The outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney have been revealed as major hotspots of homelessness in new data that shows where people were living before they sought help.
People in housing crisis are also travelling extraordinary distances across Australia’s capital cities to access homelessness support, with those in Sydney travelling up to an average of 46km, and Melburnians travelling up to an average of 74.9km.
Guardian Australia has analysed data collected in the 2020-2021 financial year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), released for the first time to the Australian Urban Observatory. The data shows where people were living seven days before they sought homelessness support and calculates average distances from their last postcode to where they found help.
It is drawn from mandatory questionnaires filled out when a person accesses a specialist homelessness service funded under the federal, state and territory National Housing and Homelessness Agreement.
The data was provided as part of the Urban Observatory’s project to map the liveability of Australian cities, and was released on Thursday to coincide with the launch of its new gentrification index.
In Australia’s largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, local government level data shows high concentrations of people reaching a homelessness crisis point while living in outer suburban rings.
In Sydney, 2,794 people were living in the city centre before seeking help for homelessness. That is closely followed by the outer western local government areas (LGAs) of Blacktown (2,557 people), Campbelltown (2,036 people) and Penrith (1,971 people).
The Central Coast was the place of origin for the fifth highest number of homeless people (1,936 people). When combined with other indicators used by the Urban Observatory to measure social amenity – including access to healthcare, schools and playgrounds – it emerges as a major hotspot of housing insecurity and disadvantage. The Central Coast suffers high levels of homelessness coupled with very poor access to essential services.
Meanwhile, in Melbourne, the western LGA of Brimbank is the local government area with the highest level of homelessness, with 3,801 people living there the week prior to accessing housing help. It is followed by Casey (3,542 people), Wyndham (3,502 people) and the City of Melbourne (3,463 people).
Brimbank is Victoria’s third most disadvantaged local government area according to the Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD).
Melton, on the city fringe, combines high levels of homelessness with lowest amenity: 3,362 people lived there prior to accessing homelessness services, and the area’s social infrastructure rankings are among the worst in the city.
These trends are also broadly reflected in the data when broken down at suburb level.
The figures are likely underestimates of housing need. That is because organisations not directly funded by governments can provide homelessness services without providing data to the AIHW. The data also does not capture those in housing insecurity who did not approach a homelessness service. If a person accessed homelessness services more than once during the year, only their first occasion of seeking support is captured here.
Data was also supplied to the Urban Observatory showing average distances travelled by people to access homeless support, with Darwin recording the longest average distances travelled for housing support at 250km, followed by the outer Perth LGA of Kwinana, at 148km.
The inner city Melbourne LGA of Port Phillip comes third, with an average of 74.9km travelled to access housing help, followed by Yarra (41.8km) and Melton (41.3km).
In Sydney, the longest distances travelled were to the CBD for housing assistance (45.8km) followed by the Blue Mountains (45.7km) and Parramatta (39.6km).
Sarah Langmore, of the Western Homelessness Network in Victoria, was not surprised by the extraordinary distances people were travelling to access housing support.
“Women experiencing family violence often have to go outside their LGA to be safe when they get assistance,” Langmore, who collaborated on the Urban Observatory project, said.
“If people have nowhere to stay and we have to purchase emergency accommodation, it completely depends where we can get a room, and that’s getting harder and harder. So a lot of the time people are moving around in order to get assistance. It’s horrendous.”
Langmore said it was not unusual for people to move from one service access point to another across the city until they found one that had capacity to accommodate them. Most homelessness services were turning away vastly more people than they were able to help.
“We’re terrified with the current rental crisis, we’re seeing more and more people coming to our services just because they can’t afford their rent,” Langmore said.
Meredith Gorman, a homelessness network coordinator at Launch Housing in Melbourne, said the new data was an important contribution to the provision of essential services.
“We will not have a true picture of [city] liveability unless accurate data on housing and homelessness are factored into liveability measures,” Gorman, who was involved in the early stages of the project, said.
Data provided by the Australian Urban Observatory also shows the density and spread of government and community housing rentals across the capital cities.
Privately run community housing organisations dominate the outer suburbs and new growth areas, while public housing is more highly concentrated in areas that were historically working class, such as Waterloo, Redfern and Glebe in Sydney, and Richmond, North Melbourne, Collingwood and Fitzroy in Melbourne. Many of those suburbs have since gentrified to the point of exclusivity.
This is also likely to change in the future, as many public housing estates in Victoria and New South Wales are being demolished and rebuilt under contracts that shift their management to to private community housing providers rather than the government.
