What renting is doing to your DNA

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. Being a renter right now can be pretty stressful, with a shortage of properties on the market, rising rents and a real lack of security for tenants. But what you might not know is there’s evidence that renting is actually accelerating the biological ageing process. That’s according to a peer-reviewed study by the University of Essex in the UK and Adelaide Uni. Today, one of the report’s authors, Emma Baker, on how DNA testing has shown renting can be really bad for your health.

Sam Hawley: Emma, we know renting in Australia right now is really tough. Rents are high, it’s hard to secure a property, it’s really a landlord’s world, isn’t it?

Emma Baker: Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we’ve been on the edge of a rental crisis for quite a while, and I think now we’ve really got to the pointy end of it, where it’s incredibly tough for renters to find a place or to afford a place.

Vox pop: I mean, you can’t really think about anything else. It’s just looking at units, scheduling inspections.

Vox pop: It’s crazy to get anywhere. I know heaps of people who have lived out of their cars or are constantly trying to find somewhere to go.

Vox pop: I was actually homeless for 14 months. I applied for 472 houses in my last year of being homeless.

Vox pop: I don’t know what to do in the circumstances with my three children. It’s going to be the point where I will be living in my car with my children, hungry and homeless.

Sam Hawley: Mm, that’s all quite stressful. And a study that you were involved in shows if you rent, you could be ageing more quickly. So let’s unpack that. First, we need to understand the difference between chronological age and biological age. Tell me the difference, first of all.

Emma Baker: Yeah. Well, so we all age at the same rate of years. And so that’s our chronological age. It’s our number of birthdays that we’ve had. But there’s this additional thing which takes into account the kind of life that you lead and the things that you do when you’re exposed to. And we call that biological age because if you drink too much or smoke or, you know, live in a high pollution area, it’s likely to affect the kind of healthiness that you have over the long term. So we call that biological age.

Sam Hawley: Right. OK. And this study that you were involved in is looking at the link between biological ageing and renting.

Emma Baker: Yeah. Well, in fact, we looked more broadly than renting to start with. So a lot of our work is trying to pull apart the effects of housing in all of its kind of characteristics on our health. And in this piece of analysis, we looked at people’s biological age measured through their blood and a whole range of different things that we thought might explain differences in biological age and also a whole lot of things about their housing characteristics.

Sam Hawley: OK. You better explain a bit more, about the blood. What did you actually do?

Emma Baker: It really is one of the very first pieces of research in this kind of new area looking at epigenetic ageing. We use a big United Kingdom data set which follows people over really long periods of time, 20 or so years. So we know all of their characteristics and all of the things that are going on in their life. Every year, they get revisited and surveyed. And about halfway through this survey, they took a series of blood samples which they then went off and measured for the markers of age. So, you know, basically biological ageing is the scarring of your body and your DNA, which may be faster than other people. So we do bloods in the middle and then continue on housing afterwards. So we can then control for all of the things that are going on in people’s lives and look at their relative rate of biological ageing in the middle.

Sam Hawley: OK. As I understand it, you have around 1,400 adults participating. So halfway through a longitudinal study looking at them, you collect blood. And that blood can indicate to you someone’s biological age. Is that right?

Emma Baker: Yeah. So when we look at their blood, you know, we see regardless of chronological age, some people are ageing faster than others. And, you know, one of the things that really stood out to us was that, you know, all of the things that we think in, say, public health messaging, you know, things like smoking and drinking and obesity, they are very similar in their effect size to things like living in a rental home or not being able to afford your rent. But one of the things that really stood out was people who live in a rented home compared to people who are homeowners seem to be ageing faster biologically.

Sam Hawley: Right. And how much faster did you find?

Emma Baker: Well, we estimate it’s about two and a half weeks for every year in private rental. And in fact, private rental is the really interesting thing here because social renters, for some reason, don’t seem to have that effect. So there’s something different between private renters and social renters. And we think that that is most probably the security that social renters have and homeowners have compared to private renters.

Sam Hawley: So that’s people in public housing are more secure than if you’re just renting in the private market.

Emma Baker: Yeah. And it kind of makes sense. I mean, traditionally, if you’ve made it into social housing, it’s designed to be a little more secure than the private rental sector.

Sam Hawley: Right. So basically, your study finds that if you rent, you could be ageing more quickly, mainly because of the associated stress that comes with being a renter. But did you do similar tests on homeowners or those with mortgages? Because with rising rates, that’s pretty stressful right now, too, I would have thought.

Emma Baker: Well, in fact, the two and a half weeks is in comparison to homeowners. So there’s something about homeownership that is protective of people.

Sam Hawley: All right. Well, what else did you find in terms of the private sector that is leading people to age more quickly? What else is going on there?

Emma Baker: Yeah. Well, we really don’t know. And this is just one of the very first pieces of work in the field. But we think it’s something about the security of tenure that private renters often don’t have. And when you look at big studies of the Australian population, you see that the average rental lease is between six and 12 months in Australia. So even if you have your lease extended, you still are living in that slight state of kind of unknowingness, really not quite secure if your lease is actually going to be extended or not. So we think that that is one of the things that’s kind of contributing to a loss of years effectively.

Sam Hawley: And what about the quality of the rental property? Did you take that into account? Because as we all know, some are not great.

Emma Baker: Yeah. Look, we haven’t in this study, but in other work that we do, we look across the whole of the Australian rental population and we see great variation in the quality of rental. But one thing that we know from other studies is that as a nation, we tend to put our sickest and poorest people into the rental accommodation that is the worst. So the rental accommodation that’s likely to make them sicker.

Sam Hawley: This is all pretty confronting news, I would have thought, for renters. It’s certainly not good. But it’s a study that was done in the UK. So the 1400 people were British people living around the country. So how can you just then apply it, I suppose, to an Australian market? We’re quite different here, aren’t we?

Emma Baker: Yeah. Well, actually, it’s surprisingly similar across the two nations. And if anything, I would say that I would expect the results to be slightly stronger in the Australian context. We have a much smaller social housing sector. So, you know, there are more people living in the private rental sector in Australia that would normally be under the protection of the social rental sector in the United Kingdom. So, you know, I think you can broadly translate the results of this. I think if we, when we finally get to do it in Australia, we might find even stronger results.

Sam Hawley: All right. So the insecurity of renting is not really then a problem with renting per se, but the policies of governments, by the sound of it.

Emma Baker: Yeah. In a way, the way that we do tenure in Australia, it’s more or less a choice and a bit of history. So, you know, different countries set up their tenure systems in slightly different ways. And the way that we do it is we have a policy of government. And we happen to have evolved a system which has worked quite well for us to date, but a system where, you know, there’s an expectation of, say, six to 12 months leases. I mean, there’s a happy story in this, in that the idea of biological ageing, just as if you, you know, say, give up smoking in a smoking campaign, you can recover some of your health. If we were to change the security of tenure of the private rental sector, for example, people are able to bounce back in terms of their health and their biological age. So, you know, I think one of the things that this study gives us is something to focus on for policy. And that is actually happening in Australia at the moment.

News report: The state government has secured the support of the Greens to pass more reforms to SA’s rental laws through Parliament’s Upper House. Under the changes, landlords will face new limits when it comes to their ability to not renew leases.

News report: Landlords will be offered $10,000 to switch from short-term to long-term rentals in a bid to help ease pressure on WA’s tight rental market.

Emma Baker: I’ve never seen so much action in the policy sector for a couple of decades in trying to improve conditions and really look at how we can make things more secure for renters.

Sam Hawley: OK, so let’s have a look at what we can actually change here. And it sounds like we should do it pretty quickly. So what can we change right now to reduce this gap, I suppose, between people who rent and people who don’t?

Emma Baker: We probably, first off, as a piece of low-hanging fruit, need to look at how secure rental is for people. How are they able to plan for their future? The other interesting thing is, you know, Australia just recently passed a law that’s really kicked over in the last couple of years from being a nation where we were mainly homeowners and mortgage holders and then renters to being a nation where we’re mortgage holders and renters and then homeowners. So there’s been a massive shift in the way that we house Australians. And I think that that is one of the main reasons why, you know, the policy attention has come onto it. We probably need to think about, you know, how can we make rental a tenure that people actually want to live in for their whole lives? Because my kids are probably going to spend longer in rental than we did, and many of them will stay in the rental sector for their whole lives. So, you know, the challenge is how do you make rental somewhere that is a great place to land?

Sam Hawley: And how do governments secure renters’ tenure? It doesn’t sound that complicated.

Emma Baker: No, and I think we’re headed in that direction. We’re going slowly. It’s a state-by-state solution at the moment. For example, in South Australia, we’ve just had a couple of inquiries looking at how secure can rental be? How can you improve the kind of conditions for tenants? We’ve just looked at pets. So increasingly, people are able to have more rights about having a pet in their house, and we know that that contributes to people’s good health, especially their mental health. We’ve been looking at how we can change tenure to give people more options to have longer lease lengths. You know, that’s well advanced in Victoria, where they’ve also been looking at how do they regulate the quality of the dwellings in the rental sector.

Sam Hawley: All right. So what would your advice be to landlords, given this study and given the findings that, you know, renters are ageing more quickly? What can they do to stop this happening?

Emma Baker: I think maybe the advice really comes to government rather than landlords and renters, because, you know, landlords and renters just operate in the space that government provides. So I think my advice to government on this would be, if you can pick one piece of low-hanging fruit to fix in the private rental sector, start with something relatively simple, like giving people the option to have longer leases. It’s actually beneficial for landlords as well as tenants.

Sam Hawley: Emma Baker is a Professor of Housing Research at the University of Adelaide. This episode was produced by Bridget Fitzgerald, Nell Whitehead, Sam Dunn and Anna John, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.