Sydney's scummy rental properties - expensive and insecure

This is what we live with. A 100 year old building so old the water pipes run along the outside wall and into the house in the relevant spots. These are the bath taps, and yes the pipes go directly through the wall to outside. The hot water cylinder is in the attic and is gravity fed, meaning there's no water pressure just the strength of gravity making it sort of fall through the tap. It takes about half an hour to run a bath, which I do a couple of times a week for my back pain. A shower (feed by the two pipes behind the taps) takes some time to heat up as in the winter now with the pipes outside it takes time not only for the hot water to get to the bath from the cylinder at the other end of the house, but for the outside pipe to heat up from that water enough for the water to be hot when it finally arrives at the shower. The paint pealing off is because we have to use mould remover every few weeks to keep it down, and over time it's affected the paint. When I moved in here 8 years ago that whole tap area was black from deadly mould.

This is just one small issue living here. But we have it good really. We live in eastern Sydney on a main road into the city but pay only $380 a week for it. Very cheap, but only because I've been here for ages and the rental increases have been very moderate. Likely I guess because of issues such as that pictured. 

This is the face of Sydney's property bubble and rental crisis. Yet Abbott and Hockey, being investors, don't give a fuck. Abbott said the other week he hopes property prices increase. They are already the third most expensive in the world. Our home is apparently to be viewed in value terms, not comfort. Where money spent takes away from money kept in the pockets of investors. 

The biggest fear is if the landlord sells the place and it's bulldozed for an apartment block. Where will we go? What will happen to us?

This is the source of my anxiety I realised in the last few days. Digging up those past experiences from last year in arbitration has bought it all back. In a way we're lucky as we very nearly became homeless, even living in this dump.

Thirty years of hard work. Where's my fuckin Australian dream?

This is what happens when housing is seen as a vehicle of wealth creation rather than primarily as somewhere to live. People’s actual living conditions are abstracted away, replaced by sets of economic indicators that are largely of relevance to those who are already on the property ladder. 

Those who suffer most under current arrangements are cordoned off into the realm of Unfortunate Social Issues, and they are irrationally blamed or held responsible for the set of unhealthy institutions that caused their range of choices to narrow so severely. 

Having to make these decisions – an hour commute from a house with a patch of grass out the back, or a 30 minute commute from an apartment with a bathroom so badly plastered that there are previous tenants’ hairs embedded in your walls? – is demoralising for adults, and damaging for children. 

The point of the iconic quarter-acre aspiration in the Australian psyche is not the actual white picket fence or the big backyard; it’s stability and comfort. Our rental market is the opposite not because of the large number of apartments, but because a sense of ownership and security is virtually impossible for many. 

Instead, precarity creates stress. Living with the constant prospect of a broken tap the landlord refuses to fix, the end of a week-to-week tenancy agreement followed by a long house-hunting period and an expensive move, or even just having to pay rent that leaves little left for anything else: these things are sources of anxiety, so that your house isn’t a place to relax. It’s a shame housing is so expensive, but it’s a scandal that people on low incomes can never really afford to feel at home. more