Hotels and motels would be repurposed to house homeless people under a proposal to be tabled at Queensland’s affordable housing summit on Thursday.
The proposal is among a string of ideas to be floated for urgent relief for the tens of thousands of people who are on the state’s social housing waiting list, couch surfing or sleeping in cars or on the streets.
It comes as housing and homelessness services demand both a long-term plan to build more social housing but also a disaster-style response for those bearing the brunt of the crisis.
The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute’s managing director, Dr Michael Fotheringham, said fellow participants at the summit need only look to recent history for inspiration in a crisis response towards homelessness.
“Every state and territory in the country took emergency measures to address rough sleeping in the midst of the lockdown period of 2020 by using large hotel facilities as interim housing,” he said.
Fotheringham acknowledged the Covid-19 pandemic was “a unique environment” – given it shut down global travel and meant hotels had no other business – and that such an approach would be costly.
“But it shows what you can do if you negotiate that sort of agreement,” he said.
“And there are still probably enough [hotels and motels] that are struggling in the recovery that would be interested in this sort of solution.”
He said motels and “older, smaller and more suburban” hotels would be better candidates for conversion to crisis accommodation or social housing, rather than newer, high-rise hotels, pointing to similar programs in the US.
Daniel Gschwind, who recently stood down as Queensland Tourism Industry Council’s chief executive after more than two decades, to take up a role with Griffith University, said the idea had merit.
Gschwind said the tourism and hospitality sector was “clearly wrapped up” in the crisis given “destinations that are popular with visitors are also popular with would-be residents”.
He said many businesses in the sector were struggling to accommodate staff and so had a vested interest in alleviating the crisis.
“We are caught up in the problem too, and we can contribute to solutions,” he said.
“What is clear is that we need innovative and new solutions to this problem that we have not experienced before in this form and at this scale. If there are ways of repurposing existing accommodation, then I think that should be explored.”
Micah Projects chief executive, Karyn Walsh, said she would strongly advocate for the government to buy existing buildings and repurpose them for housing as part of her participation in the summit.
That included buildings that were no-longer fit for purpose or disused and hotels and motels that would be willing to sell.
“That way you don’t have such a time lag as building or rezoning land,” she said
But Walsh said such an approach would require the buildings to be renovated and integrated with services so that people didn’t end up in substandard accommodation.
Repurposing disused buildings for social or crisis housing can be a fraught affair.
In London, the conversion of office blocks into housing has been described as a catastrophe.
The recent suggestion by Brisbane lord mayor, Adrian Schrinner, to convert an unfinished quarantine facility into crisis housing for women and children escaping domestic violence was also met with a mixed response by the city’s housing and homelessness sector.
Walsh said that although the crisis demanded an emergency response, it needed to come as part of a “balanced plan” that breaks the cycle of people living in transitional and emergency situations.
“The danger is that if we’re not looking at them in the context of our plan for permanent housing, then they have a life of their own, and they keep going and going,” she said.
