Chinese students in ‘panic mode’ amid Australia housing crisis: ‘if I get desperate, I could sleep rough on the streets’
- Some parents of the 40,000 Chinese students headed to Australia this year have paid twice the market rate just to secure their children a flat
- A ‘perfect storm’ of Covid-related construction delays and surging demand has made house hunting near-impossible, students and insiders say
If I get desperate, I could even sleep rough on the streets, like under some bridge, or outside the Chinese consulate
Zhang said she “went into panic mode” as the rule change, after three years of Covid-19 border closures, meant she and about 40,000 other Chinese students also heading to Australia would all be looking for a place to stay.
“I knew that finding somewhere to rent in Australia wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t expect it to be this difficult. Some are subletting their living rooms or balconies. I don’t think I can do that,” Zhang, 25, said via telephone from her home in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong.
“I have been looking for a room for about a month now and I have given up,” added Zhang, who has enrolled for a master's degree in marketing at the University of New South Wales. “If I get desperate, I could even sleep rough on the streets, like under some bridge, or outside the Chinese consulate.”
The University of New South Wales, which welcomed a quarter of its students from China until 2020, said its on-campus accommodation was full and it was refurbishing university apartments to rent to foreign students.