Mouldy Walls, Glad Wrap Windows, Swamp Backyard: One Weekend Looking for a Place to Rent in Melbourne

Australia is in the middle of a housing crisis. Anyone under the age of 35 and without some charitable (and already wealthy) parents to hook them up is resigned to a life of rent, and even that way of living can see people living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Diaries from the Housing Crisis is a series focused on the reality of housing in this country. Renting, buying, landlords, sharehouses… it’s pretty far from where it should be, but it is reality.

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Ella, Melbourne

Saturday, June 17th — Fitzroy North, 3 beds, $800 per week

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m queasy from the wine last night. I roll out of bed and dig through my closet for my most straight-edged fit. I need it to scream “I have my shit together” so loudly that it drowns out our tattoos and micro bangs.

It’s our first rental inspection since we decided to find a new house together – me and my two friends.

We all work a bizarre choreography of entry-level, part-time, casual jobs. We have a  studying-post-grad-on-Centrelink sort of vibe. Our budget is tight, but we’ll make it work. We always do.

The house is promising. It’s on the outskirts of Brunswick (points for being close to friends, bars and the supermarket – the holy trinity). For $800 per week, we would need to recruit a fourth housemate. The house has a study that could be a bedroom, but it’s a literal shoebox with a glass sliding door that opens onto the living room. That room would have to be dirt cheap for the poor soul that ends up in it, hiking up the price for the other rooms.

No-go, we agree.

Saturday, June 24th – Northcote, 4 beds, $700 per week

Fuck yeah, what a price. It’s not just affordable but would leave room for fiscal frivolities. The house looks a bit rough around the edges, but the bar is generously low.

I ride my bike there early to stake my claim at the front gate, dishing out awkward smiles to the other share-house groups that gather behind me. Deep down we all know it’s kill or be killed, so I call upon the gods to make all their applications shit.

My friends arrive and commend me on holding down the fort at the front of the line. The real estate agent unlocks the door, and we all shuffle in.

The rooms at the front of the house are epic, they have floorboards and cute fireplaces. And then we see it: one bedroom has glad wrap over the window instead of glass. The laundry ceiling is covered in mould. The door to the backyard has come off its hinges and stands next to the doorway like an off-duty bouncer. The backyard resembles Shrek’s swamp more than it does a lawn (puzzled, I note that there hasn’t been much rain in the past week).

The prerequisite for gumboots to enter our backyard is enough for us to land on a firm no. The search continues.

Saturday, July 15th – Brunswick, 3 beds, $750 per week

My friends are both away visiting their families. As the last remaining soldier in the state, I carry the torch for the day.

The house is on a very hectic and traffic-y road. My headphones have died so I stand at the front gate, raw dogging the sound of the post-industrial world. The real estate agent is half an hour late.

One group has had enough of waiting and dips. This is great news – they looked at least five years older than me (and five years ahead in savings). The property manager finally rocks up and I put my game face on.

The house is cute. The traffic isn’t too loud from inside, and it’s all structurally sound. It has a formal living room (score), so we could bring in a fourth housemate. There’s a weird nook with enough space for a couch in-lieu of a living room.

I have no real questions about the house, but I freestyle to sound like I know my shit. “So… there’s split-system in all the rooms?”.

We apply. We don’t get it.

Saturday, July 29th – Thornbury, 5 beds, $850 per week

Maybe it’s time to hang up the Salomons on inner-North living. Every house in the curated bubble of upper-middle-class grunge is way beyond our budget now.

It costs to have the sweet scent of mango vape waft past your window, and to see more pierced noses than not in the local fruit shop.

Our group chat is full of inspired calculations: maybe if we had an extra person in the study… what if we insulated the garage enough for it to be a bedroom? Once upon a time, this would have been our golden ticket. But not anymore. Even with our game of bedroom Tetris, we can’t afford 90% of these properties.

What would I do if I couldn’t fare-evade my way to spend $17.50 on a glass of chilled red?

Would the world as we know it halt if my white-wall-black-Lululemon yoga studio was more than a fixed-gear bike ride away?

We hike to Thornbury (one suburb over) to find out.

The house is a bit dingey, but it’s insanely cheap. The church next door owns it. They either haven’t heard of the rental crisis or have decided to maintain their 2017 rent prices out of the kindness of their hearts (love thy neighbour I guess?).

We apply and we get it. My friends love it, but I freak at the last minute.

The house is close enough to trams, but too far out for cycling to remain my main form of transport. Myki fares have just increased, so a round-trip each workday would be an extra $200 a month.

The chats are tense, we’re all emotionally drained after almost two months of house hunting. We decide not to take it.

Battered and bruised, we regroup.

Thursday, 24th August

At work, I get an email from a property manager. After 10 weeks, almost 20 inspections, and enlisting my older (full-time-employed) brother to hop on our application – we’ve secured a house.

It’s on the border of Northcote and Brunswick East – central enough to ride my bike to work. All the windows have glass, it’s not on a main road and there’s no visible mould. It’s a cute 3-bedroom house for $950 per week (eeek), but you guessed it, we’ll make it a 5.

The garage will be our living room, or as we call it – the glounge. 

Ella Katz is a writer from Melbourne. Read more of their work here and follow them on Instagram here.