BLAKE:

The house was actually quite lovely when we moved in there. We lived there for seven years. But yeah, it was over that time. We saw about three owners take over and one by one they just all treated it like a cash cow and never put anything back into it and just let it go to rot.

Hello, my name is Blake Hesketh, and I formerly lived in the worst rental in Australia.

ANGE:

Blake’s a renter in Melbourne. And there isn’t an official title or trophy for the worst rental property in Australia. It’s actually a title that Blake was given by the Daily Mail, after his house went viral. We’ll get to that story later.

BLAKE:

So we found out eventually, the plumbing from my shower was not connected and was just like draining into the ground below and created quite like a nice little pond, I guess you could say, underneath the house.

ANGE:

Still, if there were an Olympics for atrocious rentals, Blake’s previous home in Melbourne would be on the leaderboard.

BLAKE:

Also the showers were leaking from the tiles and that caused none of the tiles and that had been maintained to fix, all the water was leaking in through the walls.
The whole house was wet, you know, like gross sponge. You don't want to touch any kitchen. It's. Imagine that, but your whole carpet.

ANGE:

In other words. Blake was paying to live in a swamp.

BLAKE:

It was like an op shop smell on steroids. Just became a giant joke in the end.

Like, this is the state of… housing these days.

ANGE:

In Australia, there’s something I like to call a tenant’s triangle. And that’s partly based on my own experiences, but I think that nobody can have all three of these things: a good and responsive landlord, a safe and well-looked after home, and affordable rent.

Some people have one, if you’re lucky you’ll have two, but it’s next to impossible that you’ll have the trifecta.

Blake barely had one of those things. And even though he’s just one guy, his story is emblematic of a generational shift.

With home ownership out of reach, more of our generation has no choice but to rent, and for much longer than our parents ever did, maybe for the rest of our lives.

That puts us at the mercy of landlords and is making some of us intensely angry.

In this episode, we’ll meet the people trying to make it better: the people who are mobilising, taking things into their own hands, and fighting back.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is the Great Housing Disaster, a special series from 7am. This is episode two - the renters’ resistance.

And just a heads up, this episode contains some coarse language.

For seven years, Blake did everything tenants are told to do when there’s issues with a property.

BLAKE:

We took notes down of everything, especially when the last owner took over, alright, maybe with a new owner, we could possibly get a fresh start, and start again, things like a heater and stow, all these barely minimal. So when they took over, we started taking notes and then sending them, we need to get this updated. This is not good. Like your plumbing's leaking and that.

ANGE:

At this point, Blake was getting frustrated so he started documenting his home and posting it on his personal social media, for kicks.

BLAKE:

I just put it on my, like, close friends list, joke about it one by one. Everyone kept mentioning Purple Pingers, Purple Pingers.

ANGE:

I had a similar experience to Blake. Not living in a swamp, but after I mentioned that I was working on a series about housing, I was repeatedly told by friends to talk to Purple Pingers.

Purple Pingers is a guy on the internet whose real name is Jordan Van Den Berg.

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“Hello, welcome back to Shit Rentals with your host Purple Pingers today we’re in Penshurst for $540 a week.”

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“Today we’re in Northcote for $850 per week.”

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“Hello, welcome back to the hellscape that we live in.”

ANGE:

His videos are super deadpan, stark, no frills commentary on the state of the rental market in Australia. And they’ve made him into a kind of unlikely renter’s rights champion from his studio apartment.

The videos will often just be him, and a domain listing of a horrible rental home in the background. They’d be really funny if they weren’t so depressing.

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“Welcome to affordable housing in Melbourne this will be your bedroom, it doesn’t come with curtains but it does come with cupboards and a light that makes it look like the whole room is covered in piss.”

ANGE:

And Jordan didn’t set out to become a rental advocate. He’s just a 28 year old with a day job who decided to upload videos one day. I went to visit Jordan at his place to meet him and his three cats.

JORDAN:

He’s like 16 years old and he doesn’t have a single brain cell…

ANGE:

And I asked him about the Purple Pingers thing.

JORDAN:

So in year ten, I got an Xbox, and was making a gamertag. And Purple Monkey dishwasher was a big thing, but that name was taken, and also pingers was quite a funny word and that's how that happened.

ANGE:

And now it's stuck.

JORDAN:

Yeah. And I regret it every day since then.

ANGE:

After gaining a huge following, Jordan has gotten used to being hit up by strangers, not only does he get thousands of DMs from tenants venting about their landlords or their homes, he’ll go and visit some of the worst ones and record video tours through mouldy bedrooms and broken floorboards and sagging ceilings.

And that's exactly how he met Blake, it was just another DM in his inbox.

JORDAN:

I remember someone was like, hey, do you want to come visit our house? And usually what I do is I will then call the person. And I called this tenant, and he was like, oh, yeah, like, do you wanna have a look? The house is pretty bad. And I was like, okay, I trust you. And then it was literally the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. So yeah, I wasn't expecting that even remotely.

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“So these tenants have been living here for seven years, the property is pretty fucked you’ll see shortly.”

JORDAN:

Oh, God, it was so bad. That was like plants growing through asbestos. Like exposed asbestos in the kitchen. Just like the splashback was just asbestos
The house was, like, literally falling apart as they lived it, like a gas leak, all that kind of stuff. And then the landlord raised the rent. The gas inspector came out to do the mandatory gas and electrical safety check was like, I'm glad this house has so many holes in it, otherwise you would all be dead.

Audio excerpt – Jordan:

“The microphones up here, so I don’t know if you can hear the squidges but….. Squelch sounds….it’s pretty fucking great.”

JORDAN:

We didn't realise how bad it got on us. Until we saw people's reactions. We found pictures of the house on like Chinese social media pages, Indian social media pages, even like Indian newspaper sites. It spread really far really quickly, like we noticed people were like, just walking past taking photos of the house and not being like, oh, that's the house, from the internet.

ANGE:

After Jordan’s video of Blake’s house was going viral… the Herald Sun came round to take photos, the Daily Mail wrote a story titled ‘Is this Australia’s worst rental’?, and A Current Affair came knocking.

Audio excerpt – A Current Affairs:

“The face of homelessness is changing its mums, dads and kids, people with jobs who can pay rent, just can’t find anywhere to live.”

ANGE:

The camera crews documented the place, and the reporter wrote some puns for their voice over track.

Audio excerpt – A Current Affairs:

“A smoke detector which is quite alarming, walls exactly what they’re cracked up to be, and dark board floor patches covering an indoor water way, tenants here recently had the rent upped from 1600 a week to 1800.”

ANGE:

When the story went to air on TV, Blake and his friends gathered around to watch it.

BLAKE:

It kind of came on and went from like celebrations and claps to like, get them to like the end of the segment. Everyone in the going to be like, that's fucked.

Everyone around me is like, struggling to find rentals or get anywhere ahead of it, or find a settling position, like a good 50% of us have given up on the other ever owning property. I’ve had a good ten plus friends in the last couple of years move out of town.

So yeah, I’ve lost a couple of friends to this crisis in some way, shape or form.

ANGE:

Blake’s story might be the most dramatic that Jordan, or Purple Pingers the rental advocate, has ever dealt with but with about a third of Australians renting a home, it’s just one of many.

JORDAN:

Because everyone's had a bad experience with the landlord, no matter who you are in Australia.

ANGE:

Renters love Jordan’s videos. But they quickly pissed off real estate agents and landlords, and Jordan started getting angry and threatening letters from them.

JORDAN:

Usually what I say is, feel free to send me a concern notice, which is the first step to commencing defamation proceedings. And I've never received one yet.

ANGE:

Jordan isn’t deterred, in fact seeing so many awful and in some cases illegal rentals has inspired him to go bigger.

JORDAN:

There were just so many kinds of stories coming in, and I didn't have one the time to do it and like to I wanted people to be able to tell their own stories without going through some white person on the internet. So that's when I started Shitrentals.

ANGE:

Jordan’s website Shitrentals.org is basically like google reviews for rental properties.

You can submit a review of what your rental was actually like compared to the shiny real estate listing photos. And it’s growing quickly, their database now has reviews from every state and territory.

What Jordan’s doing with Shitrentals is part of what you might think of as a renters’ resistance: Forced into the rental market, unable to see a way out, and feeling helpless. Writing reviews is an exercise in clawing back a power imbalance that defines renting: where landlords get to know everything about you when applying for a property, but you have no idea what they’ll be like if you live there.

And Jordan’s work in this space is kind of revelatory, it’s caught the interest of some pretty high powered people.

Audio excerpt – Nathan Lambert:

“I did have an exchange the other day with Purple Pingers about this issue. I am not sure how Hansard will record ‘Purple Pingers’, but he is an online personality.”

ANGE:

That’s Victorian Labor MP for Preston - Nathan Lambert.

Audio excerpt – Nathan Lambert:

“It is true that under the current laws we are very concerned with renters rights and as such it is not possible to rent out a property that does not meet the minimum standard, but it is strictly speaking possible to advertise that property.”

ANGE:

Nathan spoke in Victorian Parliament earlier this year in support of an amendment to a bill that would provide Victorian renters with more rights, but Jordan thinks they’re not doing enough.

JORDAN:

Government agencies generally are very keen to have a chat. And then government ministers are less so. The government agencies that are doing the job like regulating and providing policy recommendations and stuff that they're very keen to chat. So that's really I welcome that. But it also shows that the government itself don't want to hear what renters are experiencing, because they think they know what they're doing. And it's quite clear from the stuff that I'm doing that it's not working.

ANGE:

Despite governments being interested in what Jordan’s doing, he says that most politicians can’t really relate to how dire the problem is.

JORDAN:

They are landlords, it’s quite simple. If you look at a judge deciding a case on something where they had a conflict of interest, they would have to recuse themselves from the decision. But we’ve got landlords in Parliament deciding legislation, writing legislation about things that impact them and their home ownership and they’re the ones writing and passing the legislation. That's the reason we’re not going to see any change that positively helps renters, because they’re not renters.

So. Yeah, until they do their job. I'm happy to keep doing this.

ANGE:

Blake, the tenant who lived in Australia's worst rental, was ultimately evicted. It was a long time coming, as the landlord admitted they needed to clean up the place.

Still, in this rental game, Blake was the loser, even though he’d done all the right things.

He contacted his local MP, who was keen to help him when she saw the viral video of his house. That went nowhere. He’d obviously bugged his property manager and landlord to fix the conditions he was living in. Again nowhere.

In the rental crisis, the official channels to support tenants are often dead ends.

So out of the people that you contacted and sort of reached out to. Was Jordan, was he the most useful person that you've reached out to in the end?

BLAKE:

Yeah. Definitely.

Like it was very good to have an outlet like Jordan. You could literally do a video like that. And get all my internals screaming out in some way, shape or form.

And there's a reason why it hasn't changed. And it's been crooked for so long that like unfortunately, I think all these years of damage is just going to take just as amount of time to fix it up. And I think we're at the peak of this mess where it will get pretty rough for people out there in the next couple of years.

ANGE:

So Blake had finally left his rental home and all of its mould and asbestos behind. But what had happened to him in the swampy house, and how he tried to resist it, would actually go on to haunt him. That’s coming up after the break.

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Audio excerpt – Channel 7:

“Sydney is at risk of becoming a city without grandchildren. That's the dire warning from experts tonight as the housing crisis forces young families and workers to leave in droves.”

ANGE:

If you’re a renter, I don’t need to tell you how competitive the market is right now, you’ll know by the lines of hopeful tenants queuing at open homes on Saturday mornings.

Of course, it’s not just anecdotal evidence. Renters are living in a record-breaking time.

Audio excerpt – Channel 10:

“New data has revealed Australians' rental crisis is worsening across the country with the number of listings almost halving over the past year.”

Audio excerpt – Channel 7:

“Almost half a million families have now been forced onto rental assistance.”

Audio excerpt – Channel 10:

“Demand is far outstripping supply and that’s causing rents to jump even higher.”

ANGE:

Across Australia’s capital cities, rents have increased a lot: they’re up 17% over the past 12 months. And there’s also a scarcity of properties, only about 1% of rentals around the country are vacant.

These conditions mean that landlords and real estate agents can be really selective about who gets to rent a property. You basically have to be a perfect tenant to have a chance against everyone else.

For someone like Blake, who had been evicted, and whose name was everywhere on the internet for being an unhappy tenant… he was no longer perfect, in the eyes of some landlords.

And while trying to find a new place, he ended up becoming homeless.

BLAKE:

Yeah. Well, homeless for three months there, because those were knock backs.
And then in the end I realised that, due to the video my name personally was pretty much on like, nearly every second dartboard of every real estate agent’s house.

ANGE:

Oh, so you think you were blacklisted?

BLAKE:

We found that blacklisted. We always paid rent, the community loved us. We done nothing wrong. Like more than happy to pay more rent. And then out of nowhere, because I managed to ask for the bare minimum. Now I'm blacklisted.

ANGE:

Blacklisting is another way that illustrates the power imbalance that exists between renters and landlords.

It’s a mechanism that can be used against renters, but renters can’t do it against landlords unless they submit a review to the shit rentals site we mentioned before.

It’s an issue that interests Dr Sophia Maalsen, a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.

SOPHIA:

I research the private rental sector. And the housing market.

ANGE:

Is actually like a blacklist or is that a myth?

SOPHIA:

No, no, there's tenant databases with blacklisting of tenants. Tenants are put on that, for example, if they're evicted or whatever the landlord can enter them. And then property managers and landlords can refer to this database. And if you're applying, refuse you on that, you know, you're on that database.

There are things that you can do. You should be able to be, given a reason as to why you've been put on that database. You should be able to access it, challenge it. But a lot of people don't know this, and that has real impacts, right? Because it has a serious impact on you finding future housing.

ANGE:

As well as being an expert, Sophia teaches young people every day and seeing the impact the rental crisis is having on them is just as shocking as what she finds in her research.

SOPHIA:

I asked my students, like, how many of you share a house? Barely any of them, because they can't afford to. So they stay at home. They live with mom and dad. So that's one key area where you learn to be independent. You learn to negotiate sharing with other people who aren't your family and resolve conflicts and be less of a dick. I know, you know, like all of that kind of stuff happens in those spaces and they've been taken away.

ANGE:

And it’s not just that young people are living with their parents for longer, Sophia said the rental crisis is upending the typical milestones of adult life like starting a family.

Many are delaying that choice and some can’t afford to at all. And then there’s evidence that those who do become parents are increasingly forced to raise children in shared houses.

That was heard last year, at a parliamentary inquiry into housing stress.

Audio excerpt – Inquiry:

“I declare open this hearing of the Senate community affairs reference committees inquiry into the worsening rental crisis in Australia.”

ANGE:

One woman called Ada said she worked full time in the public service, she’d lived in pretty stable share houses for years, but when she became pregnant decided it was time to move into her own place. She spent three months attending inspections… but eventually she had to give up.

Audio excerpt – Ada:

“And at that stage I thought, you know, it's kind of unreasonable to plan to move when after 32 weeks pregnant or when you've got a newborn. It's not ideal.”

ANGE:

Ada ended up asking her housemate to move out and become temporarily homeless for 6 weeks while she settled her newborn baby in a house that was freezing. It cost $13 a day just to heat it above 8 degrees.

Audio excerpt – Ada:

“So I hold myself up in the room I converted into the nursery. The smallest room, the easiest to heat. It's got bubble wrap on the windows. The vents are covered over with plastic. The doors are reinforced. And so that room I could heat up to a comfortable temperature. And the rest of the house I would take to 10 to 12 degrees. The only time I've heated the whole house this entire winter is when I was in labour, when I thought as a special treat, let's turn on the central heating we’ll go 20 degrees.”

ANGE:

Stories like Ada’s are becoming more and more common. And long term insecure renting can have a real impact on people’s health.
One study from the University of Adelaide found evidence that renting was even worse for our health than smoking.
And because of the rising cost of housing, Sophia points out that more and more people have to rent.

SOPHIA:

We're also seeing because it is such a competitive market, a trickle down effect where people who once would have been buying homes are having to rent, so they're taking out the higher end of the rental market. They've got more disposable income, which pushes people who would have been, you know, able to afford a nice rental further down. And we find those people at the bottom end increasingly being displaced. So, more likely to fall into homelessness, which includes living in cars, couch surfing, things like that. So it's having this cascading trickle down effect across the whole spectrum of the rental market.

ANGE:

Sophia says Australian society is just not really set up to have so many people renting, we’re a country that’s been designed for homeowners.

SOPHIA:

To be a good citizen means you're also owning your own home. So if you're not, you've failed in some way. When you think about the way that even our retirement policy is organised, it's all based on the assumption that you own your own home by the time that you're retired. So, that your house is an asset. If you want to go into a retirement village or you need care, you sell your home to pay for that.

In other countries, renting is normalised, but the the system itself is set up in a way that you have that security, this everybody knows clearly, you know, what the expectations and obligations are as tenants and what the obligations as landlords. And, it's, it's much more clear cut. And you're not looked down upon for being a renter.

ANGE:

And now with so many people missing out on climbing the property ladder and still renting, their resistance is now becoming political.

Audio excerpt – Sky News:

“Just one point I think is worth making on these numbers is the growing influence of the rental vote. Keep in mind that ⅓ of Australians are renting so the Greens polling basically neck and neck with the Coalition when it comes to renters.”

Audio excerpt – Paul Murray:

“So my suggestion is to both of the major parties they have to come up with serious policies for renters.”

Audio excerpt – Clenell:

“Now a change in negative gearing is unpopular across the board but I would imagine it’s popular with young people who are fed up with ridiculous house prices and ridiculous rents.”

Audio excerpt – Paul Murray:

“And if anyone thinks that the rental issue is something that really doesn’t matter, it’s a third of the electorate.”

ANGE:

Being a renter has never been a sign of how someone votes, but now some people believe renters could start voting together and sway the next election.

Audio excerpt – Speaker 1:

“The power imbalance between landlords and tenants is obvious. There's a class of people who have direct control over the lives of another class. This landlord class is able to decide who deserves housing and who doesn't.”

Audio excerpt – Speaker 2:

“And I think what’s become abundantly clear and what will become clear over the next few years is that we are not going to put up with that indeed is anyone here going to put up with.”

Audio excerpt –Crowd:

“No.”

Audio excerpt – Speaker 1:

“The investor is just a middleman, taking a parasitic cut of profits and giving nothing back to society. So get them out of the system.”

ANGE:

Homeowners still outnumber renters in Australia. Their voices and interests are still louder than tenants for now.

There’s 7 million renters in Australia, and that group is growing in size and anger every day.

And the crisis isn’t going away for tenants. In fact, the Reserve Bank warned that even if interest rates drop, meaning landlords would be under less mortgage stress, conditions for renters are likely to get worse over the next two years before they get better.

But… until we see that political backlash gain proper momentum.. and the power balance tips in favour of renters, it’s still up to individuals to agitate and improve their own conditions.

Like Blake, who did eventually find a new home.

ANGE:

And is the new house, is it a swamp or?

BLAKE:

No, it's, it's pretty decent.

ANGE:

Okay, good. I'm glad.

BLAKE:

Yeah that's the first time I've ever had a heater or air conditioning, so it's pretty nice. Thankfully. A lot of like, private parties jumped out and decided to help us when that video came out.

ANGE:

But Blake’s still angry about what he went through. So he started undertaking a different kind of renters’ resistance by literally starting a fight against the owners of his old place, and taking them to the Victorian civil and administrative tribunal.

He’s asking for compensation for what he experienced in the house with exposed asbestos, swampy floors and a near-lethal gas leak.

BLAKE:

I'm more or less doing all this because after going to consumer affairs and that like single mothers that are juggling kids and that don't have time to like go to VCAT and do all these forms and like there’s a lot of people out there that struggling who can’t play this hoops and jumps game that’s set up clearly in the real estates favour.

ANGE:

Blake knows there’s a chance it might not lead anywhere. And even if he does win, he’s not hopeful it’ll be much compensation, anyway.

But he’s doing it for the principle of it. To show landlords that tenants are fighting back.

And if it goes nowhere, or he loses, it’ll prove a point: in this housing crisis, some people just aren’t being listened to.

So who does get a say? Who is being heard?

That’s on the next episode of The Great Housing Disaster.

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