Without a car, she relies on her mother and grandmother to drive her to viewings, often up and down the coast - 11am in Shellharbour, a dash to Wollongong by 11.45am, then Warrawong at 2pm.

She dresses neatly and carries a glowing reference that shows how she held down a $340-a-week house for four years without incident, until the owner sold.

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Yesterday, after 10 weeks in emergency housing, Miss Pirnar received her 36th rejection and "cried for half an hour".

"My ex-landlord went in to the agent to ask why, and they said it's because I could only afford [properties] under $250," said Miss Pirnar, a sole parent pensioner who lives with two of her children and has custody of the other two on weekends and school holidays.

"I get about $600 a week. [Agency staff] marked off the properties I could afford and they were all one or two bedroom units," she said. "They said these were the only properties my application would get processed on."

A new snapshot of the Illawarra property market shows less than 3 per cent of listed rentals are affordable to people on government assistance without costing more than 30 per cent of their income and placing their household in rental stress.

The results were produced by Anglicare Sydney, which surveyed 722 advertised rental properties in the Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama local government areas on the weekend of April 13-14 and found 19 suitable and affordable for people on income support. Only one property was affordable to single parents with two children.

Anglicare undertook the study to highlight the unmet levels of demand for affordable housing.

Anglicare Illawarra Community Care Manager Andrew Stratford said the issue forced people "to the fringes of society", towards areas where rents were cheaper but services and employment were more scarce.

Mr Stratford believes the snapshot helps make the case for increasing income support.

"Rents have risen faster than income, and Centrelink payments haven't kept pace with average wage earnings anyway," he said.

"The payment is too low for people to even house, clothe and feed themselves and there's no money left over for education, transport, health.

"It becomes a trap. More and more people are ending up in crisis, more people are making decisions about what essentials they can't afford and how much debt they're going to get into."

Miss Pirnar is among more than 53,000 people registered on the NSW social housing waiting list. She considers it her only chance at stable accommodation and is desperate to settle somewhere before Jayden, 4, and Tia, 2, start kindergarten, but has already been waiting for seven years.

"[In emergency housing] Jayden cannot have his own bed, he doesn't have his own toys.

"We have pretty much lived out of a backpack each for the past three months."