Living off $20 a day: How high rental prices are hitting Geelong’s essential workers

Lara resident Beck Strumpel loves her job as a childcare worker, but has to work multiple other jobs to meet rent.

Beck Strumpel is a childcare centre worker who loves her job, but she has to work multiple other jobs in order to afford the rent of her Lara home. Picture: Mike Dugdale

Beck Strumpel loves her job at a Lara childcare centre, having worked there for decades.

The 41-year-old said she enjoys being helpful and caring, and the centre is like a family for her.

But even with that, Ms Strumpel needs to work multiple other jobs in order to afford rent and other necessities.

“Prices are going up with everything,” she said.

“My pay (at the centre) doesn’t quite stretch, so I just need that extra bit to get through.

Beck Strumpel said she works multiple jobs, including as a babysitter and dog groomer. Picture: Mike Dugdale

“We get little bits of pay rises but that doesn’t feel like it’s getting anywhere.

“That I have to do extra jobs just to get through, it is very frustrating.”

Ms Strumpel said the rental prices in Lara, where she lives, are “skyrocketing” even when the suburb is considered as cheap.

She said she pays $350 a week, but at the end of May it will increase to $380.

When she first moved in, she said rent was $250 a week.

While she’s “not in childcare for the money”, Ms Strumpel said childcare workers should be paid better.

“Childcare is a very important job,” she said.

“I feel like our pay doesn’t show that.”

Childcare workers are among 15 essential workers identified as being priced out of rentals.

The report, from welfare and housing advocacy organisation Everybody’s Home, compared data on rents against award wages.

In the Bellarine Peninsula and South West Victoria, including Geelong, childcare workers were found to be paying 59 and 55 per cent of their income respectively on rent.

Ms Strumpel said while she’s worried about rent increases and how she will pay everything, she feels at home in Lara and doesn’t want to leave.

Living off $20 a day: Essential workers priced out of housing

Geelong’s essential workers are being forced to make “really unfair choices” and spend the majority of their pay on rent, a new report has found.

The report, from welfare and housing advocacy organisation Everybody’s Home, compared data on rents against award wages for 15 essential worker categories.

It found the average essential worker profiled in the report would be left with just $20 a day to live off.

Hospitality workers, meat packers, childcare workers, aged care workers and cleaners were found to be among those workers under extreme rental stress.

Rental stress is reached when housing costs are more than 30 per cent of a household’s gross income, the report found. Some essential workers in Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula are spending up to 60 per cent of their income on rent.

Everybody’s Home national spokeswoman Maiy Azize said the Geelong region was becoming a place where only wealthy people could afford to live without housing stress.

“People like nurses, teachers, healthcare workers, are being pushed to make some really unfair choices,” Ms Azize said.

“Essential workers can’t save to buy a home, can’t live securely in a rental because the rent is going up so much.

“They’re also putting off really major life decisions, including having children.

“We’re seeing people sharehousing … and depending on their parents until much, much later in life.

“Even the higher-paid essential workers … in places like Geelong, are still going to be in rental stress.”

The median rental price for a house in Geelong was $500 in the December quarter of 2022, according to the Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV).

Rentals across the Bellarine Peninsula were also expensive, with the median rental price in Ocean Grove $580 in the same quarter.

The median rental price in St Leonards, also on the Bellarine, was $450 in the same quarter, while in Barwon Heads it was $673.

Ms Azize said Everybody’s Home was calling on the government to invest in building 25,000 homes a year Australia-wide to address the shortfall in social housing.

She said many essential workers now qualified for social housing due to “enormous rental stress”, but couldn’t get in anywhere because of the small number of available properties.

She said by the organisation’s estimate, it would take about 20 years to fill the current shortfall, which would then free up some of the cheaper rentals in the private rental market.

Originally published as Living off $20 a day: How high rental prices are hitting Geelong’s essential workers