Forever renters: Australian retirees face housing crisis as superannuation drained by cancer survival

Jo-Anne Allen will be 67 next birthday.

She should be looking forward to retiring and enjoying life after beating a terminal cancer diagnosis.

A liver transplant, almost a decade ago, saved her, but it also drained her superannuation balance.

The single mother and grandmother is among a growing cohort of Australians edging into retirement as "forever renters".

Demographer Simon Kustenmacher, co-founder of The Demographics Group, calls it a "looming crisis" as more people are locked out of the housing market.

Statistics tell an alarming tale.

Australia's retirement system is built on an expectation that older people will own a home by the time they end their working life.

Increasingly, they do not.

The dilemma of lifelong renters like Ms Allen, is among the many housing-related issues raised by people taking part in the ABC Your Say project.

The Melbourne Institute's Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey found the number of renters, aged 65 and over, doubled in the period 2001-2024, from 4.6 per cent to 9.4 per cent.

Can't afford to retire

Ms Allen fears she never will be able to stop working and afford to pay her rent.

She currently pays $690 a week for a three-bedroom and one-bathroom home near Wallsend, west of Newcastle, in New South Wales.

"When I had cancer, I had to go off on leave with no pay for three years. I went from $1,500 a week to $580 a fortnight on sickness benefits. So, I had to claim my super to survive."

In 2016, Ms Allen was diagnosed with liver cancer and in 2017, received a life-saving liver transplant on the eve of moving to palliative care where she expected to die within a month.

Now, despite being gifted a "miracle" second chance at life, she says she "definitely can't afford to retire".

"I have just taken another four-year contract [in a government job].

"I don't know what I'm going to do. While I'm working, I'm secure, you know, but it will get to a point where I just can't work anymore."

Housing stress

Fiona York is the executive officer of the Housing for the Aged Action Group Inc (HAAG).

"We're seeing many older people are retiring in a rental property. So that means they don't have security of tenure, their housing costs are way more than 30 per cent of their income, which means they're in housing stress and housing is of poor quality," Ms York says.

HAAG commissioned research from Swinburne University of Technology which showed "mid-life and older Australians are increasingly facing multiple and overlapping forms of housing precarity, with private renters most affected".

The research found housing costs threaten the independence of older people and affect their wellbeing, and "many live in untenable housing due to fear of evictions".

The research, based on Census analysis and homelessness estimates, shows a 73 per cent increase in older renters between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, a third of whom were on low incomes.

"Often we hear that people are moving into really inappropriate accommodation that's not safe for them or they're moving from city areas into regional areas thinking it's going to be cheaper but then finding it's not cheaper and there's no services," Ms York says.

Letter to the government

Carole Strong is 71. She lives in a suburb of Adelaide. She sold her home 40 years ago after her marriage broke up and has rented ever since. She is on a pension and gets rent assistance.

She pays more than 80 per cent of her pension on rent. Fed up and fearing for the future she wrote to the South Australian government.

"I am getting too old to pack up and move every few years and it's taking its toll on my physical and mental health. I feel like I'm between a rock and a hard place in this regard," Ms Strong wrote.

"As a hard-working retired social worker and union member I'm saddened about my limited options … I urge the state government to consider this dilemma facing many women and look at ways to address this."

Ms Strong gets annoyed when the government talks about "downsizing".

"Some of us never really upsized. Just the language really annoys me because there's this big assumption that everybody owns a house and everybody wants to own a house. No, we don't. We just want to live somewhere safe and we want to pay our way basically."

That's becoming harder.

Vulnerable cohort

According to Super Consumers Australia, a single retiree renter needs twice as much superannuation to have the same standard of living as a person who owns their own home in retirement.

The group's most recent research, in December last year, found a single retiree who rents would need $659,000 in super compared to $322,000 for a retiree who owns their home.

For couples the figures are $786,000 compared to $432,000.

Katrina Ellis is the deputy CEO at Super Consumers Australia. She says renters entering retirement are a vulnerable cohort whose super balance is consumed by rental costs.

"Renters will be making really difficult choices and having a lower quality of life in retirement. It's not what the system is supposed to do," Dr Ellis says.

"The whole retirement system is about giving everybody a dignified retirement and it's not achieving that for people who are renting."

The solutions, she says, are not about super.

"It is about the government increasing the Commonwealth rent assistance, the government building more public housing to provide housing for people at the very low end of financial means and retirees who are renting. They're really in that group of people who can't afford the market rents."

Looming crisis

Mr Kustenmacher says if rents keep rising, as they have in the past few years, a problem is looming for the pension system with more rent assistance needed.

"It is a looming crisis in so far that we're seeing many young people being forever locked out of the housing market already, which is only a short-term problem if you look at the next couple of years.

"But in the long-term, a higher share of people renting [means] we have to pay much more rental assistance out of the pension fund. The fund runs dry rather quickly."

Then there's the issue of what it means to people's lives.

"In retirement, if you don't have enough money saved up, your mental health goes down, your actual health goes down, your social isolation goes up, and your retirement will be significantly less fun than it could have been with a bit of money," he says.

Ms Allen knows the feeling.