Last month, an acquaintance of mine became homeless.
She was evicted from the home she has lived in for years, and after months of trying and failing to get another rental, she was forced to move out with nowhere to go.
She has spent the past few weeks housesitting, crashing with friends, and submitting dozens of rental applications with no success.
If you need proof of how tough it is to be a renter in Australia, consider this - if she keeps getting knocked back by agents, her back-up plan is to set up a crowdfunding site. Stories like these are more common than you might think.
Today, Anglicare Australia launched our annual Rental Affordability Snapshot.
We found that a person working full-time on the minimum wage can afford less than 1 per cent of all rental listings.
Couples with two incomes would have to spend around two-thirds of their income just to make the rent.
Every region in the country is affected. There is simply no part of the country where people on low incomes can afford to rent.
With such high rates of rental stress and no savings buffer, any of these Australians could find themselves in the same situation as my colleague - evicted and forced to move out with nowhere to go.
If workers are doing it tough on full-time wages, spare a thought for those living on Centrelink payments. They can afford zero per cent of all rentals. Across the entire country, we found just three affordable rentals for someone on JobSeeker, all rooms in sharehouses, out of 45,000 listings. For someone on Youth Allowance, there were none.
People trying to live on these diabolically low payments can get stuck in a limbo that becomes permanent, couch-surfing with friends and family for years at a time.
Each year when I do the interview rounds to promote our snapshot, I get two kinds of responses. Most journalists, commentators, and talkback callers are appalled by results like these.
Some share their own stories of housing stress, like their struggles to find a rental they can afford or being stuck in sharehouses into their forties.
But then we hear from a government spokesperson. They assure us that they're making progress with small-time policies like HomeBuilder grants under the previous government. The current government has been promoting its Housing Australia Future Fund and Help to Buy legislation.
Both of these are useful, positive steps. Up to 30,000 homes could be built through the fund, and the Help to Buy scheme would be available to up to 10,000 renters if it's passed.
But here's the problem. The housing crisis isn't just affecting tens of thousands of people.
It's affecting millions. More than 3 million people fall into the household types we profile in our snapshot.
And those are just people on the lowest incomes. New evidence shows that even people earning up to $110,000 are in rental stress.
Australia's housing crisis has climbed the income ladder to the point where only the wealthiest among us can avoid housing stress. Small steps simply won't cut it. It's time for major reforms that match the scale of what we're facing.
We need to change Australia's unfair tax system, which is pushing up costs for both buyers and renters. We need to raise the rate of Centrelink payments that are hurting renters on the lowest incomes.
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And most of all, we need to get government back in the business of building and providing homes itself.
Decade after decade of market failure has shown that the private sector simply won't deliver affordable housing on its own.
These changes might look tough politically. But before long, the status quo will become even more toxic, threatening everything from Australia's social cohesion through to our current political order.
People shouldn't have to crowdfund to get a decent rental. It should be the government's responsibility to make sure Australians have decent homes they can afford. It's time to stop tinkering at the edges and demand the bold reforms we need.
- Kasy Chambers is the executive director of Anglicare Australia.
