Nagging thoughts and damn statistics obscure a homeless free vision?

A couple of nagging thoughts and some damn statistics dog my otherwise confident attitude that we finally have a chance to make serious inroads into the high level of people experiencing homelessness.

First, the statistics. The National Housing Supply Council’s 2010 “State of Supply” report identifies a current shortfall between the supply of housing and demand for it of 178,800 dwellings nationally. That is, we have nearly 180,000 too few dwellings to meet household need. In Queensland that will be about 36,000 dwellings needed but not available.

For renters things get worse. The same report identifies a shortage of 493,000 available and affordable rental properties for households in the bottom 40% of incomes. In Qld, nearly 100,000 affordable rental properties need to be found to meet need.

It may seem strange that the affordable rental shortfall is higher than the overall shortfall, but most affordable rental in Australia is occupied by households in the top 60% income range and they rent down to maximise their saving or disposable income.

The net result of is that those on the lowest incomes and with the highest needs are the most likely to miss out or be squeezed out. This is why rent rises are at least triple general inflation and why vacancy rates in every major centre are low. If it’s harder than ever to house people who are, were or might be homeless, then this paints in some of the picture.

Next, the nagging thoughts. The main one is that we keep adding to the service system without redrawing the fundamental architecture, the plans for what it should look like and how it should operate. It’s like adding a room and then later knocking a hole in the wall to put in a door or window.

Do we have sufficient supports or resources to get it? Not just housing related supports, but to ensure that when we do house people they stay housed and have the opportunity to connect to a community. Will they have a home? Will they be connected to health care, education, employment, their local shops?

The new approach, “The Road Home” relies on providing greater opportunity to be housed and a more nuanced approach to appropriate support. I think this is the right approach, to provide a general opportunity for housing and specific support services in that housing. Up to now, people experiencing homelessness have either made a journey through a service system or not had a service at all. It has been a crisis led process.

Queensland has been transforming its response to homelessness, perhaps more dramatically than any other States in recent years. In both the community sector and government, new ways of thinking about and addressing homelessness have emerged.

They began with the Beattie Government’s announcement of the Responding to Homelessness package (R2H),they were turbo charged by the leadership and imprimatur of former P.M. and member for Griffith, the Hon Kevin Rudd and the commitment and massive funding boost to affordable housing by Treasurer Swan with the indefatigable  oversight and engagement in the issue by Minister for Housing Tanya Plibersek.

On the community side we have seen the development of facilities like Roma House, supportive housing, the youth hub coordinators in schools, housing first approaches, the benefits of great networks on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and a number of integrated youth and family services.

Queensland, historically, had a partially funded, partial response to the issue. Up to the R2H package Qld had 24% of the population of people experiencing homelessness and only 14% of the federal funding, never enough beds, old style options and an over reliance on food vans and outreach.

Other states, particularly Victoria had undergone significant reforms over the many years of the Supported Accommodation and Assistance Program, but even if they had their share of the funding no one can claim to have properly addressed the issue.

At the federal level the Howard Government’s contribution was the development of reconnect for young people and family intervention.

The R2H package was a breakthrough. Instead of homelessness being the sole province of a single department of government it recognised the issue as multidimensional which required a multidimensional approach across a range of government and non government agencies.

The Qld Government put $235.5m over 4 years on the table for new services, responses from Police, Attorney General’s, Health, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Policy, Premier’s, Communities and Housing. It provided new outreach services, housing, engagement strategies, a homeless court, homeless hubs to help service integration, awareness from police about the issue and a focus on early intervention and prevention.

The new services however were not always integrated with existing services and a sense of division, between the new and the old was perceptible and in some cases palpable.

The Rudd Government’s election saw another strategy put in place at breakneck speed as State Governments scrambled to develop plans and implement services responding to the renewed commonwealth interest.

The approach was part of a new National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA) which also contained National Partnership Agreements on Social Housing, Remote Indigenous Housing, a new incentive to build low cost rental housing (The National Rental Affordability Scheme, NRAS) and the Housing Affordability Fund, to ease planning pressures on affordable housing.  The central theme was halving homelessness, addressing the pointy end and targeting new social housing at people at risk of, or experiencing homelessness.

The new NAHA in Queensland will deliver $284.6 million over five years (2008–09 to 2012–13) for another new range of homelessness services, all of which will be welcome and will add significantly to the service system.

The largest injection of funding, however, came through the National Building and Stimulus program. Initially $6.4b and later trimmed to $5.65b the stimulus boost will deliver 20,000 new fully subsidised units of housing. Most of the subsidy comes from government but a significant level comes in the form of land, borrowing and other contributions from States, the NGO sector including property brought to the scheme by churches and charities.

It will deliver an additional 4000 fully subsidised properties in Queensland and compliments the 10-12,000 properties for 10 years rented at up to 80% of market rent being delivered under NRAS.

But before we get over-excited about this massive injection, we should recall we are still playing catch up to the social housing levels we had in 1996 and would have now if we had maintained 1996 levels of investment. NRAS, stimulus and the NAHA will not make-up for the 11 years of neglect by the Howard Government.

One of the factors we need to consider is how the eligibility for housing and its tenant profile have changed in the past 25 years. The Fraser and then Hawke Governments were the first to move us into a rationing system. They identified there were many more people on fixed low incomes following the massive levels of unemployment in the 70’s and 80’s and began a process of means testing, asset testing and targeting services to those in greatest need.

Targeting has become the overriding principle for housing allocation and has led to greater and greater concentrations of people with higher support needs. This in turn has undermined the acceptability of public housing partly because the support services have never been adequate.

Instead, support has been part of the supported accommodation or homelessness system and largely only available to clients of services at the crisis end and if they were fortunate, medium term part of the continuum. So we are now broadening eligibility and allocation of housing assistance through a range of means, homeless services, private housing supports and subsidies, the National Rental Affordability Scheme and by growing social housing.

Subsequently, we also need to reshape support to more flexibly meet a continuum of needs across a range of housing options. We cannot rely on community housing providers to be both tenancy managers and support services or to spend on support services out of rental income.

We cannot expect support services to expand their current operations to meet the support needs of people in public and community housing without additional resourcing. Yet in the allocation of new resources we have not increased funding to specialist homeless services to follow clients, to provide specialist advice to housing providers, to provide periodic or episodic support across a range of settings.

The new services are a necessary addition to the system but we have missed two crucial elements. The level at which demand is growing faster than supply and the level of support from a range of services to meet the higher needs of tenants.

If housing demand is growing faster than supply, then the pressure on families and individuals, already vulnerable, will increase. Their opportunities will diminish and the probability they will not find housing or support will grow.

It requires governments to commit to a long term growth strategy for affordable housing and to undertake the architecture essential to the orderly operation of the system. Growth must also provide broader options to avoid further concentrating communities of disadvantage.

Support also needs to be available in ways it has not previously been delivered. Currently, support comes packaged with the housing, receive the housing and you might also receive the support. But what if your support need is short and sharp or conversely small but long term, you may not get what you need.

The SAAP program has been unique to Australia and it has provided a service system catering for the most pressing homeless need, but as we better understand homelessness, as it affects families, seniors and is increasingly a result of an inability to access appropriate affordable housing, we need to change the way support is provided.

Our crisis services have always been under resourced to do the job they have been set and now there are more resources available for housing, we need to recalibrate the system. We need the ability for specialist providers to add mental health expertise, drug and alcohol expertise, cultural expertise etc. Or we need housing providers to have the resources to purchase or access such expertise from those who have it at a greater scale than is currently the case.

Supports could come from a range of places. We know there is a critical shortage of mental health supports in the community, we know there is a shortage of dental services, we know that many people previously homeless, still have drug and or alcohol issues and these services never reach far enough.

We have developed some new models to meet some of these needs, they are welcome and they will help but across the system there is still a long way to go.

If we are serious about the next phase of addressing our homelessness catastrophe we will find the resources to meet both the housing and support needs to address or at least drastically reduce our current levels of homelessness. 

Adrian Pisarski