By Mikayla van Loon
Changes to how the Victorian government will supply social housing into the future have been announced, gaining support from local homeless support organisation Anchor.
From July 2024, all newly built developments with three dwellings or more and three or more lot subdivisions will contribute 1.75 per cent of the as-if-complete project value to the Social Housing Growth Fund via a levy.
The fund is expected to raise an average of about $800 million a year to go towards the building of social housing in the state.
Anchor CEO Heidi Tucker said this is great news for organisations in the sector, particularly since social housing has been underfunded in recent years.
“There’s been a huge under-investment right across Australia, really, for many years now, in social and affordable housing so we are sort of starting from a position of a bit of a handicap. This is great news and the sector has taken it very well,” she said.
Ms Tucker said the rental housing market is currently in a dire position, with rent prices doubling in some regional towns, with 46.7 per cent of Victorians receiving Commonwealth rent assistance and 39.5 per cent of people spending more than a third of their income on rent.
The dream of owning a home has become, for many, an unreachable goal as house prices rise but Ms Tucker said the ability to rent is even becoming a challenge for a lot of people.
“We’re now moving to a stage where people can’t even afford to rent. So if you can’t afford to buy and can’t afford rent, what are you supposed to do? The only place you can turn to is social and affordable housing, that is the only place you have to go,” she said,
“The wait for public housing is probably about 10 years, so if we can increase year on year the amount of social and community housing we can build, it just means you are giving people hope.”
Rental and house prices that had traditionally been low in the Yarra Ranges, particularly in Lilydale, Millgrove and Woori Yallock, Ms Tucker said have increased exponentially, displacing many people from those areas.
“People who rough sleep or people who are without a home are very vulnerable people in the community that come from all walks of life, unlike perhaps, the perception that they’re all a homogeneous group.
“The largest group of people who are homeless are children, and they follow their parents, mostly their mothers into homelessness.”
Ms Tucker said as one of the largest groups of people experiencing homelessness, women and children could have a lifetime of trauma to deal with but a house could be the first step in healing.
“We’re talking about, yes, the house, that’s really, really important but then it’s the recovery from whatever else has happened,” she said.
“It might be recovering from addiction, it might be recovering from an illness, it could be recovery from family violence, these things take time.”
The current approach to homelessness in Australia is to provide services first and a house second, which could take up to five years, but Ms Tucker said this investment in social housing will help flip this system.
“In other countries, the Nordic countries like Finland, and the US and Canada, particularly, have this thing called ‘Housing First’,” Ms Tucker said.
“Things like this investment will enable us to give the accommodation first and say ‘here’s your house. Now, let’s help you fix the other things’ instead of the system we have in Australia at the moment where you go through all of these services until you get to your destination.”
