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/