The housing crisis and rising financial stress are pushing more than 1,600 people into homelessness each month as demand for sheltering services soars, a report has found.
Homelessness Australia said between December and March demand for homelessness services rose 7.5% across Australia amid soaring rents and record low vacancy rates. In total, an extra 6,658 people sought help.
The biggest rise in demand for homelessness services was seen in Queensland (12.9% rise) followed by Western Australia (11.1%) and New South Wales (10.2%), according to the report, which was released on Friday.
Women and children make up 74% of those accessing services.
Kate Colvin, the chief executive of Homelessness Australia, said the rapidly rising number of people seeking help made it harder for services to provide it.
“A 7.5% increase in demand in just four months is unheard of. It forces homelessness services to make extremely tough decisions about who gets assistance,” she said.
“When you annualise this demand and add it to the existing people turned away we are looking at a funding shortfall of more than $450m.
“This is just one terrible side effect of the worst housing crisis in living memory.”
There were more than 95,000 people seeking homelessness assistance in March. For 83% of those people, the reason cited was housing or financial issues.
Jett Greenhalgh is one of those. In September the 59-year-old’s rent increased from $420 to $550 a week, making the house she had lived in for three years unaffordable.
“I’ve basically lost everything to my name due to the rental crisis,” she said. “I was putting the rent in, but it just wasn’t enough.”
Greenhalgh lives off jobseeker so she could not meet payments. Perth’s tight rental market meant finding another place was essentially impossible on her budget.
She sold all her belongings, including her car, and moved into a bus she bought, now parked outside her son’s rental home in Kalgoorlie.
Greenhalgh plans to get her bus licence and move around doing odd jobs. “I get $400 a week, but [by] the time we pay our bills and put fuel in I’m broke. There’s basically nothing to live on.”
More than 80 housing organisations on Friday called for a national overhaul of the rental market to ease the housing crisis. They argue the federal government should establish minimum rent standards to protect Australians from cost spikes and poor-quality dwellings.
The organisations, which include tenant unions, housing providers and domestic violence services, signed a statement to the Senate’s rental crisis inquiry saying the market was characterised by “instability, insecurity, and a lack of adequate protections”.
They want an end to no-grounds evictions, limits on rent increases, basic energy standards and better enforcement of tenancy laws. They are also calling on federal and state governments to aim for at least 10% of all dwellings to be social housing.
“Market rents are unaffordable with many renters struggling to secure a new rental property in the fiercely competitive private rental market,” the letter reads.
“Most renters continue to face significant insecurity, making it very difficult to assert their rights such as requesting repairs..”
Emma Greenhalgh, the chief executive of National Shelter, said now was a “watershed moment” for housing policy. She called for “meaningful rental reform by the commonwealth and state governments to make renting a much better experience for tenants”.
“Renting will be a lifelong tenure for many Australians, and we need to ensure that the homes they live in are affordable, secure, and healthy.”
The Labor government’s signature housing policy remains stalled in parliament as a standoff continues with the Greens, who want more funding for public housing and for the prime minister to encourage the states and territories to bring in rent freezes.
Max Chandler-Mather, the Greens’ housing spokesman, claimed the federal government was “pretending” it couldn’t do more on coordinating rent freezes.
“The prime minister could go to national cabinet, take national leadership, put money on the table and incentivise a freeze and cap on rent increases,” Chandler-Mather said.
He noted national cabinet was already considering broader action on renters’ rights and that state leaders had already instituted caps in the energy market.
“Replace caps on energy prices with caps on rents, and that’s what we’re proposing happens,” he said.
