This year Janice Williams and her husband were both diagnosed with terminal cancer and are facing their final days without a place to call home.
Ms Williams and her husband built a life and raised a family in the quaint country town of Nanango, in the South Burnett region, 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.
Their rental has been sold and the pensioners now must compete in a ruthless market.
"At the moment, there's just absolutely no rentals at all and we were terrified when we were told," Ms Williams said.
Ms Williams is in palliative care with brain and lung cancer and the stress of trying to find a home is almost too much to bear.
"It's sad and it's bloody stressful, I can tell you," she said.
The couple is among a growing group of Australians struggling to find low-cost housing in the regions and staring down the barrel of homelessness.
The situation has prompted calls from Australia's peak homelessness body for national leadership and urgent action to address affordable housing shortages in regional Australia.
No rentals in country towns
Since the pandemic began, the regional housing market has gone into overdrive, according to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).
"We've got a national issue here where the amount of rental stock available is incredibly low, and it's a real changing pattern to what we were seeing three or four years ago," managing director Michael Fotheringham said.
A wave of intrastate and interstate migration to regional Queensland has exacerbated already-stretched social and low-income housing stock.
Rental vacancy rates in some regional areas are at all-time lows.
In southern Queensland, the rental vacancy rate dropped from 2.1 per cent to 0.6 per cent between February 2020 and September this year, compared with a comparatively high 2.5 per cent vacancy rate in inner Brisbane.
Nanango real estate agent Jane Erkens has never seen the housing market so tight.
"We've had a number of people from southern states who are buying places here sight unseen," she said.
"We've got excellent tenants who are now desperate for rentals.
Funding not reaching the bush
Housing and homelessness are primarily the responsibility of the states and territories and plenty of money has been thrown at the issue recently.
Earlier this year, the Queensland government announced $2.9 billion in funding for social housing over the next four years and similar packages have been announced in other states.
Meanwhile, the federal government has allocated $124.7 million to states and territories this year and next to support the housing and homelessness sector on top of the existing National Housing and Homelessness Agreement.
Mr Fotheringham said the problem was that metropolitan areas often swallowed up the money.
"We need to see strong programs for social housing construction that operate not just in the major centre but look to the regions as well, and we need to incentivise industry to be building in the regions," he said.
Mr Fotheringham said there was no silver bullet and that a concerted effort between industry and all three tiers of government was the only way to fix the shortage.
Homelessness in the regions
Homelessness Australia chair Jenny Smith said a consequence of the housing shortage was an increase in people living on the streets.
"We have people with inadequate income being forced to compete in an overheated market that has now boiled over," she said.
Ms Smith said nationwide presentations to homelessness services for June were up 4.2 per cent on the previous year.
"When you compare us with other civilised communities in the western world, our investment in social housing is pitiful," she said.
Only about 4 per cent of all dwellings in Australia are classed as social housing, compared with 10–19 per cent in other developed countries like Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, and the UK.
Ms Smith said there was a lack of national strategy and leadership to address social and affordable housing.
"The big danger here is the efforts made by some of the states and territories will just be a one-off," she said.
The social housing shortfall
An AHURI report prior to the pandemic found a need for a national program to produce more than 290,000 homes before 2036 — or nearly 15,000 a year — to "simply prevent further deterioration" of the social housing shortfall of 430,000 dwellings.
In a statement, federal Housing and Homelessness Minister Michael Sukkar said the Commonwealth had made significant inroads to support social and affordable housing, with more than 13,000 dwellings supported by the National Housing Financing and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) since it was established in June 2018.
"NHFIC's success has been widely recognised as a landmark achievement of the Morrison government," he said.
"The government is also delivering across the housing spectrum, with around $9 billion expected to be spent on housing and homelessness in the upcoming financial year."
About $1.6 billion of that money is through the existing National Housing and Homelessness Agreement with the states and territories, with another $5.3 billion through Commonwealth Rent Assistance for people on welfare payments.
Meanwhile, in Nanango, Ms Erkens is going out of her way to help vulnerable people like Ms Williams find homes.
She has set up a private share house for seniors struggling to find accommodation in Nanango.
"It came about when we had a 71-year-old lady who came in and she was actually living in her car," Ms Erkens said.
