Loma Bropho is all too familiar with the feeling of uncertainty. For the past two years, the single mother of six has tried “every avenue” to secure a rental property in Perth. In that time, she and her children have been homeless, either sleeping in a car or relying on family to put a roof over their heads.
“It’s a horrible feeling,” she says. “We lay with all the windows up in the car and we can’t breathe.
“If I put the window down a little bit I can’t sleep, because I’m thinking that someone is gonna come along and rip the window off and try to hurt us.
“It feels like I’ve been dropped in a big bowl of karma or something. I’ve connected up with everybody. They have all declined me.”
Bropho, a Noongar and Yamatji woman, is now staying in short-term accommodation at a hotel in the city’s north-east, paid for by crisis care. Her biggest worry is that her children will start to feel the way she does: filled with anxiety and not knowing if they will have a roof over their heads in the days to come.
“We just go day by day,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I keep telling them, ‘You do understand, we don’t have a home’ – and they always say, ‘Yes mum, we know.’ I say, ‘Well, tomorrow get up and get ready for school and that way I can go and see more people about getting us a house.’
“That’s how it is every day. We just take it day by day.”
Families like Bropho’s are slipping through the cracks of a “fragmented, complex and uncoordinated” Indigenous housing system, research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has found.
The three-year long study released on Wednesday concludes that government initiatives to increase self-determination and grow the Indigenous Community-Controlled Housing (ICCHO) sector are failing.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The Australian government committed to working more closely with ICCHOs as part of its refreshed Closing the Gap agreement, signed in 2020. But the report, written in partnership with Adelaide University, Sydney University, the University of New South Wales, Curtin University and the Menzies School of Health and Research, has found that only 13% of Indigenous people living in public housing are connected to an ICCHO.
Target 9A of Closing the Gap seeks increase the proportion of people living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing to 88% by 2031.
Indigenous people have the highest rate of unmet housing needs. In 2021, the report says, some 45,700 low-income Indigenous households – or one in eight – had unmet housing needs. That’s double the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. The number of low-income Indigenous households with unmet housing needs is projected to grow by a further 26,400 households over the next 20 years, the report says, driven by unaffordable rents, overcrowding and inadequate housing.
A spokesperson for the federal government said it was “working in genuine partnership” with Indigenous people because “better outcomes are achieved when communities have a real say in the design and delivery of the services that affect them”.
But the lead researcher, Associate Prof Megan Moskos from Adelaide University, says the study shows Indigenous housing is falling behind because there is an “uncoordinated policy response”, with “no evidence” of shared decision-making.
“It’s clear that state, federal and territory governments acknowledge that the Indigenous Community-Controlled Housing sector can achieve better outcomes for Indigenous people, but despite that, there’s a real lack of growth plans for the sector,” she says.
“There needs to be actions to build the sector, and that includes securing adequate funding for Indigenous housing peak-bodies to lead the development of the sector.”
Tina Ugle, the managing director of a Perth-based ICCHO, Noongar Mia Mia, says community-controlled organisations are “absolutely” best placed to find housing for Indigenous people but said there are not enough available homes. Indigenous people also face “direct and indirect” discrimination in the private rental market.
“There is no stock transfer and investment from the government,” she says, adding: “It’s also the extreme rental stress and the private market. Aboriginal people are not going to get a foot in and that’s a fact.”
The federal government spokesperson said authorities were making “serious investments to tackle overcrowding and lift housing outcomes for First Nations Australians”, including $600m under the Housing Australia Future Fund and $2bn for housing in the Northern Territory.
