Renee’s three adult children live with her – and Australia’s cost-of-living crisis means they’ll probably be there for years

‘It’s a matter of survival.’ Renee Gatt’s three adult children live at home because of the cost-of-living crisis. Photograph: Matthew Newton/The Guardian

The farmhouse that Renee Gatt and her family own is crowded. There are six adults and three bedrooms, and one of her adult children sleeps in the lounge room.

But Gatt says she’s lucky – at least they own the land outside Hobart they live on.

“It works OK for us,” Gatt says. “Although it’s a matter of survival.

“For the one who is in the living room, that is wearing on him. Psychologically … it’s already difficult living at home.”

She worries for her three children, all of whom have autism. One is 25, the twins are 22. Two of them are on the disability support pension (DSP) and the other is on Austudy, making it almost impossible to afford a rental . In the past five years, the average rent in Hobart has jumped from $311 to $445 a week – the biggest increase in the country.

Last year Gatt helped move them out into private rentals, but the cost of living, and the challenges that come with living with autism, meant after a few months they decided to move back home.

“To be honest, as crowded as we all are, I know they’re safe, and it reduces me having to travel to three different houses to support them,” she says.

“But [the cost of living] is so high that they will probably be here for years.”

The crowded housing trend

In March the national vacancy rate sat at 1%, with just 31,356 properties available, according to SQM research. For the last 12 months, it has hovered at historic lows.

Australians living on low incomes in private rentals are being hit hard. The tight market means the pandemic lockdown trend of people moving out of share houses has reversed – in February, online share accommodation site Flatmates said 67,700 new members joined the platform, taking its active members to 212,000. The seeker-to-lister ratio in many suburbs exceeded 100 to 1.

Now, many are turning to room sharing, setting up makeshift bedrooms in lounge rooms, garages, and even pitching tents in back yards. While rates of overcrowding are hard to track, advocates, frontline organisations and researchers all say the problem is getting worse.

Michael Fotheringham, the managing director at the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, says urban overcrowding is growing, driven by the cost-of-living crisis.

“The main component of the cost-of-living crisis really is the housing crisis,” he says. “We have an enormous challenge around the availability and affordability of housing in this country.

“So what we’ve seen is a trend of people returning to share housing, and in some cases into quite crowded share housing, to try to overcome the cost issue of their housing.”

‘This is just the reality’

When Andrea Hatton and her two sons, aged 21 and 19, moved into their 60-sq-metre two-bedroom apartment in Brunswick 18 months ago, she gave them each a room. She sleeps on a fold-out ottoman in the lounge.

“With my youngest son, we came to an agreement that he’d be the primary caretaker of the larger bedroom,” Hatton says.

“But I would still use it, so I use it for my wardrobe, my belongings are in there, my chest of drawers, and I would sleep in the lounge. But when I needed privacy or am not feeling well, if I needed a bed to sleep in, then I would sleep in there. We would just negotiate as we go along.”

Andrea has lived in the inner north for 13 years – her sons grew up there. She works as an NDIS support worker, her youngest is employed at Aldi and her eldest is on the DSP – but despite three sources of income, they cannot afford a place big enough for them in the suburb they want to live in.

“We make it work,” she says. “It’s just, this is just the reality if we want to stay where we want to live.”

Andrea describes their apartment as a “tiny home” – she sleeps between the couch and the dining table, and folds up her bed in the mornings. Currently they pay $520 a week in rent. She recently inspected a three-bedroom apartment in early April, but it was $300 a week more.

“We’re already stretched,” she says.

‘These poor buggers just want a roof over their head’

It’s hard to think of a time when it has been more difficult or expensive to secure a rental home. After a 0.8% rise in April, Australia’s median rent hit a new record high of $627 a week, data from CoreLogic revealed on Monday. Annual rent growth has re-accelerated through 2024, up from a recent low of 8.1% growth in the year to October 2023, to 8.5% in the year to April.

Analysis from PropTrack recently revealed that between July and December last year, only 39% of properties available for rent on realestate.com.au would be affordable, meaning they were equivalent to a quarter of the earnings for a median-income household bringing in $111,000 a year. For those on $67,000, just above the median income for a typical worker, just 3% of rentals were affordable.

Fiona York, the executive officer at the Housing for the Aged action group, says overcrowding is now one of the main reasons people contact the organisation.

“In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a 60% increase in calls, the majority of them relate to housing affordability,” York says. “The main reason is inappropriate housing, which includes overcrowding.”

Her team recently helped a couple in their 60s living in a five-bedroom home with nine other family members. In another case, an elderly man in his 70s was living in a two-bedroom property with his daughter, her partner and their two children. After he was evicted from his previous rental he could not find anywhere to go, so he sleeps on the couch.

“People are making rooms in lounge rooms, sleeping in laundries, in sheds, sharing rooms with grandkids, sleeping on the floor,” York says.

One man, who lives in Lismore and did not want to be named, said he had a young couple sleeping in a tent in his back yard for six months last year while they tried to get a rental. They ended up giving up and going to Tasmania.

“These poor buggers just want a roof over their head, a basic human right,” he said.

Sean Budd, secretary of the Renters and Housing Union, says it’s common now that share houses will include a makeshift bedroom – he was living in a workshop at the back of a house last year.

“There were five of us in a three-bedroom, the other person was in the shed. And that’s because that’s all the people in the house could afford,” Budd says.

“Most of them were on welfare or worked casual jobs. And one of the big issues with that, that we dealt with, was also the turnover rate. Because there were so many people in the house and people had such housing insecurity, people always moving in and out.”

He says state and federal governments have to grapple with the issue seriously – offering more than is currently on the table.

“The public housing and social housing sector doesn’t have as big of a overcrowding problem, so of course, rapidly expanding public housing would be our best solution,” Budd says. “Because it takes pressure off the rental market, and puts people in homes that are not overcrowded.”