People are resorting to hiring private rental cars in order to have a place to sleep, a forum on homelessness in the Lake Macquarie has heard.
The online forum, organised by Lake Macquarie City Council, was held on Wednesday and involved more than 60 people from various groups and organisations who deal with homelessness.
It was facilitated by council's community development officer Emilie Wiggers and Connecting the Hunter coordinator with Hunter Homeless Connect, Nissa Lee Phillips.
Ms Wiggers said providers, including Nova for Women and Children, Hunter Tenants' Advice and Advocacy Service, Cardiff's Our Backyard, Hunter Community Alliance and Baptist Care, spoke about the dire situation they and their clients currently faced.
"It's pretty much in crisis at the moment," she said.
"We've heard people are sleeping in their cars, but also hiring private rental cars and sleeping in those because there's no other option.
"There's only around a 0.2 per cent vacancy rate of rental properties and the rental market is well above the affordability rate.
"It should only be around 30 per cent of a person's income, but it's much higher than that at the moment and it would be causing a lot of financial distress to families.
"It's really middle income earners that are affected, people who haven't been homeless before.
"It's not just low socioeconomic people who are impacted.
"There's people who are landlords themselves. They're leasing out those properties and renting themselves, but they're being evicted from the place that they live in so they're sort of between a rock and a hard place."
Participating providers discussed seeing a rise in the number of no grounds evictions and the fact there is currently no limit to rental increases landlords can impose, which had contributed to the affordability issue and led to growing trends of people sleeping in public spaces and in vehicles.
Services also reported an increase in the amount of people with disabilities requiring emergency accommodation, but said there were limited options to cater for their access needs.
"So it's both the same old story but a new story as well because of the pandemic," Ms Wiggers said. "It was already an issue affecting our social fabric but now it's peaking.
"Services were saying they haven't seen this level of need in over 20 years."
As well as a chance to discuss the current crisis, the forum also involved identifying actions that the stakeholder organisations and council were hoping to achieve.
Ms Wiggers said services spoke about how they refer on to each other and how they would like to strengthen those referrals.
"There's the no wrong door policy, so members of the public could be confused on where to start, but if you approach any of them they can link you to others," Ms Wiggers said.
Council also aims to lead data collection about where volunteer groups, churches and charities were meeting gaps that funded support organisations weren't able to meet.
Innovative solutions were also discussed, such as international ideas about having safe places for families to camp or sleep in their car - like Our Backyard in Cardiff - along with business pay it forward schemes where customers may contribute to food or hair cut vouchers which get passed on to others in need.
Ms Wiggers said the forum was the chance for people to voice concerns and brainstorm ideas, with plans for further meetings to progress the discussions.
