Anglicare's Rental Affordability Snapshot released this week has shown how dire Australia's housing crisis has become.
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According to South East Women And Children Services (SEWACS) south east youth accommodation service program manager Kylie Furnell if you used the snapshot's definition of what was affordable "there is never going to be any properties" in the Bega Valley and she described the crisis as "critical, especially for young people".
"About 70 per cent of our client base we are trying to assist to find find rentals, knowing there's not much available," she said.
The snapshot found across the nation two per cent of rental properties were affordable for a single person working full time on a minimum wage.
Three out of four rental properties were out of the reach of a couple who were both earning a minimum wage with two young children.
Also, about three per cent of properties were affordable for a couple on the aged pension and only two properties in the whole country were affordable for a job seeker surviving on the Newstart allowance.
Anglicare's snapshot stated rent needed to be no more than 30 percent of a household budget for it to be considered affordable.
But Ms Furnell said it was "almost impossible" to find an affordable house like this, with some of SEWACS' clients never finding one at all.
"People are forced to spend way over that 30 per cent in order to get a roof over their heads," she said.
Most of her organisation's clients ended up couchsurfing, she said.
The Bega District News conducted a survey of rental website Domain for its own snapshot of affordable rentals in the Bega Valley, using the postcodes 2546, 2548, 2550 and 2551.
According to the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, the national minimum wage is currently $719.20 per week, 30 per cent of which is about $215.
On Tuesday, April 30, the BDN found 71 properties listed for rent on Domain in the four postcodes.
But of them only five were priced at under $250 per week - three in Eden and one each in Merimbula and Coolagolite.
Out of those rentals, two were only one bedroom properties.
This may show the difficultly it is for someone working on the minimum wage to find an affordable rental, but the issue becomes even greater for someone on Newstart.
While Newstart is paid fortnightly, per week it equals $277 for a single person with no children and $300 for a single person with children.
Ms Furnell said the housing crisis needed to be addressed at a state and federal government level, saying policies were needed around Airbnb and empty properties.
"More people are not utilising their properties for permanent rentals," she said.
"Someone might buy an investment property and have it empty for most of the year, just have people rent for two nights a week a get top dollar on Airbnb."