INTERNATIONAL STORY A PLACE TO CALL HOME: AUSTRALIA’S POST-PANDEMIC HOUSING CRISIS When COVID struck last year, more than 40,000 Australians were housed in emergency accommodation. The Big Issue Australia asks, where are they now? BY MELISS FULTON “IT’S JUST BEEN LIKE, ‘IS THIS FOR REAL?’” says single mum and Big Issue vendor Jannah on the moment she found out she’d been accepted for transitional housing in Perth. “It was an enormous relief. It was like, ‘Wow! A place to call home.’” Over the phone, Jannah sounds relaxed, positive, happy. It’s Thursday when we talk, and she just moved in on Monday – to a humble three-bedroom home with a front gate and some friendly neighborhood birds, including a cheeky mudlark that visits every day. Already, Dakota*, Jannah’s 10-year-old daughter, has turned her bedroom into a TikTok studio, complete with LED lights. “She’s done her own bedroom, her own little design,” says Jannah. It’s been a long road for the two of them. In August last year, Dakota was diagnosed with a tumor in her foot. She was booked in for surgery and they were staying at Ronald McDonald House when they got the news from their landlord that they were being evicted. Since then, they’ve been homeless, bounced around between boarding houses, hotels, and other crisis accommodation. They did three different two-week placements at Perth’s Beatty Lodge, and a few hotel stays – some of which cost Jannah $130 a night, a huge portion of her income support payments. They lived in a share house for a while but that didn’t work out. Jannah says that if she had a car, they would have slept in it. Jannah and Dakota were able to get help in the short term, from emergency housing providers, but when it came to secure long-term accommodation, there was just nowhere to go; there were no suitable rentals available, no social housing. We’re in the throes of a housing crisis. Jannah and Dakota are among the 155,000-plus households on waiting lists for social and public housing nationwide. “It’s really, really tough out there,” says Jenny Smith, CEO of the Council to Homeless Persons, which cites a lack of affordable housing as the single biggest cause of homelessness in this country – a problem that has only increased since the onset of the pandemic. So how did we get here? One of the few silver linings of COVID was that it put the right to housing back on the agenda. Nationwide, when the pandemic struck, governments snapped into action, adopting a public health response to homelessness, securing and funding emergency short-term accommodation for Australians without a safe, secure place to call home – mostly in hotels and student accommodation. A UNSW study found that some 40,000 Australians in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland were given emergency accommodation between mid-March and September last year. JobKeeper payments and the doubling of JobSeeker, coupled with eviction moratoriums and restrictions on rental increases helped stave off disaster, protecting vulnerable Australians against the pandemic. It suggested a solution to homelessness was possible. The problem is that even before the pandemic, we were in a state of crisis. More than 116,000 Australians are homeless on any given night, and 15,800 of them are children under 12, like Dakota. In the 12 months before COVID, some 290,000 people received support from homelessness services, an increase of 14% in four years, while another 250 people were turned away by emergency homelessness services each night due to a shortage of beds and a system buckling under the weight of demand. Now, with the winding back of many of the temporary crisis supports, coupled with the continued social and economic costs of the virus, we’re facing a substantial risk of increasing homelessness, according to a University of Melbourne study – especially among young people. Of those 40,000 people given emergency accommodation during the pandemic, only onethird transitioned into more permanent housing. ILLUSTRATION BY MICHEL STREICH 6 DENVER VOICE September 2021
7 Publizr Home