Over the 14 years to 2020, Anglicare SA recorded a staggering 99 per cent increase in rental stress across South Australia.

As our state’s social housing stock has declined over the past decade or so, there is a corresponding increase in homelessness. I see evidence of this every time I take a walk in the south park lands. The growing number of brightly coloured tents brings home the reality that ordinary Australians are now faced with skyrocketing rents and unaffordable mortgage repayments, forcing too many onto the streets or sleeping in their cars.

These days if you’re on income support you are virtually condemned to homelessness.

In March this year, according to Anglicare’s Housing Snapshot, a single person on a parenting benefit living in South Australia, even when they are willing to share, could not afford any of the 1600 properties advertised for rent. Not one. Even for a working couple on minimum wages, 85 per cent of the rentals in Adelaide were unaffordable.

The South Australian Housing Trust was arguably the most successful public housing authority in the country, not only providing affordable rental accommodation but helping public housing tenants into home ownership. Those days are well and truly gone.

Established by Liberal Premier Thomas Playford after the recession in the late 1930s, the Housing Trust was not a welfare housing agency; it’s aim was to provide decent quality homes for workers.

When state governments handed the role of providing affordable housing to the private sector during the 1980s, the outcome was entirely predictable. A long slow decline in the number and quality of Housing Trust homes and the disappearance of a crucial pathway for low-paid workers to purchase their own homes.

The SA Housing Trust became a world leader in public housing, building 122,000 high quality affordable homes over its 70-year lifespan, driven by the need to attract investment in manufacturing to the state.

When high unemployment became a feature of the Australian economy, public housing became welfare housing while affordable housing for workers became the domain of private developers. And here we are now, three decades later with over 184,000 families on public housing waiting lists nationwide and 4,000 odd in South Australia.

We need to replace that function in the housing economy, and we can do it with some political will that favours workers and their families over private investors.

The need for affordable housing

Labor’s policies will not touch the sides in the current housing crisis – the Help-To-Buy scheme will drive up house prices and help almost no one, while their Build-to-Rent scheme gives tax handouts to developers and investors to build luxury homes and won’t build a single new affordable rental home.

The Greens proposal for a Public Property Developer will knock $260,000 of the price of a house and save renters more than $5000 a year.

If we phase out negative gearing for investors with more than two properties and put limits on capital gains, those savings will more than pay for the addition of 610,000 homes nationally over the next decade.

This is how we can solve the housing crisis.

Rents in Adelaide are now increasing faster than anywhere else in Australia with a 60 per cent increase over the last four years. This is pushing those on low incomes into homelessness. We can see this with our own eyes as more and more people crowd the city footpaths in sleeping bags, and there are just as many out of sight, couch surfing or sleeping in cars. The rise in Adelaide house prices is more than double the national average while repayments on a median dwelling have increased by almost $2000 a month since 2022.

It’s beyond contention that housing tax concessions, including negative gearing and capital gains tax, are pushing house prices ever higher, out of reach of the 10 most common occupations in Australia. For example, if a primary school teacher began saving for a home deposit today, it would take until 2036 to save a 20 per cent deposit on a median priced home.

A full-time childcare worker taking out a home loan today would need to spend 92 per cent of their income on repayments (assuming an 8.8 per cent interest rate) and a nurse would have to spend 50 per cent of their income servicing a home loan. It really should not be this hard.

Investor housing tax concessions, set to cost $176 billion over the next decade, helped push house prices in capital cities up by 34 per cent since 2020. The benefits of these arrangements flow mostly to the richest 20 per cent of Australians. It was time to ditch negative gearing, which the Prime Minister refused to do yesterday, and scrap capital gains tax concessions.

When you’re walking through the south park lands on the edge of Adelaide’s CBD, you can’t help but imagine yourself in the shoes of those sleeping out in tents in the cold. It’s a frightening prospect to lose your home but we are seeing more and more ordinary Australians slipping through the net.

We are a wealthy compassionate country, and we can limit the suffering of people caught up in the housing crisis by instituting a rent freeze and rent caps. Australian renters are insecure and powerless compared with other countries. We need to improve protections for renters’ rights.

Let’s face it, developers will always put profits before social service so we must agree there’s a level of market failure here.

Our own proud South Australian Housing Trust history shows that we can do this differently. We can put a roof over everyone’s head.

Barbara Pocock is a Greens Senator for South Australia and an Emeritus Professor at UniSA Business at the University of South Australia