Emergency accommodation is often unsafe, inappropriate, of poor quality and compounds the trauma of people experiencing housing crisis, a new report has found.
The lack of available social and affordable housing coupled with inaccessible and unaffordable private rentals meant that most people who entered crisis accommodation had no meaningful pathways out.
Demand for emergency housing was also vastly outstripping supply, which meant services were resorting to acquiring unsuitable and often unsafe short-term accommodation, such as in rooming houses, hostels, motels and caravan parks.
“The whole housing system is in crisis and that feeds the crisis in the homelessness service system,” the report’s lead researcher, Deb Batterham, said.
“If we want people to stay in crisis accommodation for only six weeks, each year we would need eight long-term housing options per bed to enable that to happen.”
The report, compiled for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute by researchers from Swinburne University, Launch Housing, University of South Australia and Flinders University, examined the elements of effective and appropriate crisis accommodation – as well as when it doesn’t work.
Crisis accommodation is generally offered by specialist homelessness services only as a short-term solution, with many organisations telling residents they can only stay for six to eight weeks. But once there, people found it extremely difficult to secure alternative housing, with less than a third exiting the crisis system into long-term accommodation, the report found.
Residents of emergency accommodation have previously told Guardian Australia they were given deadlines to leave and encouraged to look for inappropriate rooming house accommodation despite them having young children and pets.
The lack of crisis accommodation was worse in regional and rural areas, the report said, as it was generally concentrated in major towns and cities.
Data from the Australian Urban Observatory earlier this year showed people in housing crisis were travelling extraordinary distances to access this homelessness support, with those in Sydney travelling up to an average of 46km and Melburnians travelling up to an average of 74.9km for help.
“When we can’t provide long-term housing options that are appropriate and we can’t exit people to good places, we really just ended up compounding their trauma and they cycle back through the system,” Batterham said.
“If you exit someone to inappropriate housing, it’s just a matter of time before they come back. And they’ve got a whole new range of issues.”
Good and effective crisis accommodation was physically and culturally safe, especially for children, involved a flexible length of stay that meant people were not worried they would be pushed back into homelessness and was self-contained with kitchen and private bathroom facilities, the report found.
Services also provided people with other kinds of help depending on their needs, such as counselling and substance use support, assistance in navigating Centrelink and other government services and continued to support someone as needed after they had found long-term accommodation.
Effective accommodation also allowed people to keep their pets with them for comfort and support, the report found.
Crisis accommodation failed when it was poor quality, without kitchen or bathroom facilities, when the staff were rude or judgmental, when there were excessive rules or a complete lack of rules, or when they required mandatory copayments from a tenant.
The report’s authors also highlighted the detrimental and unfair consequences of forcing “mutual obligations” on residents by requiring them to apply for a certain number of private rentals or otherwise placing “unreasonable conditions to search for housing options which do not exist”.
“These things exacerbate the stress and trauma of homelessness and further compound people’s struggles, making it more difficult to exit homelessness,” the report said.
One unnamed worker who participated in interviews for the report said given how long people were staying in emergency accommodation, the money spent on that could be better spent subsidising private rental or paying for six months’ rent upfront.
Until Australia has an adequate supply of public, community and affordable housing, crisis accommodation services should be expanded to meet the need in the community, Batterham said.
“It doesn’t need to be crisis accommodation forever, but we’re going to need it for the foreseeable future,” she said. “We need to keep people safe, as safe as we can, in the meantime.”
