Gender-blind: Why Housing Policy is Failing Women in Australia by Tanya Corrie, CEO, Juno
The most common stereotype of what it is to be homeless in Australia remains the vision of a single, older male, on the streets, sleeping rough. It is of a large hall filled with temporary beds and soup kitchens where people experiencing homelessness can seek reprieve from a night on the streets and an empty belly.
This stereotype unfortunately misses the mark about the real face of homelessness and what it is to be homeless. It ignores the gendered aspects of homelessness, why it looks different for women, and why housing policy needs to adopt a gendered lens. Embedded attitudes and perceptions around homelessness lead to siloed service systems that limit support for women experiencing homelessness, including disjointed family violence crisis and homelessness support systems; lack of long-term affordable accommodation for single-income families; and inadequate periods of trauma-informed support after women receive permanent housing.
The reality is that 60 per cent of people presenting to homelessness services in Australia are women.[1] Older women are the fastest growing group of those presenting to homelessness services because of a lifetime of gendered inequality, income poverty and caring responsibilities.[2]
These are the faces of homelessness that we don’t see. These women are not often sleeping rough, but the ones that do are at a much higher risk of experiencing violence and sexual assault.[3] They are more likely to be women and their children sleeping in cars, older women who are living in caravans or hostels, and the estimated 7,690 women that return to violent relationships[4] as they are being forced to make an impossible choice – violence or homelessness.
They are women like Lee,* who at 53, was forced to leave her previous rental with her 8-year-old son because it was an unsafe environment for them due to the risk of violence. Prior to renting, Lee owned her home but had to sell her house to pay the costs associated with a family court matter involving the perpetrator.
As a sole parent with one income, soaring rental prices and low rental availability, Lee could not find an affordable property and was pushed into homelessness. She spent some time couch surfing with family before moving to Melbourne to be closer to her oldest child. At the time of referral to Juno, Lee and her son were moving into emergency accommodation after the property where they had been couch surfing became too crowded.
Or they are women like Mary* who, after years of abuse and control by her husband, left him once their children had left home after spending 20 years caring for them. She had no superannuation, no savings and access to no support when she was referred to Juno for housing assistance. Mary slept in a caravan in a friend’s yard until she could organise access to appropriate disability support payments and housing, living in housing limbo for over a year until she was able to find somewhere safe and affordable to call home.
The Homes for 100 Women Project, driven by the Women’s Housing Alliance[5] of which Juno is a member, would address the critical need for stable, secure affordable housing and support for women experiencing homelessness in Victoria.
The Project would remove the current siloes that exist in enabling women and children to access affordable housing and support, and replace them with a collaborative, coordinated and trauma-informed approach.
The model is an integrated, whole-of-life approach designed by Victoria’s leading agencies in supporting women experiencing family violence and homelessness.
The Project provides women with a clear and immediate pathway from any family violence intake point to accommodation. Women:
1. Receive housing first,
2. Receive a single case manager and
3. Connect to gender-specific supports
Once secure, stable housing is in place, women can access a coordinated program of health and recovery, legal, financial, income, education and employment supports.
This approach has been trialled successfully in Queensland and is based on evidence that integrated approaches and multi-disciplinary service delivery improves safety and decreases the barriers women face when seeking support.[6] Similar, wraparound support models trialled by member organisations have shown a return on investment as high as $3.96 for every $1 invested[7]and with housing stabilised, improvements to income as high as $203 per week have been experienced with ongoing goal setting and planning.[8]
What is required is the political will to recognise homelessness for women needs its own response and that this epidemic is only going to worsen the longer it is ignored.
It requires an acknowledgment that despite progress that may have been made in gender equality, women still experience poorer economic outcomes than men, and this poverty accumulates over their life course. We need to change the policy settings that lead to this and adapt solutions to address and improve outcomes for women.
[1] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) (2022) Specialist homelessness services annual report 2021-22, AIHW
[2] Australian Human Rights Commission (2019) Risk of Homelessness in Older women, AHRC
[3] Box, E., Flatau, P., & Lester, L. (2022). Women sleeping rough: The health, social and economic costs of homelessness. Health & Social Care in the Community, 00, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.13811
[4] Equity Economics (2021) Nowhere to Go, Everybody’s Home
[5] The Women’s Housing Alliance (WHA) formed in 2019 as a cross-sector partnership to address the systemic barriers and the housing crisis being faced by women and children across Victoria. WHA members are leading organisations across the family violence, legal, health and housing sectors that support women and children experiencing and at risk of homelessness. Our vision is to ensure adequate, safe and secure housing solutions which provide timely, accessible, and affordable homes for women, children, and young people in vulnerable circumstances.
[6] ANROWS (2020) Working across sectors to meet the needs of clients experiencing domestic and family violence, ANROWS
[7] Deloitte Access Economics (2019), Social Return in Investment: A Case Study Approach, Macauley Services for Women
[8] For Purpose (not published) Midline evaluation of EMPower Program for Juno Services, Juno
About Juno
Juno is a support and advocacy organisation working across Melbourne. We provide gender-informed services that empower and support women (CIS- and Trans-) and non-binary people and their children experiencing homelessness and housing stress, family violence and financial hardship. We advocate to raise awareness of the unique issues women and non-binary people face and change the systems and structures which contribute to gendered poverty, homelessness and family violence.
Website: www.juno.org.au
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/juno-org-au
Twitter: https://twitter.com/junoinc_
The Song of Concrete - Claire G. Coleman
Guest story by Claire G. Coleman, Noongar writer (poet, essayist, novelist). Claire’s experience is featured in Under Cover documentary.
Night has unrolled over Melbourne like an old grey army blanket, threadbare and scratchy.
It’s cold, the fog so thick that a white glow precedes the trams as they sneak down Brunswick street, stalked by glowing red. My bodyguard – her fur sleek and black, shaped a bit like a dingo but just a touch chunkier – is finishing off a half-pizza somebody has given her. That’s one of the best things about this place: kebabs, pizza, burgers, I never have to find food for my kelpie. Her puppy-dog eyes are junk-food magnets.
“Would your dog like half my pizza?” It’s the most common question I hear on these streets.
The tequila in my gut is bringing fire to my eyes. The felafel roll I have just eaten is heavy in my gut and contains the promise of not-hunger; a promise on which it will not immediately deliver. My mandolin is tuned, a few bucks nestled inside its pear-shaped dwelling to convince people to add more. My voice and my head are both lubricated.
I start to sing.
I have never been much of a singer, not a much better musician, but out here, cross-legged on the street, being barely dodged by drunk people looking for another place to drink, it doesn’t really matter. One night a couple of drunken idiots, brawling unsteadily, fell on me. Luckily my mandolin was unharmed, but I carried the bruises for some time.
I strum, throw out a shit-poor rendition of The Ship Song, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The chords are simple. The song is not meant to be well-sung, otherwise Nick Cave, the musician I am closest to being a fan of, would not be singing it.
Some coins clink, a note flutters downwards.
Naked legs, jeans, pantyhose, boots, runners, thongs, sandals pass by. Overcoats dangle. I am jealous of warm coats tonight.
Someone stops to listen. Clink.
Across the street and down a bit, a bassist whose name I can never remember is drawing a crowd, because unlike me he can really play. I’m glad he’s there. From time to time we have passed the tequila back and forth, and he has protected me in the past when someone tried to kick me off my corner with threats of violence. When the bassist backed me up the aggro person fled, their voice, their sworn abuse trailing them down the street; yet me and the bassist only know each other enough to say “Hello”. I guess that’s just the sort of guy he is.
I’ve managed to keep my corner – the best corner in the street, near the light and crowds of a late-night souvlaki shop and a bar. It never hurts to play the songs the bouncer requests.
It’s cold tonight. I dread the street on such nights – not the physical street, but the abstract idea of the street. Even with a fleece blanket and a kelpie, I am not sure I will be safe and warm enough. Bus shelters, even Flinders Street Station, where I know people will be sleeping, are seldom warm, and never safe enough. I’ll make enough cash tonight to go to a boarding house or a hostel if I wanted to, but I have never been inside one of those places; never felt a strong urge to do it.
I have other uses for my money, other reasons to be out on the street busking.
Dumb Things, by Paul Kelly: the chords are simple, but the changes are fast. I’ve never been great at this song, but the words speak to me. I have done dumb things too. Some of the reasons I am out on the street come down to that – to mistakes I’ve made. The rest of it was just dumb luck.
It can happen to pretty much anyone; enough bad luck, enough things going wrong, and you’re sleeping on friend’s couches. Enough time on couches and eventually you can end up in a squat, if you’re lucky. Sleeping in my car kept me off the street for a while. But shit happens, dumb things happen. Bad luck happens.
Eventually the street happens. There are many paths from losing your home to sleeping rough, but few ways back to housing once you land on the street.
It’s so cold. Words come to me and I strum a simple chord pattern, one I don’t think I will ever remember, one I’m not sure is even any good, but I can sing to it. I find myself improvising without really planning to. The first line – “It’s really bloody cold…” – startles a chortle from a passer-by. I keep playing, knowing what I am playing for, knowing that any emotion from these strangers can translate into cash.
“It’s really bloody cold…” The words puff whitely from my mouth. “My fingers feel like ice…”
Truth is beauty: it is so cold my fingers are aching, and I miss a chord change and then another one, but nobody notices. It’s not like what I’m playing is even really a song.
The street is so cold that the black steel tramlines are glistening with condensation. The concrete footpaths have turned dark.
But this is my street. For now I live out here, three thousand kilometres from Country.
And I know it’s not the quality of my music that matters. There’s a magic to this corner where I sit cross-legged, bound to the concrete by my desperation to earn a little cash. There’s even more magic at two in the morning. That magic throws words into my mouth, throws cash into my stash: “My lips feel like ice…” And they do. I can barely sing at the best of times, but out here on this freezing night is far from being the best of times.
“My tongue feels like ice…” Anyone sensible would be finding somewhere warm. The people on the street tonight drinking are not sensible, they are desensitised to the temperature, to my predicament, by booze. Sensible people don’t give twenty-dollar notes to buskers.
“It’s really fucking cold.” My arse has frozen to the concrete.
Someone walks past, drops me a fifty; they say “Jesus saves,” but I am an atheist. Jesus didn’t save me from the streets. I bite back a retort, grab the fifty and pocket it before some bastard skims it.
Someone requests a song they’ve heard me butcher before: Britney Spears, Hit Me Baby One More Time. I only play it as a joke, but it always gets me money. I know it’ll be good for a note at least. A passing local musician drops a fiver and a guitar pick in my case. I get a lot of picks that way.
Eventually the crowds peter out, the money stops falling. I have been out here in the cold for six hours. I go to the souvlaki shop, where they know me, and I know I will be safe. I come here every night at about this time and count my money. It’s okay, over a hundred and fifty, so I buy a late-night dinner and relax. The longer I stay here, the longer I’ll be warm, but I shan’t outstay my welcome.
This is the most dangerous time of night: walking into the city, towards the lights and the coppers and the all-night, drunk-too-much dickheads. There are patches of darkness on the streets that cannot be avoided. I have never been attacked – not walking into the city, at least – but I know people who have. I cannot afford to feel fear. And besides, there is no better bodyguard than a pure-bred kelpie.
I make it to the lit streets of the inner city at about five in the morning, in time for a couple of hours’ sleep before the Saturday morning crowds pour into the train station, making it hard to sleep safely. My mandolin case goes under my head: it’s too hard for a pillow, but if someone steals it I am screwed. My money goes in my bag, which I hug under my polar-fleece blanket, my kelpie on the other side.
In the morning I buy a train ticket, take myself, my stuff, my dog, and board a train to Lilydale. I am not trying to actually get to Lilydale, but it’s a long train trip, the trains are heated and I need the sleep. I sleep safe under the eye of cameras.
When I wake I mentally add my night’s earnings to what I have already stashed. My van is my home, but it’s still hundreds of kilometres away, and the hole in the radiator is not going to fix itself. I don’t even leave the train when it stops. I have to eat what I can, get some more rest. Another hour of sleep in the train back from Lilydale; if I did this at night, I would be moved on.
When night rolls around, I will be back on Brunswick Street again.
Last night. Tonight. A few more nights.
Just a few more.
[First published in “We Are Here: stories of home place and belonging”. Published by Affirm press 2019, Edited by Meg Mundell.] You can purchase the book here.
Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman whose family have belonged to the south coast of Western Australia since long before history started being recorded. She writes fiction, essays, poetry and art writing while either living in Naarm (Melbourne) or on the road
Born in Perth, away from her ancestral country she has lived most of her life in Victoria and most of that in and around Melbourne.
During an extended circuit of the continent she wrote a novel, influenced by certain experiences gained on the road. She has since won a Black&Write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship for that novel ,"Terra Nullius". Terra Nullius was published in Australia by Hachette Australia and in North America by Small Beer Press.
Since mid 2020 Claire has been a member of the cultural advisory committee for Agency, a Not-for-profit Indigenous arts Consultancy.
How can the private sector help to eliminate homelessness?
Guest article by Housing All Australians, Founder and Director, Robert Pradolin
Housing All Australians is proud to have been the initial seed investor for the creation of this informative Australian documentary. The reception Under Cover is receiving is extremely encouraging as most of our population are not aware that women over 50 years of age are the fastest growing cohort of homelessness in Australia.
The tireless hours spent by Writer/Director Sue Thomson, and her team, in interviewing the women who have graciously shared their stories, has started to enlighten the Australian population of what they did not previously know about homelessness and how these women are someone’s mother, sister, or their daughter or one day, it could easily happen to them.
We are also very honoured to have a small part in the film showing one of our initiatives which is about underutilised buildings can be turned into short term transitional housing to provide immediate housing for those in need. It also shows that the private sector is there and is willing to help vulnerable Australians. The gravity and size of this issue is ($290 billion) too big for government to solve by itself. This is a community wide crisis and is impacting all demographics, especially those on low incomes and our key workers who cannot find accommodation close to where they provide services to society.
We founded Housing All Australians (DGR1 charity) as the voice of the private sector. Business had been missing from the conversation, and if Australia is to create a new pathway for the future of our country, then business must be part of the solution.
The delivery of social and affordable housing has been the remit of government, but government investment in housing our most vulnerable has fallen significantly and currently sits in a precarious state. This will impact the way that Australian society evolves for future generations unless we decide, collectively, to do something about it. Doing nothing is not an option. We must change our current trajectory and reposition housing as fundamental infrastructure for a future prosperous Australia.
The Australian Government Actuary estimates the investment required to address the chronic shortage of social and affordable housing is at least $290 billion, which equates to an additional 300,000 to 400,000 homes. Our population grew by more than 25 per cent between the 2001 and 2016 Census years, yet our stock of occupied social housing shrank by 2.5 per cent to now make up less than 4 per cent of all dwellings. In Australia, our construction industry builds around 200,000 homes per year in good times, with a mere 8000 social housing units. Under this trajectory government can’t do it alone and it knows it.
Housing All Australians’ economic study, Give Me Shelter, released earlier this year showed that unless we create the addition housing our country needs, future generations will pay an extra $25 billion per annum (in today dollars) by 2051 if nothing is done. This is clearly something we all need to put our shoulder to the wheel and change the current trajectory, otherwise we will be leaving our descendants with an intergeneration social and economic timebomb.
Housing All Australians has come up with several initiatives that help make a difference and start to drive change.
Our “Pop Up” Shelters, like the Lakehouse, in Melbourne, provide temporary accommodation for vulnerable women by re-purposing vacant buildings awaiting redevelopment. The scheme takes advantage of the thousands of suitable empty buildings across Australia that can be re-purposed for short-term use as crisis or transitional housing. We bring the property owner and the community housing agency together and facilitate donation of private-sector goods and services to renovate and fit out the home.
Since opening, Lakehouse has helped housed over 107 women aged 55 and over in need of short-term accommodation. Through the support provided by YWCA Australia, over half these women have been able to secure permanent public housing or private rentals. Wyn Carr House in Western Australia is another project underway and we have many more in the pipeline. (If you know of a vacant building – get in touch!)
Other private sector led initiatives include projects such as Conscious Investment Management’s housing project, a $150 million investment funding the acquisition of up to 307 apartments for social and affordable housing tenants in a unique partnership with the Victorian Government and community housing association, HousingFirst. With government playing a key enabling role, this model unlocks institutional scale private capital to generate new social and affordable housing stock.
These are just three examples of how the private sector can be involved by providing capital, housing delivery, and donation of goods and services. At Housing All Australians, we only work with value-aligned businesses. So if you believe your organisation has values that align with our purpose, we would be pleased to hear from you. If every business did a “little bit” to help, collectively we can have a huge impact across Australia.
Home is where healing can begin
Guest article by Launch Housing Chief Impact Officer, Laura Mahoney
Home. The place where we find safety and shelter from the outside world, where we rest, where we keep our things, where we lay our head each night and where we raise a family.
Home is such a vital part of a person’s identity, sense of belonging and overall health and wellbeing. It is also a human right. But for many people, not having a home or somewhere to sleep at night is their reality. When most people think of homelessness, they think of people sleeping rough. However, homelessness comes in many forms, is both visible and invisible, and is gendered.
The way women experience homelessness is very different and largely invisible. Women are at much greater risk of experiencing homelessness or housing crisis due to structural and systemic gender-based inequity. They are more likely to be working in lower paid jobs, living below the poverty line and have dependents, they are more likely to have been caring for family members full and part-time and to have been partially or completely out of the paid workforce.
Women are more likely to experience family violence and are less likely to have the financial resources to escape. Older women are more likely to be living in a rental property – a significant risk factor for experiencing housing crisis. Increases in interest rates, rising rents and the lack of affordable housing is compounding the problem.
A new report by Australians Investing In Women and Per Capita has found that approximately a quarter of Australians rent in the private market, with rents growing 9.5 per cent in the year to June 2022. Two thirds of private renters with low incomes are in housing stress, with 20 per cent spending half their income on rent. Women are disproportionately represented in this group with older women and single parents more likely to spend a larger proportion of their income on rent.
The effects of these systemic gender inequities in our society can be seen in the high numbers of women accessing specialist homelessness services like ours.
The fastest growing group of people experiencing homelessness is older women, and family and domestic violence is the largest growing driver of homelessness for women, particularly those with dependent children. And this situation is only worsening. Rents are continuing to increase and affordable housing is becoming even more difficult to secure, especially in the private rental market. Meanwhile, Victoria Police crime trends showed the number of family violence incidents was higher in every month during 2020 than during 2019, in part due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What makes it worse is that the options for women leaving family violence are limited and scarce. Many women and their children escaping family and domestic violence will attempt to access crisis accommodation. Much of this accommodation is already at capacity, with support services under-resourced to cope with the pressures of current demand. It is also often unsafe or unsuitable for children. This lack of availability is pushing families into small, often run-down motels, sleeping in their cars, on the streets, couch surfing or returning to unsafe households.
This means that many women have to make a devastating choice – stay home in a violent and unsafe situation or enter into homelessness and another unsafe situation. Each year in Australia over 7,500 women return to violent partners due to having nowhere to live, while more than 9,000 women become homeless as a result of escaping violent homes.
It is unacceptable that we don’t have enough suitable options for women and families to find safety and stability at such a critical time of need.
Even if a woman is able to access crisis accommodation, the clock starts ticking the moment she enters this short-term option and there are currently very limited ways forward into permanent housing after this time runs out.
In theory, crisis accommodation provides a short-term stopgap until medium-term transitional housing, or long-term permanent accommodation becomes available. However, with the realities of social and affordable housing shortages across the country and rental supply and affordability at an all-time low, long term stability is out of reach for so many families.
This is resulting in an overreliance on emergency accommodation and short-term options which can prolong the period of crisis for women and children, exacerbating trauma and instability, which has negative impacts on children and their development, including extended episodes of disengagement from school and social activities.
How can we expect women who are dealing with the trauma of violence and homelessness to find stability?
We need to turn our attention to more holistic ways of supporting women and families into housing and find ways to bypass or move quickly from crisis accommodation to permanent housing so families can rebuild and find stability as soon as possible.
A Housing First approach to rapidly re-house women into permanent supportive housing will give them the best chance to rebuild their lives. Permanent housing combined with co-located support services is a proven approach that gives women and children a fresh start.
Launch Housing has partnered with Uniting Vic Tas to address a specific gap in affordable permanent housing options for women and children experiencing family violence, and homelessness in Victoria.
Known as Viv’s Place, the project is the first-of-its-kind in Australia and has opened its doors to up to 60 women and up to 130 children in Dandenong. This includes women over 55, many of whom are also leaving or have left family violence situations with no financial resources or anywhere safe to live.
In addition to 60 self-contained and furnished apartments, the building has 24-hour support staff and a range of wrap-around support services located in the building, including health, legal, financial, education and living skills specialists. Children will have access to counselling services, trauma-informed playgroups, art groups and after school clubs.
The building has been designed with safety, security and a sense of community as the core principles. The communal spaces encourage interaction and belonging and have been designed and decorated through a trauma-informed lens. The safety of the women and children is central to the model, and has already been recognised by residents as the most fundamental difference to anywhere they have lived before.
This model not only makes it possible for women and children to leave family and domestic violence, it provides them permanent stability and puts them at the centre of care, bringing support services to their door so they can recover in the safety and security of their home.
Our hope is that Viv’s Place will provide a model for the development of more holistic housing solutions across Australia to give women and children the best opportunity to recover and rebuild their lives.
We need systemic change to address the intersecting housing and family and domestic violence crises that are impacting so many Australian women and families. Real change starts with being bold, measuring impact and scaling up solutions that work.
Launch Housing is a secular Melbourne-based community organisation that delivers homelessness services and life-changing housing supports to disadvantaged Victorians.
We want to end homelessness and are passionately committed to creating lasting societal change to help those most in need in our community. In a country as wealthy as ours no one should be homeless.
https://www.launchhousing.org.au/