Housing crisis: Homeless families forced to live in tents as Albany grapples with State's lowest vacancy rate

The housing crisis in one of WA’s biggest regional centres is so bad that young families are being forced to pitch tents in their relatives’ backyards or squeeze into overcrowded homes with their parents. As WA battles an unprecedented rental crisis, Albany’s 0.5 per cent vacancy rate is the lowest in the State, according to the Real Estate Institute of WA. Less than a fortnight since the end of the State Government’s emergency rental laws, more and more renters are being squeezed out of their homes and into a shockingly competitive market. Courtney Rickert has been looking for a home for her and her four-year-old daughter Georgia since November when they were told their rental property would be demolished and they had to leave. Her daughter has been living in her grandmother’s home, while Ms Rickert sleeps in a tent in the backyard. Now expecting her second child, Ms Rickert said the battle to find a rental was taking a toll on her mental health. “It has been bloody hard,” she said. “With rental prices going up and up, it is just astronomical. “I’ve always suffered from my mental health but since being in the tent it has gone downhill. “I am really lucky that I can be in my mum’s backyard so I know that I am still safe, which I am thankful for. But it’s just, how much longer can you keep going?” Ms Rickert said with so few properties available for lease within her budget, she had only been able to view four houses and apply for two. “Other people are offering more money, which is great if you can, but some people just can’t,” she said. As well as checking rental websites several times a day, Ms Rickert is on the priority waiting list for public housing but said she was expecting to face a five-year wait. She is not alone. As of February 28, there were 456 people on the wait list for public housing in Albany, of whom 87 were priority applications, according to the Department of Communities. The average wait times for these properties were 122 weeks for general applications and 50 for priority-listed applicants, executive director of service delivery Lindsay Hale said. Currently, 46 of the 911 public housing properties in Albany are vacant. “At any given time, a small percentage of public housing properties are vacant for reasons including: undergoing refurbishment or major maintenance; maintenance between tenancies; awaiting allocation to new tenants; awaiting occupation and earmarked for allocation to a community housing provider,”Mr Hale said. Ben Smith and his partner Laura Stoney spent seven months looking for a rental before their lease expired on March 30. With four children aged between eight months and seven years old, they are now living with Laura’s parents. “The uncertainty of what’s going to happen and how it is going to work is a little bit worrying,” Mr Smith said. “Especially because now we have eight people in a small house, the tension can sometimes get a bit high. We will keep looking, but the way things are going I don’t know if we will find anything soon.” Mr Smith said it had been a battle to even make it through the door for a rental inspection, with intense competition for homes within their budget. “Half the time, by the time we managed to even get to a real estate agent to drop an application off, it has already gone,” he said. “We’ve even had times we have organised a viewing and then we’ve been contacted later to say the viewing is off, because it has been leased.” Clara Stewart’s family of six have been looking for a home for two months after their rental was sold. They have been living in her parents’ four-bedroom home since January. “Looking for a house has become rather stressful, not only for us but also for others as we see quite a few families viewing the same houses we view,” she said. “The prices are very daunting ... I really feel like giving up as there isn’t much for us to be looking at. “It is really taking it’s toll on all of us. “All we are wanting is a place to call home, to have our own space ... for our children to be free and grow.” One Albany grandmother, who requested not to be named, is desperately looking for a home for her family after being told they needed to be out of her rental property by next week. She had originally been looking for a home for her daughter, before she got the news her lease was going to end. “We’ve had knockback, after knockback since then — I’ve had five in the last week,” she said. The woman said her family of five, which includes an adult daughter with a disability and baby granddaughter, had nowhere to go. “It is just stressing me out to no end, I am not sleeping properly, I am not really eating properly,” she said. “I’m looking at having to split my family just to get a roof over our heads.” Some people are turning their backs on the traditional real estate market to secure a home. With an aim to escape an “unaffordable” rental cycle, Albany woman Michelle Hassell and her husband have been searching for a home to buy for their family for 10 months. Two days after the moratorium ended, they were issued an official termination notice for their rental. “Renting has been a really horrible, stressful situation for us,” she said. “It was really, really disappointing and disheartening and it placed a huge amount of pressure and stress on our family, we couldn’t believe that we ended up in this situation.” In the end, she turned to her neighbours to see if they would sell their home and by “sheer luck” found a home to purchase. After emerging from the other side of a 10-month battle to find a home, she urged landlords and real estate agents to show understanding. “A little bit of compassion could go a long way ... where people’s families and lives are genuinely on the line because they have reached this critical point of facing genuine homelessness,” Ms Hassell said. “Luckily we could find our way out but I think there are a lot more people out there who are not going to be this fortunate.” Albany based Pivot Support Services chief executive Ian Neil said peak disadvantage would “probably be in two or three months time”. He urged those in need to seek help now. Pivot’s COVID-19 relief fund, backed by $500,000 from the State Government through Lotterywest, offers three streams of support to people in crisis across the Great Southern including help for those in housing distress or debt. “When people feel that they are getting themselves into difficulty in relation to paying rent or household expenditure, we want them to contact us sooner rather than later,” Mr Neil said. Albany Community Legal Centre principal solicitor Tameka Brown encouraged tenants to “be proactive and seek out early advice and assistance”. Ms Brown said people who were caught in the rental crisis could contact the Albany Community Legal Centre, Circle Green Community Legal or Consumer Protection. If you are in crisis and need help now, call Lifeline 13 11 14.