In times of crisis, home is the safest place to be. The nature of the COVID-19 crisis in particular means that to keep ourselves and our communities safe, we must stay at home. The UN Special Rapporteur for Housing says our homes have become the ‘front line defence against the coronavirus’.
But as up to a million jobs disappear and the people who worked them struggle to access Centrelink in person or online, our homes suddenly don’t seem so safe. A third of private renters are already in housing stress and 30 per cent don’t have $500 in savings. For many, the next rent payment is past due, their landlords won’t negotiate, and there’s a sense of panic in the air.
Governments have been unable to avoid enacting measures to support people to keep their homes. In Australia, following pressure from a from a community coalition led by tenants’ unions and homelessness organisations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that states and territories will be imposing a six-month moratorium on evictions of tenants impacted by COVID-19. A number of states, cities, and counties in the United States led by mayors and governors from both major parties had already suspended evictions, as had the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.
So it would seem that many of us, on all sides of politics, agree that evicting someone from their home because an emergency circumstance beyond their control has affected their ability to pay their rent on time is morally questionable at best. And yet, before COVID-19, this was something we allowed to happen all the time.
We have an epidemic of evictions in Australia. ‘Housing crisis‘ — which includes events like evictions and sudden rent increases causing rental arrears — is the third most common cause of homelessness in Victoria and the fastest growing cause of homelessness nationwide, rising 32 per cent between 2015 and 2017.
Tens of thousands of eviction applications are made by landlords every year, and the vast majority of these are not for damage, nuisance, or use for illegal purpose, but for simple rental arrears. In 2017-18 in Victoria and New South Wales alone, landlords applied to evict 47,962 households. 37,772 — nearly 80 per cent — of those eviction applications were lodged because the household had fallen behind on their rent.
'If we agree that no one should lose their home when a global health crisis has cut their hours, then let’s agree that no one should lose their safe place to shelter because they’ve been made redundant, or because they had a series of unexpected healthcare expenses.'
Even worse, many of those evicted are people who will find it hardest to find homes again. Public housing authorities are two to four times more likely to try and evict their tenants than private landlords. As a result, the number of people being evicted directly into homelessness has more than doubled over the past five years. In Victoria, some of the most shocking cases have included the Department of Health and Human Services evicting a woman with an acquired brain injury because the sound of her partner abusing her represented a ‘nuisance’ breach.
Like so many of the other social norms exposed by COVID-19, it doesn’t need to be this way. Australia’s private rental market has been progressively deregulated since the 1950s, but other countries have started to demand more from private landlords.
In Scotland, for example, landlords have to satisfy a ‘reasonableness requirement’ for evicting a tenant. As part of that process they are required to complete a ‘pre-eviction checklist’ that shows they considered alternatives to eviction, spoke to the tenant about the issue to which the planned eviction relates, worked with the tenant to consider alternatives to eviction such as payment plans or a temporary rent freeze, or referred the tenant to support services or financial counselling. The checklist reduced evictions by 33 per cent in its first year.
If we agree that no one should lose their home when a global health crisis has cut their hours, then let’s agree that no one should lose their safe place to shelter because they’ve been made redundant, or because they had a series of unexpected healthcare expenses, or because their social security payment was frozen through no fault of their own, or any one of the countless other emergencies that deplete our savings and make that next rent payment harder to meet. Let’s extend protections against eviction past the COVID-19 crisis into a future where we recognise that our homes are more than a financial asset for our landlords.
Abigail Lewis is a Research Associate and Communications Manager at public policy think tank Per Capita. Her policy research areas include social policy, social security, social housing, and social justice. She tweets at @AbigailLLew
Main image: Main image: Woman in house (Getty Images/Basak Gurbuz Derman)