SO there's a rental squeeze in Brimbank? Well, for $175 a week a single person can rent a place to sleep in one of the municipality's many unregistered rooming houses. You could be sharing a three-bedroom home with up to eight people, many of them drug addicts, alcoholics or former prisoners.
For many of Brimbank's most vulnerable residents, it is this sort of accommodation or the streets.
Last week the Advocate toured some of the worst rooming houses in Sunshine and St Albans with an outreach homeless person nurse, who asked not to be named.
Nestled among a quiet street in St Albans are three unregistered rooming houses.
We enter a property and immediately the smell of smoke, possibly marijuana, hits us. A young man is lying around in an untidy room, with syringes on his bed.
He tells us there are five people living in the house and that the landlord warned him he may move another two people into his room to share.
He pays $150 a week and was told his rent would not be any less. The nurse tells me this is a common problem.
Any house with more than four people living in separate rooms is supposed to be registered with the council as a rooming house. But unscrupulous landlords have a plan.
"Quite often the owners of the houses don't even know. Real estate agents are charging them $300 per week rent, but the [renters] are subletting and sometimes making up to $1000 per week," he said.
The second house we visit is filthy. There are partitions up, making more rooms for landlords to let, meaning more rent money for them.
In the third house, one resident is home and is disgusted with the state of the house. There are clothes, needles, white ants and dirty dishes littered throughout.
"Who would want to live like this?" the resident said. "There are five in the house at the moment and we are charged $175 each per week. The landlord is talking of moving more people in.
"The people who live there, they do drugs all the time, everything from chuff [marijuana], to needles to pills."
In another house in Sunshine, we visit a man who is living out of a converted garage - another scam allowing the landlord to make more money.
The nurse said Brimbank Council was trying to crack down on such houses, with only one registered rooming house in the municipality.
"But part of the problem is, with all these unregistered houses, if they just close them down, where are these people going to go? There is no crisis accommodation in the west."
One of the residents we spoke to summed it up nicely.
"We used to have a dog that lived here, but even he couldn't live like this and ran off."
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