Poverty puts pressure on people – it’s constant and strong. If the pressure builds up, people can be pushed into homelessness.
We can relieve the pressure on people’s lives by creating
affordable housing and helping people get decent jobs. And we can
help people withstand this pressure by strengthening our social welfare system and ensure all payments stay above the poverty line.
In 2020 Anti-Poverty Week partnered with the Everybody’s Home campaign to help ensure all Australians have a safe and decent place to call home. We can end homelessness and increase housing affordability. Investing in social housing is both the right and smart thing to do.
In 2021, safe and affordable housing is an even more important solution to ending poverty. Women and children fleeing violence is the single largest reason people seek help from homelessness services. See the important new report Nowhere to Go produced by Equity Economics and released on 12 July 2021. It was commissioned by the Everybody’s Home campaign ahead of the Women’s Safety Summit and Homelessness Week 2021. The report estimated that the lack of long term social housing is leading to 7,690 women a year returning to violent partners and 9,120 women a year becoming homeless. If the Commonwealth Government invested in 16,800 additional social housing units the $7.6 billion cost would be dwarfed by immediate economic benefits of $15.3 billion and the creation of 47,000 new jobs. You can sign the Petition page which calls on the PM to support more social housing for women and children fleeing violence.
Homelessness Week 2021 runs from 1- 7 August 2021. See the Supporter Pack here. See these resources, including heat maps which show social housing and homelessness need by Federal electorate.
You may also like to read these published in Homelessness Week 2020:
- Life Course Centre August 2020 Newsletter
- Older Women in the Private Rental Sector: Unaffordable, Substandard and Insecure Housing written by Emma Power at the University of Western Sydney.
- Launch Housing Public Perceptions of Homelessness
See also
- Mission Australia, Staying home: A Youth Survey report on young people’s experience of homelessness, July 2020.
- Also the Social Housing Acceleration and Renovation Program (SHARP) released in May 2020 which details how building 30,000 social homes over the next four years will create up to 18,000 jobs per year while combatting homelessness.
- Australian Homelessness Monitor published by Launch Housing in 2018.
- Crisis UK: Talking about homelessness Framing toolkit, June 2020 based on research undertaken for them by the FrameWorks Institute Our common experience: the big idea that can help end homelessness, May 2018.