Sydney’s prices push people out on streets
SYDNEY’S soaring property prices have pushed greater numbers of older Australians and domestic violence victims into homelessness, a landmark new report says. The shocking number of people being forced onto the streets have been revealed.
NSW
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SYDNEY’S soaring property prices have pushed greater numbers of older Australians and domestic violence victims into homelessness, a landmark new report says.
Homelessness has risen 14 per cent nationally over five years — but by 48 per cent in Sydney and a whopping 53 per cent in the inner city, the Australian Homelessness Monitor 2018 report found.
Based on a groundbreaking UK model of looking at the scale and causes of the social problem, the study found increases in homelessness “substantially driven” by rising numbers of domestic violence victims in need of accommodation because of “the housing crisis” or “housing affordability stress”.
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And the city’s real estate boom meant more affordable private rents were increasingly being taken by middle-income households, squeezing out the poor.
Sydney recorded a 35 per cent increase in “rough sleeping” — sleeping outdoors — compared with a 3 per cent rise in Victoria between 2011 and 2016, the researchers found.
And the number of homeless women disproportionately increased — rising 25 per cent compared with 19 per cent for men.
The researchers said that as more middle-income Sydneysiders gave up the dream of home ownership — or spent longer renting to save a deposit — poorer families missed out.
“With more moderate- and high-income people spending longer in the rental market than they used to be, that’s causing stress for everyone trying to compete for that housing,” report author Professor Hal Pawson from the University of NSW said.
“The underlying issue is there’s a big restructure of the whole rental market going on — and that is gradually eliminated what used to be a large pool of low-rent housing.
“That’s gradually disappearing — but public housing has not increased to fill the need.”
“We’ve witnessed a marked increase in rates of homelessness in the past five years.”
At the last census in 2016, 116,000 Australians were homeless, with a 28 per cent jump in the elderly having nowhere to live.
“It’s quite striking that this age group is the fastest growing,” Professor Pawson said.
He said the research calculated that 613,000 people — including 229,000 children — had fallen below the poverty line as a result of housing costs.
There had also been a 24 per cent increase in domestic violence being the primary cause of homelessness — now accounting for 40 per cent of cases reported to services.
Launch Housing chief executive Tony Keenan, who commissioned the report, said it was “the first time we’ve been able to connect all these dots to inform a fully fledged picture of why homelessness is such a dire issue in Australia”.
“Homelessness is not unavoidable. This research demonstrates how policies and programs can — and do — make a difference,” he said.
Homelessness NSW chief executive Katherine McKernan said our state needed to make a greater effort to solve the problem with more social housing, better help for domestic violence victims and affordable housing because “we’re not faring as well as other states”.
A spokeswoman for Shelter NSW said across NSW and the Greater Sydney region the median rent for a two-bedroom unit was now higher than the median rent for a three-bedroom
house, reflecting the concentration of units in higher-price locations.
