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“It’s someone who is probably at your deepest point, your darkest point, looking for help. And for no one to answer the call, and for that call to go unanswered, that would be a pretty heartbreaking feeling of desperation to know, well, where should I go now? If these people are supposed to be there to help me and they can’t answer my call, where should I go now. ?”
This is Angela Jackson, director of Impact Economics and author of a new report which lays bare the scale of the homeless crisis – and how difficult services find it to help them – or even to answer the phone.
The report studied 23 homeless services over a two-week period, revealing that there were 200 hours during this period when services had to close their doors, as well as 325 hours of calls without response and more than 660 [[666]]urgent emails that staff could not respond to.
Anglicare Victoria CEO Paul McDonald says it comes down to a growing disparity between supply and demand.
“I have to say that the increase in demand is just relentless in terms of the number and range of different people. Demand versus supply is like watching a seesaw whose weight drops sharply at one end We are seeing a new demographic of young adults looking for housing or unable to access the rental market, women and their children, victims of domestic violence, unable to easily access housing options that. suit them.
This increase in demand means that families with children seeking emergency accommodation have been unable to receive help about one day in five, while people without children have been turned away every other day.
Unaccompanied minors were turned away one day in nine.
For people walking through the doors of support services, Angela Jackson says support workers face impossible choices when deciding who to help.
“There is not enough long-term accommodation for them. So they are staying longer in services, which means there is less emergency accommodation available. And therefore the type of calls that what they do is, and we’ve heard this from providers, it’s, “oh, well, you have kids, but oh, you have a car, well, sorry, you can sleep in the car then, because.” our first priority is people with children and without a car.” It’s quite difficult to defend Australia, because as rich as we are, people find themselves in a situation where homeless services have to sort between families with and without cars.
The report states that one of the main reasons for the increase in homelessness is the stress of renting.
The number of people at risk of homelessness has increased by 63 percent across the country to three million people, due to a dramatic fall in rental vacancies and soaring prices, without any enough affordable options for everyone.
Kate Colvin, CEO of Homelessness Australia, says it only takes one change in circumstances to push people over the edge.
“A real incident that triggers homelessness, and that’s the negative shock – like losing income, losing your job, or being a victim of domestic violence and having to leave the home you’re in.”
Rental assistance and an increased supply of social and affordable housing are well-documented solutions to the housing crisis, as the report suggests.
But Ms Colvin says the government could do much more to reduce these rent pressures.
“The real problem in the rental market is that there simply aren’t enough low-cost rentals available. So that creates two problems. The first is that it creates very intense competition for the few low-cost rental properties prices that exist, which This drives up prices, but it also means that people are excluded And there is also the fact that rents continue to increase So the most important solution that we need is that the. government puts more low-cost housing on the market by investing in social housing.
The report on homelessness comes as the federal government makes another attempt to push its long-stalled housing policy through Parliament in the last half of the year.
Labor attempted to legislate a fairness system that would allow first-time home buyers to pay a smaller deposit.
The government also attempted to introduce a build-to-rent scheme, under which tax incentives would be offered to developers to build properties to be rented out.
Angela Jackson says it could take time to implement these measures – and in the meantime, frontline services need more funding to care for people who can’t wait.
“We’re seeing funding for specialist homeless services being cut in recent times, in this sort of post-pandemic period. The construction of social housing is important, but in many cases it is simply a matter of replacing existing stock rather than building new ones. We see in Victoria that there will be a continued need and demand for social housing while ensuring that homelessness supports remain sufficient to support people both at risk of homelessness and also experiencing homelessness .
