Illawarra affordable housing advocate Michele Adair is fearful.
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Two new reports in recent days have highlighted the "rental crisis crippling" regions such as the Illawarra, but Ms Adair fears the NSW Government will follow the lead of the federal government and offer no solutions in next week's Budget.
"I'm very fearful that the NSW budget will continue to ignore this very very, not only significant social issue but they will again ignore the opportunity to create jobs and to sustainably invest in the community through a direct capital investment in social and affordable housing," she said.
Wearing her Community Housing Industry Association NSW (CHIA NSW) chair hat, Ms Adair called for urgent action to address the state's social housing waiting list, which has over 50,000 households waiting for up to 10 years or more for safe, secure and affordable housing.
She was particularly upset at figures showing there were 2438 Illawarra households on a waitlist in 2020, and the region recorded a 62 per cent drop in private rental vacancies from 799 (2019) to 302 (2020).
"We are equally concerned for the number of households that have been pushed further and further to the brink of poverty because of the escalation in rent," Ms Adair said.
"They are the people we refer to being in housing stress and they are the ones that are only one bit of bad luck away from homelessness and really severe poverty. They are already living in significant poverty as a consequence of paying too much in rent.
They are the people we refer to being in housing stress and they are the ones that are only one bit of bad luck away from homelessness and really severe poverty.
- CHIA NSW Chair Michele Adair
"Recent data shows that on average a renter is paying nearly $6000 a year above what they should be comfortably paying if they're on a media wage."
Ms Adair also worried a new report called "Housing: Taming the Elephant in the Economy", released by the University of NSW on Wednesday, wouldn't be taken seriously by the government.
"The issue is whether or not the government will actually respond to the research, which points to three very significant issues which both the state and federal governments need to address," she said.
"The first is that the current runaway price rises that we are experiencing in both the rental and purchasing market is in fact destabilising the economy and is creating very significant risk to all communities, including regional communities like the Illawarra.
"The second issue of very significant concern is that without adequate housing policy there is no link between the investment that is going into particularly personal home ownership.
"What that means is that the economy is failing to realise real productivity gains and economic growth, because the money is just sitting in personal wealth creation, it is not stimulating jobs and it is not stimulating economic growth which is clearly very limiting.
"The third issue is that the growth in the housing market is misaligned to where jobs and employment need to be and so there is no link between where people can live and live affordably and where they are actually able to work.
"Those three things should be raising real alarm bells at all levels of government.
Those three things should be raising real alarm bells at all levels of government.
- CHIA NSW Chair Michele Adair
"But this data has been presented to the federal government and to the NSW state government now for a number of years without any action.
"The federal government failed to do anything at all in its budget a couple of weeks ago on housing.
"We have just seen yesterday that the Queensland government has committed over $2 billion to social housing following the lead of the Victorian government last year which committed over $5 billion to social housing.
"And yet I'm very fearful that the NSW budget will do little, if anything at all on social housing."
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