Image: Marco Verch, Flickr (CC BY-2.0)
I once asked my landlord if I could have a dog. She said no, of course. But she said something else too: You have to try and think like this is your house. What would you do?
I had been renting her house in Melbourne for two and a half years, paying $850 a month (excluding bills) for the privilege of occupying a house barely fit for habitation: impractical 2×2 kitchen; no heating or working air con; peeling lino floors with holes worn through; cracks in the walls so large you could see sky; an extension made of uneven concrete and desperation, from which the kitchen, bathroom and laundry (roofed in tin and walled by plywood) hung off as inaccessible afterthoughts.
I knew that the house—or more realistically, the land—was worth two million dollars. I knew, too, that the reason the landlord never fixed anything was because she was waiting for the right moment to sell. In the meantime, my housemates and I slept in beanies and scarves through the winter, played at handyperson whenever anything broke, and desperately looked for nice things we could hide our peeling walls behind.
I knew that the reason the landlord never fixed anything was because she was waiting for the right moment to sell.
Since leaving home, I’ve lived in eight rental properties—two in Brisbane and six in Melbourne—and almost all of them were on par with this one. As a renter, I got used to black mould, peeling paint, water damage, broken flyscreens, pest infestations, cracks in walls and windows, doors that didn’t close, stained and musty carpets, fixtures and appliances that broke so often we were told to simply stop using them. I got used to landlords that wouldn’t fix any of this, landlords that charged us for minor damage like ‘discolouration of the shower curtain’, and landlords that refused to let us make our space even a little more habitable.
As tenants, we weren’t allowed to so much as put up a poster (though we did, sometimes sneakily taking them down before inspections). Our job was to maintain the property exactly as it was, protecting its investment value by inhabiting it only insofar as we were paying rent, never leaving a trace of ourselves in our wake. Our home was not our own.
This is not an uncommon experience. According to a 2018 Queensland government report, only 37 per cent of tenants felt they could treat their rental property as their home. Meanwhile, 56 per cent of landlords thought they could. It’s not the disparity that’s shocking here, but rather the little conjunction as, the implied counterfactual as if it were. As (if it were) their home, when that is exactly what it is.
There are over two million ‘property investors’ in Australia: that is, people who purchase property they do not intend to live in. Its sole purpose is to make money for its owner; the fact that it also provides shelter is secondary. This is made abundantly clear by how far Australian laws have gone to protect landlords’ property rights, and the abundance of neoliberal government policies (negative gearing and the loosening of foreign investment regulations, to name just two) that have resulted in astronomical house prices and locked millions of people out of the market.
Not everyone can afford, or wants, to own a home, but everyone should be guaranteed a secure, comfortable and affordable place to live.
It’s no surprise, then, that long term renting is on the rise in Australia—as of 2018, around 30 per cent of Australian households were renting. And though there’s been a lot of consternation over the falling rate of home ownership, Australia’s figures are actually on par with many European countries, and surprisingly higher than some. Germany, for example, which is comparable to Australia in terms of cost-of-living to income ratio, has one of the lowest home ownership rates in the developed world at just 50 per cent—a figure that’s remained stable for decades.
Where Australia lags behind, and what causes so much anxiety for tenants, is the lack of renter rights and protections. Not everyone can afford, or wants, to own a home, but everyone should be guaranteed a secure, comfortable and affordable place to live. This is the key difference between Germany and Australia: how much further German laws go towards ensuring that this guarantee is met, a fact I discovered when I ended up stuck in Berlin during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I found an apartment quickly—a huge 130-square-metre, two-bathroom, high-ceilinged, wooden-floored, new-kitchened Wohngemeinschaft (sharehouse) which I shared with five housemates. My room is the smallest in the house, but still easily bigger than most rooms I’ve had in Australia. It’s in a nice area, close to parks, restaurants and public transport. I pay the equivalent of $500 a month, which includes rent, bills, home insurance and a little extra ‘house kitty’. Not only is my new apartment considerably cheaper than anything I could get back home, it’s considerably homier too.
Where Australia lags behind, and what causes so much anxiety for tenants, is the lack of renter rights and protections.
Like most renters in Germany, we are on an indefinite contract and protected from eviction by stringent laws. If our landlord wants to cancel our lease, he has to give us three months’ notice (at least) and provide a legally valid reason. He is required to maintain the property in good condition and make sure that everything works as it’s supposed to. Under German tenancy law, our apartment is our home first and foremost, and my housemates and I have the freedom to treat it as such, including making pretty much whatever reasonable changes we want—installing shelves, painting the walls, affixing a projector and disco ball to the ceiling, even adding demountable walls—so long as we return the apartment to the state we found it in when we move out. We also got a cat without consulting the landlord, since he can’t automatically ban pets (though he can restrict certain kinds of animal).
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Germany’s housing policy was designed in the wake of the Second World War, in response to severely limited housing, nearly worthless currency and fear of re-radicalisation. The laws were intended to ensure as broad a population as possible was adequately housed, meaning: houses and apartments had to meet stringent building requirements, rents were capped, the rental market heavily regulated, and home ownership and speculative investment disincentivised.
World War II also saw Australia introducing rent control, but the protection only lasted a few decades. Since 2008, Australian law has increasingly incentivised property ownership and investment, for example through negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks, and relaxed foreign investment rules. On top of this, Australian laws don’t require new houses and apartments be built to appropriately house a broad range of people and as such, much prime real estate is given over to single-person or single-family accommodation.
While changes move in the right direction, they are only small concessions … nowhere near robust enough to provide tenants fair and equal property rights.
All this has led to skyrocketing property prices, the corresponding rise in long term renting, and, finally, the introduction of new tenancy laws that resemble a (albeit watered-down) version of Germany’s.
The proposed laws differ between states, but there are four general patterns, the first two of which are aimed at providing secure and comfortable housing (and should have been law long before now), while the latter two address fair use:
- Tenants will be better protected against eviction (for example at the end of a fixed-term agreement) and have stronger rights to cancel an agreement without notice in the case of domestic or family violence;
- Landlords must ensure that their properties are ‘structurally sound’ and provide adequate light, ventilation, gas and electricity for their tenants;
- Tenants may keep pets;
- Tenants can make minor modifications to rented property, with consent of the landlord, who cannot unreasonably deny requests.
It’s worth mentioning that these changes have not been codified in all states—Victoria, for example, has quietly delayed its new rental protections, ostensibly due to the pandemic, exactly when they are needed most.
While these changes move in the right direction, they are only small concessions, relying heavily on goodwill and ‘reasonableness’ and nowhere near robust enough to provide tenants fair and equal property rights. And when landlords in the past have refused disabled people the right to make necessary changes to their homes, the various ‘minor modifications’ clauses, with their possibilities for ‘reasonable denial’, hardly seem adequate to address the potential for abuse.
Yet, despite the requirement to first get permission, and despite the significant protections and tax exemptions available to property investors, these small reforms are seen by landlords as a significant risk to their property rights. According to an article in The New Daily, landlord interest groups claim that the reforms are so extreme—that is, reforms allowing tenants to live comfortably and safely in their homes—that they’ll discourage investment and thus drive up rents. The irony seems to be lost on them that investors leave around three per cent of all homes in Australia ‘speculatively vacant’—intentionally empty in order to artificially drive up property values and rent.
Like a lot of tenuously employed under-30s, I don’t especially want to own a house. But I want the right to live in one.
I don’t believe shelter should ever be a for-profit system. It’s a basic human right, like healthcare and education, and should be provided to everyone, free of charge. But to the extent that it is, it must accept its own terms: that the investor bears the risk of property devaluation. (Isn’t that how capitalism’s supposed to work?) By requiring tenants to ask permission to make minor changes (another irony since landlords are allowed to let the house slip into decrepitude), these changes reinforce the unequal power dynamic between landlord and tenant, and the view that renters are liabilities in their own homes—a deeply classist attitude thoroughly inflected with racism, ageism and ableism.
Like a lot of tenuously employed under-30s, I don’t especially want to own a house. But I want the right to live in one. I want to make it a home, to bend it to my shape, and to know that I can, and that no one will take it away from me. If I need to leave, I want to spend time making it ready for the next person, as an act of care for my home and its new residents. This shouldn’t be a radical thing to ask; it should be the status quo.
Allowing tenants to make minor modifications to their home, without permission, is one step towards recognising that a house is a home first, an investment second. But our laws must be pushed far beyond the amendments suggested in order to discourage property investment and speculation and protect against unreasonable rent increases and evictions. Renting in Germany has shown me that this is, in fact, possible; that renting doesn’t have to terrible but can be just as secure and comfortable as home ownership. For increasingly transient and precariously employed young people, such security and comfort is long overdue.
