As Promised
This is as promised my fifth post in a session of writing. I’m on a roll. I might even try to finish open a more positive note. No promises see what I can do?
So, to give some context from all the things regarding my previous posts. For the last seven years I’ve rented an apartment through an affordability scheme. It was to take people off the public housing list but help landlords more than the tenant’s long term. The scheme ran for ten years, of which I benefited only the last seven. The landlords of new developments for a period were asked to offer up several properties to be managed by the government in exchange for cheaper rent to the tenant and what they lost in rent they got back at tax time. You gotta have money to make money, right? It is to say, I got to live in a complex with normal people not in a public housing silo. It is also the time to say when I got into this housing arrangement some bright spark, (Note sarcasm) despite my telling him not to, he had me removed from the housing list.
Every year I had to sign a new lease and provide financials and income statements to prove I was the only resident and I still qualified as low enough income to qualify for the scheme. What a MOTHER FUCKER. Mind you I had to do it every year for the seven years I was there. Honestly, it’s a different mindset. Remember the days you just needed to prove you could afford the rent?
In the time I’ve been on the Disability Support Pension I’ve had rent assistance which despite my rent going up every time, mostly initiating me having to relocate. It’s like the government that decides how much rent assistance needs to be doesn’t pay rent, or live in the real world, or care to learn how much rent is. We know the answer to all these things. No, they don’t!
In the last twenty years, I’ve rented houses for 4 years, each HOUSES WITH HOUSEMATES and at the end of the fourth year I’ve not been able to negotiate out of a rent increase, the landlord situation changes and I’ve needed to pay exorbitant rent or move. So, I’ve moved.
The house I rented the first time I moved with my disability. I struggled to find something in my price range and I was literally paying someone’s mortgage. I only had housemates for four months of the year. I stayed there and even asked my dad, who helped me a few times to cover the rent even though I’d bankrupt him.
That household situation had me move further out again, to never want housemates again. The first housemate, I ended up taking to VCAT, AMD. The second that lived with me for three months and was years my senior and had a huge reduction on her portion of the rent and had her son practically live with us. No more. There was the assumption, the government was paying my rent and my lifestyle. So, she thought to take advantage of that.
The last of the scheme I was in I paid $317 a week. At the end of the scheme my rent was to be $550 per week. They wanted me to sign a lease and there was no way I was doing that. If I was going to pay that much rent it was going to be somewhere nicer and quieter. I paid two weeks of that rent and timed it perfectly to get the fuck out.
I later checked the rental listing and it was advertised as $500 per week. Just scum, I know this post is a lot of specific financially, but necessary.
I could have afforded the scheme amount of rent in a reasonably comfortable lifestyle until sixty, when my income changes and I could no longer keep a roof over my head or the lights and internet on.
Not giving up all my things that tell people who I was/am/aspire to return to or just giving in and moving to some shit-fuck suburb, I wouldn’t survive in around people who HAVE ASPIRED TO NOT DO BETTER OR CARE, or to do better in life.
This post has not ended on a positive note has it.
Hell onWheels/Life One Handed 