It's a story about the old.

We hear so much from the young and, yes, being forced out of the property ownership market is tough. You see your parents in their own homes and wonder if you can ever make that happen for you. But you might need to wait until they die. Waiting that long might not be an option and it's quite depressing to see governments fail even in attempts to manage housing affordability.

This is a story about the other victims of housing affordability. People my age and older, who never bought a house. Or women on the terrible end of a divorce and the worse end of a property settlement. People who might have lost their jobs through illness and were forced to sell. Families whose circumstances are so beset with poverty that any kind of property ownership is completely unlikely.

All those people are renting and they are in trouble. In some cases, in much worse trouble than the under-40s. Why? There is no appetite to hire the old. If you are young, you are far more likely to get an interview and a subsequent job. It looks like the Turnbull government will try to take this on, as it finally recognises that we have a cradle-to-the-grave housing problem.

That might be good news for the future but not so good for those struggling now. Australia has the second-highest rate of poverty among those on pensions in all OECD nations and it would be hard to find any group of politicians who actually care. The Australia Institute's senior economist, Matt Grudnoff, has tried to make poverty even more explicit by calculating the number of households where all occupants were aged over 55 and not in the paid workforce. 

Grudnoff says: “Our retirement system basically takes the inequality that exists in our society at the moment and then magnifies it in retirement.”

His research, conducted on behalf of Your Life Choices, shows retired renters spend on average almost one-third of their income on housing. If you need to spend that much money on keeping a roof over your head, researchers call that housing stress. 

“The big expenses for retired people are going up faster for those in the most precarious economic situation,” he says. That's because the main cost is rent.

Of all the necessities, rents have been rising the fastest. The single retired renter spends about $600 a year less on medical and healthcare costs (about 6 per cent of their yearly income) than a single retired home owner on an aged pension (about 9 per cent).

It's possible those who are renting are less sick but the more likely explanation is they have less disposable income. And the retired couple on the age pension who rent? Only 4 per cent of their weekly spend goes on medical and healthcare costs compared to 8 per cent for their couple friends who own their homes.

The big obstacles to independent financial security – divorce, disability, unpaid work – particularly in the years leading up to retirement, are nearly a guarantee of spending retirement in poverty.

Think all boomers are fat cats, whose ride to wealth comes at the expense of anyone under 40? Nope. The unappealing aged are easy to punish, invisible, unloved. They are the hidden poor and appeals to protect the age pension go unheeded.