Charities paid by state government demand homeless clients apply for 10 rentals a week

How can it be charitable to ask our community’s most vulnerable to apply for multiple rentals a week or risk losing their emergency accommodation, writes the Editor. Have your say.

It is hardly charitable to impose “cruel and unattainable” conditions on homeless women to apply for multiple rentals or risk losing their emergency accommodation.

Yet an array of charities, which are paid by the state government to operate emergency accommodation, are demanding homeless clients apply for 10 rentals a week.

Housing Minister Nick Champion says emergency accommodation, like all government programs, has eligibility criteria and stipulations encouraging people to find housing. Third-party charities say their programs are funded by government and, therefore, the eligibility criteria is set by government.

But these charities are doing a disservice to the charity name and Mr Champion is not in the real world. Rules for emergency accommodation should be commensurate with reality.

Instead, The Advertiser’s Be Their Champion campaign has revealed repeated examples of homeless women being forced to comply with onerous rules governing emergency accommodation.

These simply do not match the reality of a housing crisis. Many homeless women have been forced out of their homes, repeatedly applied for rentals and have arrived in emergency accommodation because they could not find a home. In a vicious irony, they are then forced to spend excessive time in a fruitless search for rental accommodation.

Clearly, these rules need to change. Mr Champion needs to take responsibility. It is appropriate to have mutual obligation requirements but not ones that are so obviously unachievable as to be impossible. A sliding scale should be applied, linking the requirement to apply for rentals to the vacancy rate.

Alarmingly, Shelter SA executive director Alice Clark says she is shocked that charities are applying the onerous SA Housing Trust requirements, because she believed these had been relaxed.

One wonders what the donors and volunteers to these organisations think of this clinical method of operation by charities which should be themselves pushing back on the government. Unfortunately, it is more in keeping with the worst excesses of an unscrupulous business than a group charged with helping the needy. The victims, yet again, are the homeless women who just want a roof over their heads.

Originally published as Charities paid by state government demand homeless clients apply for 10 rentals a week