childcare and company in old age. But readers have told us again and again that the situation they find themselves in was not born of choice. Necessity is reshaping how we live.
“When I was young, I lived in share houses because it was fun,” says one reader in Sydney, in her late 40s, who has rented for most of her life. “Nowadays I have no choice.”
Ashlee, 33, spends weekdays at her mother’s home in regional NSW. “I won’t lie, returning home has been a difficult adjustment – for us both, I’m sure,” she said. “I left home at age 18 and spent over a decade living your average, independent adult life, so it felt like an embarrassing regression. Society tells us that moving back home is for those of us who have failed some way in life.”
How tolerant we are of the crisis’ social implications is yet to emerge. “We have to adjust to the new norm,” says Morrison, “or we start to say, ‘No, this isn’t good enough.’”
For Dave in Newcastle, adjustment has been a “nice” change. Living in a home he bought 30 years ago, the healthcare worker and his partner are enjoying the company of his two adult children and giving them security to counter their “sketchy” contract jobs.
His daughter, in her early 20s, was dissuaded from her first-choice universities in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne after looking at living costs away from the family home. They talk, walk the dog together and, occasionally, the children will cook. “You get a bit of a glimpse into their lives,” Dave says – although it may turn out to be more than a glimpse.
“The kids have acknowledged how fortunate they are. If they were still there in their 30s, I’d be a bit surprised – but I don’t think I’d kick them out.”
– Some names have been changed
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