NEW research reveals the west’s housing crisis is far worse than realised, with a dramatic increase in the number of desperate people resorting to rooming houses.
A revised count shows the west is bearing the brunt of the city-wide explosion in rooming house numbers, as greedy operators take advantage of people being squeezed into the rental market.
Professor Chris Chamberlain of the Centre for Applied Social Research at RMIT University found a spike in the number of rooming houses and number of tenants in them in Wyndham and Melton.
The number of rooming houses has risen from one in the 2006 Counting the Homeless report, to 36 in 2011, as counted by Professor Chamberlain, while rooming house tenants in Wyndham soared from nine to 264.
Werribee Support and Housing chief executive Carol Muir said she was aware of between six and eight rooming houses in the Wyndham area over the past four years.
“There’s no local crisis accommodation and rooming houses are sometimes used, mostly for singles.”
Ms Muir said rent for a spot in a rooming house in Wyndham could range from $100 to $200 a week. “One client reported that they had to pay $180 a week for a room and there was no bed or mattress provided.”
If it wasn’t for a rooming house, Matthew Whittingham says he’d still be sleeping in his car.
He says he’s been “going through a rough time” as a result of his then girlfriend “cleaning out” his bank account and taking off with his best friend.
“It’s [the rooming house] not too bad,” he says. “It’s better than sleeping in my car. If it wasn’t there I’d have nowhere to go.”
