OCTOBER 2020 VOLUME 33 — ISSUE 9 I S S N
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Of A Certain Age: Homelessness and Older Women
Contents Parity
Australia’s national homelessness publication
Published by Council to Homeless Persons
Jenny Smith Chief Executive Officer Noel Murray Parity Editor noel@chp.org.au (03) 8415 6201 0438 067 146/0466 619 582
www.chp.org.au/parity/subscribe
Address 2 Stanley Street Collingwood Melbourne VIC 3066 Phone (03) 8415 6200 E-mail parity@chp.org.au Website www.chp.org.au
Editorial | 3
Jenny Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Council to Homeless Persons
Chapter 1: Learning from Lived Experience
Christine’s Story | 4 Walk in My Shoes: The Lived Experience of Older Women in Need of Affordable Housing | 5 Victoria Heywood, Communications, Women’s Housing Ltd
This is Tammy’s Story | 7 Single Older Women with No Place to Call Home | 8 Therese Hall
This is Lynette’s Story | 10 This is Lorraine’s Story | 12 More-Older Women Are Experiencing Homelessness Than Ever Before: I Was One of Them | 14 Penny Leemhuis
This is Cheryl’s Story | 15 This is Susan’s Story | 16
Kedy Kristal, Acting Chief Executive Officer, Women’s Council for Domestic and Family Violence Services, Western Australia
@counciltohomeless
Parity magazine is online
This is Helen’s Story | 18 @CHPVic
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Contributions to Parity are welcome. Each issue of Parity has a central focus or theme. However, prospective contributors should not feel restricted by this as Parity seeks to discuss the whole range of issues connected with homelessness and the provision of housing and services to people experiencing homelessness. Where necessary, contributions will be edited. Where possible this will be done in consultation with the contributor. Contributions can be emailed to parity@chp.org.au in Microsoft Word or rtf format. If this option is not possible, contributions can be mailed to CHP at the above address.
The 2020 Parity Publications Schedule
November: Shelter from the Storm: Responding to Homelessness Under Covid-19
Cover art
Woman in a Night Shelter, 2012, by Dorothy Lipmann. The artworks on pages 7, 8, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23, 25, 35, 41, 52 and 54 are also by Dorothy Lipmann.
The views and opinions expressed in Parity are not necessarily those of CHP.
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Chapter 2: Understanding and Responding to Older Women’s Homelessness
Understanding the Homelessness Experienced by Older women | 19 Dee Healey, General Manager, Homelessness and Client Support Services, Wintringham
Older Women Receiving Specialist Homelessness Services Support | 21
Carol Kubanek, Housing and Homelessness Reporting and Development Unit, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
More Than Double Jeopardy | 24
The National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group
The System is Failing Older Women: We Need Specialist Services | 27
Gemma White, Early Intervention Worker, Melis Cevik, Outreach Worker/Home at Last Service and Kobi Maglen, National Development Worker, Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG)
Homelessness and Health Needs Among Trans Women: A Trans‑Pacific Dialogue | 29 Cal Andrews, Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne and Aaron Munro, Long-time advocate of housing solutions in Vancouver and owner of Public Alley Counselling and Consultant Services
Establishing the Number of Older Women at Risk of Homelessness | 32
Dr Debbie Faulkner and Dr Laurence Lester, The Australian Alliance for Social Enterprise, The University of South Australia
The Policy Response to Women’s Homelessness That You Might Not See Coming | 34 Helen Dalley-Fisher and Romy Listo, Equality Rights Alliance
LGBTI Older Women | 36
Rebecca Walton, Rebecca Walton, ACSN Volunteer Coordinator, Housing for the Aged Action Group
From the Ground: The Perspective and Experiences | 38 of an Older Person’s Intake Coordinator Elaine Smith, Wintringham Advice and Information Coordinator
Older Women on the Brink | 39
Jeanette Large, Chief Executive Officer, Women’s Property Initiatives
Little Reason to Celebrate: Older Women, Trauma and Homelessness | 41
Leanne Wood, Research, Social Policy and Advocacy Advisor, Anglicare Southern Queenslandand Carol Birrell, Service Manager, Homelessness Services Women and Families, Anglicare Southern Queensland
Chapter 3: Housing Issues and Solutions
Innovation is the Key to Responding to Older Women’s Homelessness | 43 Leah Dwyer, Senior Adviser, Policy and Engagement, YWCA Canberra
Older Women on the Edge: Struggling in the Private Rental Sector | 45
Emma Power; School of Social Sciences and Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Keeping the Roof Over Her Head: | 47 Precarious and Lost Homeownership Among Older, Single Women
Frances Every, Organising Committee; National Alliance of Seniors for Housing and Leonie Bessant, Coordinator, National Alliance of Seniors for Housing, Housing for the Aged Action Group
Bleak House in Paradise | 50
Leonie Bessant, National Alliance of Seniors for Housing (NASH) Co-ordinator, Housing for the Aged Action Group
It’s Time for Community Aged Care to Raise its Game | 52 Dr Victoria Cornell, Housing Research Manager, ECH
Opinions
Fiona York | 54
Executive Officer, Housing for the Aged Action Group, (HAAG)
Yumi Lee | 55
Manager, Older Women’s Network NSW Inc
Bryan Lipmann am | 57
Chief Executive Officer/Founder Wintringham
Alison Standen MP | 60 Shadow Housing Minister
Editorial
Jenny Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Council to Homeless Persons
The risk of homelessness is growing for older people generally, as less and less people retire owning their own homes. For most of us, paying rent when not working or in retirement, is a recipe for poverty and homelessness. The particular vulnerability of older women to homelessness, demonstrates our society’s structural gender inequality.
‘This trajectory of poverty and homelessness [for older women] is set to continue without policy interventions that address structural inequality and provide appropriate housing solutions.’ — Dee Healy from Wintringham ‘Australia needs to ask: is the escalating social ill of older women’s homelessness evidence of ongoing ageism and sexism in our society?’ — The National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group For specialist homelessness service (SHS) providers, it has been clear for some time that the fastest growing group of people presenting for assistance, is older women. It is also dawning on the community more broadly, that our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts, are now more and more likely to be spending the last third of their lives living in abject poverty. It is vital that the plight of the growing numbers of older women in need of stable, secure and affordable housing, is seen for what it is, a crisis.
This edition of Parity, provides a window to this set of circumstances through the narratives recounted of the lived experience of women at risk of experiencing homelessness. These accounts give biographical flesh and form to the sheer weight of the damning statistics. The data underpinning this narrative, provides a picture of the scope and the dimensions of how structural gender inequality works to consign growing numbers of older women to housing stress, housing insecurity and homelessness. A lifetime of gender inequality means lower levels of income, less time (for many) in the workforce and often, much smaller levels of superannuation. The consequent financial circumstances mean that many single older women live in poverty without any hope of access to housing they can afford. This disadvantage is amplified and entrenched when mixed with the devastating impacts of family violence, and when combined with the harsh inadequacy of Centrelink income support. Tackling homelessness systemically is often avoided by consigning it to the ‘too hard’ basket of intractable ‘wicked problems’
that defy solution due to their complexity. However, when considering the plight of older women at risk of homelessness, mostly we are not diverted by complexity. The overwhelming issue is the need for access to housing affordable to people on low incomes, in particular social housing. The National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group have identified a number of services and service models across Australia that have been working successfully to respond to older women’s homelessness. There is no doubt that these are strong and effective services and programs that respond to the crises experienced by older women in housing need. Overall, what is needed is the implementation of a combination of policies. Policies that address structural gender inequality, and policies that provide access to housing affordable to those on our lowest incomes. To address the discrimination and disadvantage of older women, we need a humane supply of social housing for all without the market based privilege only for those blessed with the means. Acknowledgements CHP would like to acknowledge and thank all edition sponsors, Wintringham, Women’s Housing Limited, Women’s Property Initiative, Housing for the Aged Action Group, Women’s Council for Domestic and Family Violence Services WA, The Mercy Foundation, The YWCA Canberra, The NSW Older Women’s Network, The Infoxchange.
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Chapter 1: Learning from Lived Experience
Christine’s Story
*
Christine found herself homeless in her 60s. She had moved to Victoria from Queensland with her daughter and two grandchildren, and struggled to secure suitable housing. A chance encounter at a National Apology Day event in Canberra led to her signing up for aged care services at Wintringham. She was later provided housing in one of our Independent living units. Tell us a bit about yourself. I’m 67. I come from an orphanage background, they call us Forgotten Australians, that name never sat with me. I said it to the Royal Commission people, I think it makes you feel constantly that you were forgotten, and I think it’s very hard to move on from that name tag. But that’s my background, from when I was two to 13.
approved a granny flat for me in the backyard of my daughter’s house so I could be with my family and look after the kids. We’re Indigenous, so we’re very family orientated. I was all excited, but then the council rang up and said it couldn’t be done as it didn’t meet the building regulations, and that was that. It was a shame, I was back to sleeping in my daughter’s house, but she only had three bedrooms and I wasn’t supposed to be there. How did you find housing?
How did you find yourself in the situation where you were homeless?
By God’s grace, I went to Canberra in October 2018 for the National Apology for National Apology for institutional abuse delivered by Scott Morrison. I met some Indigenous ladies from HomeConnect while I was down there. Three weeks later, I got a phone call from one of them and she said ‘Chris, I’ve noticed that you’re in your 60s. Are you on an aged care package?’
To find myself homeless at my age was quite a shock.
And I said ‘no, I thought those were only for people who were in their 80s.’
My daughter and I came down to Victoria together. She was in a domestic violence situation up in Queensland. It was a horrendous time. I made the decision to come down with her to help with the kids. From there we got a private rental which was very expensive. It ended up being deemed unsafe, so we had to move out within a month.
So she came out to my daughter’s house, and we wrote everything down for the application. I got a letter saying that I was approved, and that I needed to find a provider. I rang Wintringham up, and it was the best move I ever made.
Then we moved to our friend Cathy’s house. Not many friends would let mother and daughter and two kids move in with them. We applied for a house with the housing commission, but they told us that it could take years.
A lady named Julie (Wintringham Home Care Packages Case Manager) came around. She helped me set up the aged care package I was on — I didn’t even know it existed. Anyway, just before Christmas, she told me about a vacancy in a unit that was coming up.
Then it came out of the blue, my daughter got offered a house in Leopold. And then they said they had
In January, I got the phone call that it was available, and my daughter and I just cried. We went and looked
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at the unit, we never expected it to be as nice as it was; we both cried when we saw the place. How did being homeless make you feel? Those times of being homeless at my age were humiliating and embarrassing, you don’t tell people. I had no super, wasn’t educated enough to hold a good job. It’s not only that you don’t have a roof over your head, it’s all the emotions tied up with it and the circumstances that led you to it, and you don’t want to tell people, they don’t understand. What would you like people to know about homelessness among older women? Don’t judge, find out what a person’s circumstances were before you put them down to being a silly woman, and be aware that they were wives, mothers, and aunties, and people that walk past you and you don’t even notice them. After being in an orphanage in my earlier life, I was very scared of going into a cold, institutional environment. After what happened to me as a child, I didn’t want to end up in a cold‑looking place away from my family. I could imagine that other people would feel the same. I’m very happy and very blessed. I don’t want to take away from the fact that it was a struggle. I don’t want people reading this to think it was easy. No it wasn’t. I don’t know all the answers, all I know is that my daughter and I walked in here and I was so grateful I cried, I just felt like I was home. * Interview facilitated by Wintringham
Walk in My Shoes:
The Lived Experience of Older Women in Need of Affordable Housing Victoria Heywood, Communications, Women’s Housing Ltd While housing affordability is an issue that affects all Australians, women are particularly vulnerable to changes in market and employment conditions. Among those who are most likely to experience housing stress are elderly women and those nearing retirement age who have limited superannuation and do not own their own homes. Research and statistical projections also indicate that there is increasing cultural, linguistic and financial diversity among women. As the gaps continue to widen, many women are at risk of falling even further behind. This, together with the ageing of the female population, continues to drive the urgent need for more affordable housing solutions for women. Women’s Housing Limited (WHL) is one Housing Association with direct experience of the difficulties these women face. According to WHL Chief Executive Officer, Judy Line: ‘Our long history in this area has provided us with a specialised understanding of the needs of women. And it’s our experience that women are particularly vulnerable to housing stress. ‘This is driven by the fact that women’s incomes are generally lower than those of men which, in turn, is influenced by the gender wage gap, intermittent and parttime work, as well as often being employed in lower income industries.’ As the following WHL tenant stories show, pathways into housing insecurity are as many and varied as the older women themselves.
Low Income Middle Class
Eight years ago, Di had a responsible job as an accountant, owned her own house and, although her marriage had
broken down, had a good relationship with her ex-husband and children. After a series of unfortunate events — including a failed business venture and a disagreement with the Australian Taxation Office (which was eventually resolved) — Di lost her house and found herself living with her elderly parents. Di lived with her parents for more than a year, but was mindful of the stress this placed on them. Taking matters into her own hands, she searched ‘housing for women’ on the internet and managed to secure a tenancy with WHL in their Brighton rooming house. She was happy with the area, but it was a challenging time. Di had previously owned a four-bedroom house with two living areas. In contrast, her accommodation at the rooming house consisted of a room with shared kitchen facilities and a common lounge area. She had never rented before and didn’t know what to expect. And although Di worked hard to maintain good relationships with her co-tenants, she found living in a rooming house tiring and challenging, particularly with neighbours knocking on her door late at night. Around this time, Di’s health started to suffer. The stress was getting to her. Morale was low and medical expenses were high. ‘Just try walking in my shoes. $224 a week is just not enough when paying rent. Centrelink is poverty,’ Di says. Di describes herself as low income middle class, having come from a good background, but ‘falling on bad times in my fifties.’ She had never expected to be in this situation, living one day to the next, dealing with Centrelink and struggling to even buy stockings for a job interview.
The Brighton rooming house was home to Di for two and a half years before a WHL community housing property at Bentleigh became available. Finally, Di had a stable home with space and privacy, and she was able to work on improving her health. Di has developed supportive relationships with her neighbours at Bentleigh and feels part of a strong community. Di hopes that sharing her story may help women experiencing the same trajectory realise that they are not alone, and that her experience will give other women strength to connect with people and support services and encourage them to never give up.
Margaret’s Story
‘The death of a partner, divorce or separation can have a serious impact, with women’s housing security and economic position more likely to decline after such events,’ says Judy Line. And as Australia’s aged population (with its higher proportion of women) increases, affordable housing will become an even more pressing issue. Margaret knows this all too well, having lost her husband after 52 years of marriage. ‘The way he suddenly passed away, I am still grieving. When you are left on your own, friends will ask how you are, but it is not the same.’ By herself, Margaret found the private rental market very difficult. ‘The landlord kept putting the rent up and up, and would do nothing to help me. There was no heating or cooling in the place… it was no place to live.’ Many older women renters like Margaret struggle in the private rental housing market. A combination of low incomes, or reliance on a pension, and high rents leave them
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living in poor quality housing and unable to afford essentials like food, medicine and utility bills. Then Margaret was put in touch with Women’s Housing. ‘I was brought to look at an apartment and when they offered it to me, of course I grabbed it. It is very central and it’s fantastic, it really is. I get all the help that I possibly need and I really do feel safe and comfortable here.’
A Series of Unfortunate Events
A successful career is no proof against housing stress and caring for others can often put women well behind. One of WHL’s tenants, ‘Ana’, had been a high flying executive in advertising and marketing and then a respected freelancer with her own business. But all that changed in the twelve months between 2000 and 2001 when she lost her mother, her brother and her lover. ‘I had been caring for my mother from the time she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at the age of 66 until her death just after her 67th birthday, but still managed to work between her treatments and specialist appointments,’ Ana says. ‘But with one loss on top of another, I was never the same and I was diagnosed with major depression and a hoarding disorder. Sometimes I was incapable of forming words, let alone walking from the bedroom to the kitchen.’ There was a brief respite when medication began working, and she picked up some work as a retail assistant, however Ana’s father in Brisbane had myelofibrosis, a chronic form of bone marrow blood cancer, and she moved her life to take care of him for his final three years. On returning to Melbourne, Ana had another brief stint in retail but the business closed down. ‘Since then, I have become that cliché, an invisible woman of a certain age. My inability to find work trapped me in a cycle of poverty where I couldn’t afford to pay the rent where I was living, but I also couldn’t afford to move.’ ‘Every month, I’d wonder how in hell I was going to pay my rent/gas/ electricity/phone and then blunder my way through to the next round of bills and heart palpitations.’
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Then on 8th September 2017, Ana was approved for an apartment by WHL. ‘My life changed overnight,’ Ana says. ‘I can pay my rent and my bills. I can buy decent food and even a bottle of wine if I feel like it. Now, thanks to WHL, I’m doing a course to enable me to start my own micro business and in the process I’m reacquainting myself with some of my strengths and abilities.’
No Blame
Today, fewer than one per cent of private rentals are affordable for a single person on the pension. There are 650,000 households who can’t afford housing at market rates in Australia right now and this figure is projected to reach over a million by 2036.1 Anne grew up in a predominantly Irish Catholic household in Cheltenham. Her mother was addicted to prescription medication. Fortunately, her father was the ‘rock’ for Anne and her sister. However, from a very early age Anne was conditioned to care for others. She became a nurse and married at the age of 18. By the time she was 34, she was looking after two children, a sick, alcoholic husband and her elderly father while completing an Arts Degree at Monash. In 1993, Anne had another battle — this time with breast cancer. Anne fought this battle alone. Two years later, Anne received some money through her tax return, which she spent on a ticket to Thailand. This was to be the start of many happy years teaching English in Thailand, and then later in Japan. However, the roles were not highly paid and Anne returned to Australia with few savings and little superannuation. At 60, she found it difficult to get work or find a home and was referred by Centrelink social workers to WHL’s Mt Martha rooming house. ‘Where am I going to end up? What am I going to do?’ — Anne Anne initially found living in a rooming house challenging, surrounded by so many individuals with different needs and problems. She loved the space and gardens, but felt the lack of privacy and learned to make her room her home. She also built a
fulfilling life outside the house, which gave her purpose and a feeling of usefulness. It helped that she felt supported and respected by WHL. ‘It’s not ideal for older single women to be housed in rooming houses’, says WHL’s Operations Manager, Lindy Parker, ‘However, there is a big shortage of suitable self-contained accommodation so sometimes only option we can offer is a rooming house. Then, when we can, we will put them into a single unit.’ This desperate shortage of accommodation is something that WHL is addressing by expanding its property portfolio as developers in their own name, and by partnering with property developers to increase affordable housing capacity. ‘Property development has become a key part of WHL’s strategy for providing more housing for more women,’ says Judy Line. ‘These projects are getting increasingly complex, progressing from the purchase of turnkey projects to management of a developer’s building. Alternatively, we’ll look at a WHL design brief with the purchase of land and entry into a development agreement, or full management, of the planning process and construction of housing by an external builder on land that WHL acquires on the open market.’ As it turns out, WHL was able to offer Anne her own apartment in Altona Meadows, and she embraced the move with optimism, excitement and her trademark ‘gratitude is the attitude’ style. Women’s Housing Limited (WHL) is a not-for-profit organisation that provides low-cost housing to women at risk of homelessness. Since establishment in 1997, WHL has been listening to and validating women’s experiences and acting as their voice in the housing sector. As a Housing Association, WHL has significantly expanded and diversified its housing portfolio and has the experience to deliver large‑scale housing projects aimed at meeting an ever-growing demand. Endnote 1. https://www.domain.com.au/news/ if-its-voluntary-for-developers-to-makeaffordable-housing-deals-with-councilswhat-can-you-expect-846621/
This is * Tammy’s Story I’m a child of the sixties and they were free-ranging times. But I wasn’t convinced that this was the end of it all. My grandmother had the good sense to make sure I was wellschooled, and that helped me see that the world was a bigger place than where I came from. My parents were both very involved in the Second World War, returning with hopes and dreams that could hardly be realised. Childhood was difficult, leaving me rather introverted, but with a fierce intellect. I had to move on. I financed art school study in the mid‑1960s. A few lucky breaks with people met at that time, led to an interest in the history of Modernism in visual art, including the recognition that, as a woman artist, I would have to delve into the whys and wherefores of that history without taking anything for granted. One of the painting tutors at the art school, a prominent male artist, commented that I was uncompromising. It didn’t mean much at the time. Now I can see that he wasn’t accusing me of being ‘selfish’ — more likely ‘resolute’.
community, and I am grateful to be part of that group emergence. With a questioning approach to what makes abstract colour paintings relevant in the cultural present, and with regular exhibitions of work, I’ve continued to sustain the studio practice with minimal interruption. Painting for me is about exploration and risk-taking, with all the ‘ups and downs’ this implies, an approach that has gradually merged with my attitude to life in general. I’ve received some great opportunities over the years,
I have been living much of the time with limited means. I put storage and studio rentals before domestic needs. Over the past nine years, in particular, that has meant short-term house minds, usually with the care of animals, and from time to time, a rented room in group-houses. As a last resort, I’ve camped out in the studio. This way of survival in Canberra has worked until recently, with the present combination of travel restrictions, prohibitive rental opportunities, and Covid‑19. As I’ve become older, with no intention of retiring, one does become a bit weary, especially during Canberra winters. This year, when the pandemic arrived and prospective house‑minds dissolved as people cancelled overseas travel, where to live quickly became urgent. As a studio-based artist, I didn’t want to leave Canberra and my work base. I spent a lot of time searching for affordable possibilities on the computer, eventually receiving a lucky break when I was referred to YWCA Canberra and was given an internal number to ring. There I found unreserved respect as a senior woman, and for the way I had been living. This was the beginning for rental housing support with a degree of independence that I could not have anticipated.
Now, in my early seventies, I could not have envisaged how a heartfelt commitment to colour painting would pan out. In other words, one never knows what is going to happen in the long run. In the 1980s in Sydney, to support studio practice, I earned a modest living with secretarial work and part-time tertiary teaching of art, to support the making of paintings for exhibition and, sometimes, sales of work. I received strong community support. Young women artists were gaining attention in the art
continues to receive limited support. I’m committed to working for change, putting much effort into writing and giving talks about colour work, with exhibitions of paintings. I’ve never regretted the commitment I made.
Woman In An Armchair With African Mask,
2012 by Lipmann while interest in Dorothy abstract painting
* YWCA Canberra Next Door Housing Client
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Single Older Women with No Place to Call Home Therese Hall*
Before turning 50, Natalie, 55, had ‘a business, a family, a mortgage, a couple of good cars and a holiday every year’. She never dreamed that she’d spend most of the next five years holed up alone in a run-down motel room in Tweed Heads. ‘You don’t think, “God I’m going to be homeless in 20 years — what should I do?” I never worked towards it and then I got sick and that was the end of that.’ Julie, 57, shares a townhouse on the Gold Coast with her adult son and an overseas student. She experienced her first brush with homelessness five years ago when a work redundancy and a relationship breakdown coincided. ‘Look, take it from me, you can be thinking you’re on top of the world; you have everything you want. But, honestly, it can happen just like that. Click, and it all changes.’ Natalie and Julie are part of a growing cohort of single women over 50 who encounter housing instability for the first time later in life. They are women who held jobs and cared for children and sometimes parents; most had married or partnered. They had rented – and often owned — a home. However, after a lifetime of gender-based discrimination, events such as a health problem, a relationship breakdown or loss of a job can lead to the brink of homelessness. According to the 2016 census, older women are the fastest growing cohort among the homeless, with a rise of 31 per cent in five years. In addition to the 6,866 older women identified nationally as homeless, a further 5,820 were deemed to be in marginal housing and at risk of homelessness.1 Some, like Natalie, are living in disused motel rooms; some are tucked
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away in share houses, like Julie; others are living in caravans or house-sitting. In 2019, I interviewed 30 such women in northern New South Wales (NSW) and south-east Queensland while undertaking research to capture the experience of inadequately housed single older women. These women are not easy to locate; many have little or no involvement with homeless support services. They prefer to stay under the radar, disguising their ‘almost homeless’ status in a bid to stave off a stigmatised identity. When people ask Natalie where she lives, she refuses to answer. ‘It’s none of their beeswax,’ she says. She describes her ‘home’ — a 20-square-metre room in an otherwise deserted motel — as ‘absolute rubbish’. Gabbi, 51, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and lives on the Disability Support Pension in a caravan with her dog, explains how
The Cage, 2008 by Dorothy Lipmann
it feels to inhabit the borderland between adequate housing and homelessness: ‘I think I’m always going to be a slip‑between-thecracks kind of girl. I’m not quite hopeless and destitute enough to get the level of help the destitute and hopeless people can get. I’m not quite successful enough to do it on my own.’ All but three of the women I interviewed are mothers who had brought up children alone. They tend to ‘self-manage’ their housing precarity through coping strategies honed over years of getting by as sole parents. Their ability to remain housed, no matter how unsuitably, has kept these women hidden from the housing support sector. ‘I could make myself literally homeless if I challenged my substandard, illegal housing,’ Natalie says. ‘But I am not willing to rock that boat.’ Despite the particular challenges faced by single older women in the private rental market, there is no smooth pathway for them into social housing. In most cases, they fail to access ‘priority status’ because their housing stress is due to low incomes, not complex needs such as family violence or mental health issues. The 2018 National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group report claims that single older women are thrice marginalised: ‘they are marginalised in the private rental market, marginalised in the social and affordable housing markets, and even marginalised in the homelessness services sector.’ 2 Natalie has experienced all three. In the private rental market, real estate agents use the 30 per cent of income calculation to ascertain affordability, which for Natalie on a Disability Support Pension
(including Commonwealth Rent Assistance) is $158.91 a week. She comments: ‘That won’t even get me a room in a share house’. In the social housing market, Natalie’s efforts to gain priority housing status have been rejected. ‘I am now trying to accept the fact that I must give up on social housing as an option and resign myself to the fact that I will never receive social housing support.’ And, with regards to the homelessness services sector, Natalie has met with inaction. ‘I have contacted some of these places and said, “Look, can I please have, like, a case manager or something.” And nothing ever happens; it just doesn’t get organised.’ Although sharing could result in living in a better location with improved facilities, most of my research participants express a strong preference for living alone. ‘I don’t like the idea of sharing,’ says Zoe, 58, who manages her homelessness by travelling vast distances to take up long-term house-sits in locations that suit her. In explaining her reticence to share, Zoe describes herself and women like her: ‘We’re all damaged to a greater extent than normal wear and tear. And we find it hard to trust people, reach out or let people in.’ When faced with no alternative but to share, many turn to a clutch of regionally based private Facebook groups open only to older women looking for, and offering, affordable accommodation. The woman behind these groups is Alex, a 69-year-old former community worker and single parent. These are not run-of-the-mill renting or house-sharing groups; they have a specific purpose ‘to help women connect so that they can organise share accommodation’ in order to avoid homelessness. Alex began four and a half years ago with the Gold Coast group and now facilitates 20 groups across much of the country. ‘It’s doing a job — there are around 6,000 members,’ she says. Alex’s vision is to foster ‘intentional sharing’, which she defines as house shares that allow women to feel that they ‘truly are equal partners in their own home’. On finding themselves within proximity of homelessness, many of my research participants could not rely upon the support of their adult
children. Asked about the prospect of living with their children, some women are horrified, while others dismiss it on practical grounds. Natalie doesn’t think her son would want her to live with him: ‘His life is probably not as stable as what it should be either.’ Since her interview, Natalie’s son has become homeless himself, and spent a few nights with his mother in her motel room, sleeping in a swag on the floor. Some women experience the withdrawal of support by family at the point where they need it most. ‘It’s almost like people think poverty is contagious,’ says Zoe, who was deeply hurt when one of her two daughters ‘turned her back’ on her in her time of need. ‘She literally said to me, “Oh, why don’t you just get over yourself; you’re such a drama queen”.’ Other women choose not to reveal the severity of their situation to their children. Karly, 66, who bounces between share houses and housesitting in northern NSW, believes that her daughter, who’s in her late 20s, would help her if she asked for it. ‘But I don’t share my worries. She sees me as fairly confident and competent. She thinks, “Mum will deal with it”.’ Within the borderland between their prior ‘housed selves’ and their future ‘homeless selves’, women are reeling from their inability to embrace the normative life course experienced by those entering their senior years — perhaps as a doting grandmother or a semi-retiree with the resources to pursue leisure activities and travel. While remaining sheltered in a physical sense, they are feeling emotionally traumatised because of their proximity to homelessness. In this setting, the internet provides a platform for community. Membership of virtual communities on Facebook affords these women a freedom to speak up without being dominated by their ‘almost homeless’ identity. Zoe is a member of an eclectic range of online groups, including Centrelink‑related groups (where saving tips are shared), health support groups, environmental interest groups, camping and caravanning groups, political activism groups, as well as housing support groups. ‘It can get depressing to read about others’ circumstances,’ Zoe says. ‘But it can be uplifting when people are supporting each
other. We need a reminder that humans are good and kind.’ As the population ages, there is growing evidence that we are facing a ‘generational tsunami’ of single older women in housing stress, prompting research and rhetoric from governments and the homelessness services sector. Most conclude that a focus on prevention and early intervention is needed for those at risk of homelessness.3 However, according to my research, this is not occurring. Rather, the cohort is ‘disappearing’ further into the gap between suitable housing and homelessness. The contradictions between policy and practice are exemplified in a discussion I had with a regional manager for The Salvation Army in south-east Queensland. She claims that the ‘over 55s are a recognised target area that is being really looked at by various housing services’. But, because ‘resources are so stretched’ and ‘housing isn’t there’, there’s a gap that ‘this group will fall through’. She concludes: ‘I’m not surprised that your research participants feel overlooked.’ While single older women in marginal housing conceal themselves outside the public gaze to avoid a stigmatised ‘almost homeless’ identity, they have developed online strategies to exercise agency over their lives, resist inflicted identities and plan for their future. As I found through conducting this research, these women have a deep understanding of how it feels to enter, navigate and effect change in this borderland between adequate housing and homelessness. If their experience is attended to and their insights acknowledged, the generational tsunami of single older women in housing stress may be averted. Note: Names in this article have been changed. * Last year Therese completed a Master of Research (Anthropology) thesis at Macquarie University titled, Single older women with no place to call home. Endnotes 1. Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) 2019, Older women’s risk of homelessness: Background Paper, Exploring a growing problem, p.8.
2. National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group Report 2018, Retiring into Poverty: A national plan for change: Increasing Housing Security for Older Women, p.7.
3. AHRC 2019, op cit.
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This is * Lynette’s Story For you, the reader, to understand how amazing the Next Door Program is and appreciate how amazing the staff has been to me and the many women they have helped, I need to share with you, just briefly, my circumstances: At the age of 50 years old I faced divorce, was going through menopause and experiencing clinical depression. This collection of life experiences was overwhelming and even on their own, would have been horrific to manage.
just gotten divorced and had taken a break from their careers previously to raise children. I applied to every possible government and social program for housing, legal assistance, health and counselling and social support.
What followed was seven years of me only being able to get casual employment that, most times, were short-term contracts and were positions below my level of expertise, education and experience. It soon became clear, ageism was at work and trying as I may, to reinvent myself, I could not get employed in a full-time, secure position. Over this period, I moved 17 times across three cities, only being able to afford to live in shared accommodation. You can imagine how humiliated and demoralised I felt. I pushed on and found myself going to approximately 72 job interviews over this period. I applied for over 430 different positions. At times I simply gave up and sat in my shared accommodation, staring at four walls. Then, I’d start again. It soon became clear to me that if I could experience this continual battle, and in essence have a nomad existence and frequent homelessness, any woman my age could as well. I felt awful for the many elderly women facing this reality. I investigated and found that the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homelessness are women in their 50s who had
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Photo supplied by Wintringham
It soon became clear that these services were at breaking point. They still are. On top of this, the Newstart unemployment pension still is at the same rate as in 1994. This sees recipients having to live on $40 a day. An average, small room in regional Australia is $50 a day.
Naturally, my health and in particular my mental health deteriorated. I have a teenage daughter and wanted to raise her. I had to give up my parenting rights because I could not afford to have my child. This is by far the most devastating experience any mother can face. Housing waitlists in cities are at six to 20-year waiting periods. In regional areas, the wait time is just a little less. My health was deteriorating, and I was placed on a high-needs waitlist with Housing ACT for when an appropriate home became available. Until then, though, I was advised to keeping looking for a place in the private market. Now, greedy landlords have capitalised on the short supply of accommodation for lower-income
individuals, sending the rental rate for a room way beyond what the average low wage earner can afford. How then, can someone of my age, unemployed and living on Newstart, find affordable accommodation? I moved so often and lived in such appalling conditions and shared at times with dangerous individuals. They say moving is one of the most stressful experiences you can have. Well, I’ve moved now 16 times over the past seven years. A turn in emergency eventually brought me in contact with the Next Door Program. From that moment my life changed for the better. I had read in a local newspaper of their services and had the hospital social worker call them. Within two
hours, two amazing, empathetic and knowledgeable women of my age were at my bedside. They listened to my story and for the first time in seven years, I immediately noticed that there were people who cared. Their caring and their recognition of my pain and suffering reflected in their faces. I even felt awful having to retell them my story and see them suffer with me. They reacted with apologies and made me understand that they would not leave my side and that they would ensure I never would suffer at the level I had already experienced. For the first time, I believed I was going to get help. I had been let down so many times before. These women related to my pain as if it were their own. They responded with haste and made things happen immediately. After I was released from the hospital, I was placed in emergency accommodation and visited almost every day to ensure I was maintaining my mental health. I was given clothing, food, and was supported and taken to doctor’s appointments and out to get groceries. At this stage, I started to become mute when I had to again retell my story to yet another doctor or support worker. These women did not hesitate to advocate and at times be my voice. They continually fought against bureaucracy and staff demoralisation. Before long, I was offered accommodation through Housing ACT and, within a week, I was helped to move into my new place. The Next Door Program went further and ensured I had furniture and all essential items to start being independent. These wonderful women still oversee my progression to me living a full, happy life. I now feel of value to the world again. I have started to paint again and even have several exhibitions arranged. My relationships with family, friends and my daughter have improved greatly. I have even returned to work as a therapist again and have just recently fallen in love. I will be getting married again in 2021. There is still life and love to give in this old girl! * YWCA Canberra Next Door Housing Client
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This is * Lorraine’s Story Then I had a car accident in 1991 in Clunes and I came close to dying. After my car accident, I bought a house in Maryborough. I’ve got bad legs, I’ve got lymphedema and all that. I was living by myself and I was having falls, and one of my falls was pretty bad; a coat hanger flew up and ripped my leg. I had to clean it and put a towel around it and go to the hospital. They said I shouldn’t be living alone. In the end, I was using a walker at 69 years of age; I just couldn’t manage.
Lorraine has been living at Wintringham’s Alexander Miller homes in Maryborough for nearly five years. She is now on a Level 2 Home Care Package which helps her to manage living alone while supporting her independence. She says she wouldn’t be able to do it without the help of her Wintringham Support Worker. Tell us a bit about yourself. I am the mother of eight children. My eldest is 49, my youngest is 31. They’ve had three fathers, all who have died. One had a heart attack on the beach, my other fella died of a heart attack as well, and then my ex was killed when he fell off the back of his truck. I’ve done a lot of the rearing of my children on my own. It‘s been tough, but there’s always a positive to every single thing in life, and there’s always a way forward to help get you through. How did you come to find housing at Wintringham? After my husband died, I rented a commission house, where I lived for 16 years.
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I sold my house and I moved to Geelong for 12 months in 2014, I went down there to live with my daughter and son-in-law, and they liked to party on the weekends. I like loud music, but I don’t like his sort of loud music, and I also knew that I was a boarder in their home, I mean I had no right to carry on. Sometimes I’d just shut myself in my bedroom and cry because I just didn’t want to be there. I loved being with my daughter and my two little grandchildren, but I didn’t like anything else. I was up at the Salvation Army Welfare office in Maryborough one weekend, visiting, and I was getting ready to go back down to Geelong. My friend, who worked in the op shop, said to me ‘Lorraine, you don’t look very happy, do you?’ And I said no, I didn’t want to go back down to Geelong. And she said, ‘here, I’ll get something out of our welfare office.’ And she came back with a paper that said Wintringham Housing. And you know what, I rang and two weeks later, I was put in this unit.
A worker named Donna rang me and asked me what I needed, and if there was anything I didn’t have. When I sold my home and went to live in Geelong, I gave a lot of my things away. I didn’t have a lot, so I didn’t have a washing machine. Donna said, ‘we’ll buy you one’. I thought she was joking, but I tell you what, when I walked into this unit, the washing machine was here. It was so lovely. I was very impressed. How do you feel about living at Wintringham? I only feel safe when I’m living in my unit. I’ve got a good recliner chair, a lift up one. There are railings in the shower and the bathroom and all that. I hate going to other people’s houses, in case I can’t get up off the toilet or I can’t get out of the chairs and all that. I always feel so safe here in my unit, so I’ve turned into a real stay-at-home person. I’m just so comfortable in my unit. Just out the back from my unit, we’ve got the hospital, we’ve got two doctors’ clinics, we’ve got a Centrelink on the other side of our street, and on the bottom of our street we have a Priceline chemist. And if anyone needs a mechanic, there’s a mechanic in our street too! Over here on our site, we have a lovely little set up here. Four of us cook each other meals every week. I might make a big tub of soup, or curry sausages, or spaghetti bolognaise. We’re always sharing and it’s lovely and peaceful. It’s just beautiful living here. * Interview facilitated by Wintringham
The year that changed homelessness
After a year like no other, we are pleased to announce that the 2020 National Homelessness Conference will go ahead – online – on 1 and 2 December. CONFERENCE PROGRAM We have developed a conference program that will examine the impacts on our sector from the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic as well as the catastrophic climate disasters of last summer. Our full program outline is available online with an exciting mix of Australian and international speakers to be announced soon.
SPONSORSHIP OPTIONS The Conference is the largest homelessness event in Australia and brings together practitioners, policy makers, researchers and those with lived experience of homelessness. Our sponsorship prospectus is available online and we encourage organisations to sponsor this worthy event, in its first year ever running virtually!
REGISTER NOW, OR FIND OUT MORE AT:
https://ahuri.eventsair.com/national-homelessness-conference-2020
JOINTLY CONVENED BY
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More Older Women Are Experiencing Homelessness Than Ever Before: I Was One of Them Penny Leemhuis ‘I hope I die in my car,’ a woman experiencing homelessness once told me. I understand why she felt that way. For 12 years I experienced homelessness. I walked among you, hidden, invisible and completely disregarded by society. As housing costs soared, wages stagnated, and work became less secure, inequality for many Australians has continued to increase. Women retire on average with less superannuation than men and are more reliant on the age pension in retirement — which is increasingly proving to be insufficient to cover the living costs for people who do not own their own home. Australia is also facing a chronic shortage of social housing and these factors have come together to form a perfect storm where homelessness and housing stress are on the rise. Older women are experiencing this the most acutely. Between 2011 and 2016 the number of women aged between 65 and 74 presenting as homeless increased by 50 per cent. Currently, it is estimated there are 405,000 women aged 45 and over in Australia who are at risk of homelessness when they retire. Before I experienced homelessness, I had an accessible and secure home. I was comfortable and all my needs were met. I could afford a reasonable quality of life that looked after my basic requirements as well as my additional medical expenses. I was connected with my community in a way that contributed to my health and wellbeing. My wellbeing came from the foundation provided by a secure and accessible home. I was an ordinary woman living an ordinary life.
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When I was younger, I worked part‑time for low wages and accrued little superannuation. I contributed to the community as a volunteer. I raised my children and other people’s children. Society benefited from this work and the work of thousands of other women, the canteen and sports mums. But I had unwittingly put myself in a precarious position. One that would reveal itself later in life with a treacherous outcome, a betrayal. In my late twenties I worked full‑time and began to accumulate super, but this was very short‑lived. In my 30s, an accident resulted in permanent disability. In my primary incomeearning years I lost the ability to accumulate super, savings and employment history, but I learnt a lot about life. After a relationship breakdown, and with little equity, I was unable to afford a home of my own. Faced with barriers to getting back into work, I was unable to afford private rental. I struggled to do so for a few years and in doing so quickly consumed what little
Shut Out, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
savings I had. Soon after, I found myself renting rooms and living in untenable, unsafe and unaffordable housing options. And yet I didn’t consider myself homeless. This is a common story. Since founding advocacy group Older Women Lost to Housing (OWLs), and working with Housing for the Aged Action Group and others on their work to reduce the number of older women experiencing homelessness, I have spoken with many women who tell a similar story. There is a certain amount of shame and embarrassment associated with being an OWL. They feel helpless, hopeless and powerless. Many have never had to deal with a welfare organisation before and don’t know where to turn for help. Currently there is nowhere to go for women who are experiencing homelessness, or at risk of homelessness, where they can access tailored support, with the exception of HAAG’s Home at Last service in Victoria. Australia’s retirement system is based on the assumption that you own your own home. In the medium‑term, we need to make this possible for all, by creating more social and affordable housing. Finally, we must remove the formal and informal individual and systemic barriers that women face to achieving equality, to ensure the experience is different for the next generation. Homelessness can happen to any older woman. It could be your mother, grandmother, aunt, neighbour, colleague. It could be the woman sitting next to you. We walk among you. We are one of you. We have a right to be a valued part of society. After all, we helped build it.
This is * Cheryl’s Story When I was referred to YWCA Canberra’s Next Door Program, it’s no stretch to say it was a life-changing moment. As a homeless mature-age woman, I’d held onto the last shred of my dignity by housesitting for nine years while pretending it was a choice. It was never a choice; it was a necessity. Then Covid‑19 travel bans and lockdowns eliminated the need for house sitters. My housing situation became perilous.
Enter the Next Door Program. The team saw beyond the disempowered woman I’d become. They knew stability was the crucial first step towards rebuilding my life, Covid or no Covid. They found me transitional accommodation while urging Housing ACT to approve me as a priority needs applicant. They supported me all the way to my new home, a perfect Aged Persons Unit in a perfect location. The Next Door team is a powerhouse of women who deeply care about
their clients, and who solve previously insurmountable problems for them. They truly make a difference. I felt only despair and disempowerment when trying to navigate the public housing system alone for two years. It always ended in tears and distress. I’d given up. That was until the Next Door team championed my cause. I can never thank them enough. They’ve been my guardian angels. * YWCA Canberra Next Door Housing Client
Girlfriends at the Dance, 2012 by Dorothy Lipmann
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This is * Susan’s Story
Kedy Kristal, Acting Chief Executive Officer, Women’s Council for Domestic and Family Violence Services, Western Australia
Susan is an Aboriginal woman in her early sixties living in Western Australia. She is currently housed in a small Seniors social housing unit that she is utterly determined to remain in, despite the ongoing harassment and abuse she is still experiencing from her ex -partner. Susan was on the wait list for this unit for ten years and feels the unit is her last chance for a safe and affordable home in her old age. Susan’s relationship with Barry started 18 years ago, and they have been separated for the last
Trauma/abuse/ violence painting by Thunder Rain Artz The left hand corner is dark colours and jagged lines this represents the bad emotions/the trauma/depression and anxiety that we experience and suffer The black shade behind the red hand is violence The red hand is squashing it, telling it to stop The links are different colours, representing friends, families, partners, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, social workers – when we ask for help I did the candle white for hope. Hope for a good outcome and a better future. The butterfly is purple for royalty, because we are all special and the butterfly represents new beginnings
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five years. Susan has raised two sons and worked most of her life all over Western Australia in outback stations, roadhouses, farms and retail shops, in Cue, Meekatharra, Mt Magnet, Onslow, Carnarvon, Newman, Newman, Cunderdin, Augusta, Badgingara, Cowanup, Cataby, Karrajinie, Kalbarrie, Geraldton, Ashburton River and Fitzroy Crossing.
Susan comes from a big family; she has six siblings and often hosted Christmas get togethers for over 60 people before her relationship with Barry. The 13 years with Barry have left her completely isolated from her siblings and extended family. Susan was an independent, confident and experienced woman in her mid‑forties when she met
Barry. She had just completed her studies in health and was looking forward to a career. Barry’s violence and abuse began within the first year of the relationship, and one of the first serious events occurred when Susan had refused to let Barry back into the house after four violent incidents. When he continued to bang of the door and scream threats and abuse, Susan became so frightened she crept out and slept outside under a tree; she was so fearful she wet herself. The next morning, she went to work as a support worker at a drug rehabilitation centre. Eventually, the ongoing abuse wore her down and, although she loved the job, she left. This was Barry’s pattern; throughout the relationship, Susan would find a house and work and he would track her down and try again and again to destroy her life. Barry would target neighbours or work colleagues and tell them lies about Susan, saying she was a prostitute and drug addict. Susan at times did use alcohol to help her cope with the ongoing abuse and trauma, and this compounded the financial stress caused by constantly moving. Susan estimates she has lived in 40 houses during this 13-year relationship. ‘I would have to find packing boxes, borrow money from my son, pack everything up by myself, clean the properties by myself, find money for a storage unit, find money for truck removalists, along with finding money for a new bond; all I ever did in 12 years of knowing this man was survive, just living in high stress mode.’ Susan estimates from the day she met Barry in 2006 to 2013, she had over a hundred jobs; she had five jobs that she lost in the first two weeks due to Barry’s behaviour at her workplace. Susan called the police many times and some 24‑ and 72‑hour Police Orders were issued, if the police arrived before Barry had disappeared. Even when Barry received a Police Order, restraining him from being near Susan, he would ignore the order and continue his abuse and threats.
Dot Painting with hand by Thunder Rain Artz
Susan was subjected to a serious aggravated assault by Barry in 2013 and has not been able to work since. Susan has stayed in most of the women’s refuges in Perth over the course of this relationship. These refuges offered her a safe space for a short period of time, but Susan found them a hard place to be. Staying in the women’s shelters was hard. I felt again I had no control. I felt ashamed and the other women workers there were generally around my age. ‘In the women’s shelter it was hard exposing my problems to strangers, as I am a very private and dignified person and in the women’s refuges I was exposed to a lot of other women from all walks of life.’ When Susan finally moved into her current unit in 2015, she endured 18 months of relentless torment from Barry. Barry was homeless and frequented a park next to Susan’s unit; he would call out her name all night long, leave objects (used needles) on her doorstep and had his mail directed to her address. Susan was highly anxious, afraid if she constantly called the police about his behaviour this may result in her being evicted.
Eventually Barry was charged with 22 breaches of the Violence Restraining Order and as he had accumulated $22,000 in fines he was jailed for 18 months. So between 2016 and 2018 Susan had a wonderful 18-month period where she was free to move about her community safely and able to live a normal stress free life. Barry resumed his threatening behaviour upon release and Susan currently has another Restraining Order against him which is due to expire soon. Susan’s physical and mental health has been significantly impacted by Barry’s behaviour. ‘I feel jumpy and, at different times, numb. I suffer from anxiety. I feel I can’t catch my breath, and just want to run, very rarely can I relax. I believe this is because, I’ve been stuck on alert mode for so long, watching out for my safety, that I just can’t relax, my inside feels shattered and scrambled, like I’ve been tortured.’ Susan continues to fight for her right to have a safe, affordable and permanent home. * Susan is not her real name but everything else happened. I have had the privilege of working with Susan from 2015 and she has given permission for some of her story to be shared.
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This is * Helen’s Story I was pretty desperate before I encountered Next Door. I had been living with my ex-partner for around three years. It was toxic, but I didn’t have the resources to move out, either emotionally or financially. I’d been struggling with severe depression. For anyone who hasn’t experienced it, once you’re in a bad place, the depression gets hold of you and you spiral down. I didn’t think I could get out of my situation. I felt like I couldn’t do anything. I used to be pretty independent and capable but I just got into such a state that I couldn’t do it. I was being supported by a mental health team, who put me in touch with OneLink. They referred me to Next Door.
I’ve had more visitors over in the last three weeks than in the last three years. I never realised before the importance of having friends over for a cuppa, and how much it can help mental health, as does having a place where I can come to and relax. I finally feel safe in my home. And it wasn’t just housing. They were happy to help with a whole bunch of other stuff to help me feel safe and secure. I cannot speak highly enough of them.
I used to work in social services many years ago and I know it’s hard and people get over‑stressed, but I never felt that from the Next Door team. Just feeling that there are people there to support me, it’s such a different thing than I have experienced before. They really explored what I needed, the foundation of what I needed, rather than just providing a superficial response. They have been a godsend. * YWCA Canberra Next Door Housing Client
From the minute I had a meeting with the team, I felt so much more relaxed and supported. It is often difficult for me to trust people, given my background, but it was really easy with these women because they were caring and understanding. They really listened to what I had to say. The Next Door women got to work on trying to help me work with Housing ACT so I could get public housing. But then I got an eviction notice from my ex as the house was about to be sold. I had a deadline. I was initially almost overwhelmed, but the team were awesome in helping me to stabilise my emotions. They assured me that I wasn’t going to be homeless, that there was going to be some support for me. They found me this fabulous unit that is beyond awesome, with a six‑month lease! I’ve been here less than three weeks and already I have been able to relax, my mental health has improved, and my social life is better.
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Woman Celebrating Australia Day, 2012 by Dorothy Lipmann
Chapter 2: Understanding and Responding to Older Women’s Homelessness
Understanding the Homelessness Experienced by Older women Dee Healey, General Manager, Homelessness and Client Support Services, Wintringham may not be aware of the supports available to them.5 Natalie was referred to Wintringham as she found herself homeless and staying in a friend’s spare room at 63 years old. Coming from a migrant background, Natalie had a strong work ethic and commitment to family installed in her since an early age. Having worked her entire life while also raising children, Natalie had to cease work due to physical health issues. This coincided with a relationship breakdown which resulted in homelessness. Natalie states: Australia’s ageing population coincides with the rise in numbers of over-55s accessing homelessness services.1 Consequently, in the last five years there has been a 30 per cent increase in older women experiencing or at risk of homelessness.2 This makes older women the fastest growing cohort of people experiencing homelessness between 2011 and 2016.3 Older women continue to be more likely to live in poverty, spending less time in paid employment than men, especially if they were married.4 This trajectory of poverty and homelessness is set to continue without policy interventions that address structural inequality and provide appropriate housing solutions. This article highlights the need for continued advocacy to address these drivers, discusses housing solutions and explores how older women’s experience of homelessness differs to that of other cohorts. The impacts on those experiencing homelessness are well documented. However, for older women how do these impacts differ? Firstly, older women are more likely to experience first-time homelessness after the age of 50 years and, as a result,
‘I didn’t even know services like Wintringham were available. I’m just so grateful. Now I have my own home again, I have choices and purpose. I can care for my two grandchildren two days a week which means I’m still technically working and financially helping my son and daughter in law’. For older women experiencing homelessness for the first time, it can have profound effects. For Natalie, losing her home also had a significant impact on her mental health. Older women in Wintringham’s Community Housing report the same along with a complete loss of identity and sense of self when experiencing homelessness at this stage in life. Perhaps this impact is amplified given the social conditioning we, as women, experience in relation to domestic ideology. Although the 1960s and 1970s saw deep cultural changes in modern western society, expectations of marriage and motherhood were still very much a social norm. The roles as caregiver and homemaker were still seen as women’s traditional roles in society. In fact, I would argue they still largely are today. This is the double-edged sword for
women in this demographic; while feeling a significant loss of identity linked to domesticity and housing, these traditional gendered roles in society contribute to economic insecurity in their later years. In turn, this economic insecurity leaves them vulnerable to homelessness. Theresia, a mother of six, grandmother of 19, and great grandmother of 9, states she couch-surfed and lived with her children and grandchildren prior to securing housing at Wintringham. Theresia states: ‘Having always been in command of my life, this loss of identity affected me so deeply; I never felt like this before. After just three weeks of living at Wintringham I feel like I’m regaining my identity.’ These stories are all too familiar to our Advice and Information team at Wintringham who report an increase in older women contacting our services who are first time homeless. At Wintringham, we have a commitment to Housing First Principles of providing safe, secure and affordable housing prior to, and not conditional upon, addressing other health and well-being issues. We see the positive changes in people once they are in housing that is not only affordable but also is at a standard that respects a person’s dignity. As such, our housing developments are guided by a set of design principles that facilitate freedom of movement, a sense of security, stability, privacy, safety and control over the living space. For Theresia, it was also the social connectedness that securing this type of housing enabled: ‘I’m resuming the activities that I love so much like ballroom dancing. I now have a home for
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Tea-break, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
life. You have no idea what a huge impact that can have on a person and their outlook on life. Having my own home now and the right support structures around me, means that I somehow feel whole again, and ready to share my skills with others in whatever way I can.’ It is wonderful to listen to stories like Theresia and Natalie’s. Unfortunately, we simply don’t have enough housing vacancies to meet this growing demand. Without an increase in funding for additional social housing, waiting lists will continue to increase. Longer-term however, providing safe, secure and affordable housing is only part of the solution. Unless the structural and cultural drivers
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of economic disadvantage for women are addressed, the numbers of older women experiencing homelessness will continue to rise. On the precipice of this structural vulnerability, a relationship breakdown, death, job loss or change in health circumstances is all it takes for an older, single woman to become homeless.6 Policy initiatives that boost economic security for women, that address issues such as the current superannuation gender gap and the gender pay gap are required. We must continue to advocate for funding to increase social housing stock but also policies that result in economic security longer-term for women.
Endnotes 1. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) 2012–13 (2013), Specialist Homelessness Services. 2. Paterson K 2019, Australian Human Rights Commission, Older Women’s Risk of Homelessness: Background Paper, Sydney, p.4. 3. Australian Human Rights Commission 2020, ‘Older women on the rise’, https:// humanrights.gov.au/about/news/olderwomen-facing-homelessness-rise 4. Kimberley H and Simons B 2009, The Brotherhood’s Social Barometer: living the second 50 years, Melbourne, p.29. 5. Mission Australia 2017, Ageing and Homelessness: solution to a growing problems, Australia, p.28. 6. Homelessness Australia 2015, ‘Ending and Preventing Older Women’s Experiencing in Australia: Joint Submission of Homelessness Australia and Equity Rights Alliance’ https://www. homelessnessaustralia.org.au/media/156
Older Women Receiving Specialist Homelessness Services Support Carol Kubanek, Housing and Homelessness Reporting and Development Unit, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Housing is critically important for people’s wellbeing and security, particularly as people near or reach retirement age.1 There are an increasing number of older women who are homeless and in need of support.2, 3 This article provides a snapshot of older women who experienced homelessness or were at risk of homelessness who received services from Specialist Homelessness Services in 2018–19.
Population Trends of Older Women and Their Living Arrangements
Overall, the Australian population is ageing, with older women representing a growing proportion of the total population. The proportion of older women aged 65 and over has increased from around ten per cent of the total female Australian population in 1966 to 14 per cent in 1996, and to 17 per cent (or 1,972,384 women) in 2016.4
older women, renting who have low incomes. In 2016, just over 12 per cent of all older women were renting and 45 per cent of these women spent more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.7
than half (13,200 clients) were female and the numbers have been increasing over time.9 Since 2011–12, the number of older female clients has risen 80 per cent from 7,300 clients in 2011–12 to 13,200 in 2018–19.
Older Women Who Receive Specialist Homelessness Services
Among those clients whose housing status was known at the beginning of support, the number of older women experiencing homelessness increased by around 160 per cent from 2011–12 to 2018–19 while those at risk of homelessness doubled. In 2011–12, around 20 per cent (or 1,100) older female clients, receiving assistance from SHS agencies were homeless and 80 per cent (or 4,600) were at risk of homelessness. By 2018–19, the proportion of older female clients experiencing homelessness increased to 25 per cent (or 3,000 clients) whereas clients at risk of homelessness decreased to 75 per cent (or 9,000).
Older women experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness can access a range of supports from Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS).8 These services are delivered by non‑government organisations, including those specialising in delivering services to specific target groups (such as older people) and those providing more generic services to people facing housing crises. Of the almost 23,900 older clients (aged over 55 years) who received SHS support during 2018–19, more
The living arrangements of older people can influence their likelihood of needing housing/homelessness support.5 In 2016, 61 per cent of older women aged 65 to 74 lived with a spouse or partner, 25 per cent lived alone, ten per cent lived in a household with other related people and two per cent lived in a group household. The proportion of women living alone rises as women age. Around one-third (31 per cent) of older women aged 65 and over lived alone.
Low Income Households
People on low incomes are less likely to be in a financial position to cope with life events such as becoming a widow, divorce or ill health, which may increase the likelihood of experiencing homelessness.6 There has been an increase in the number of older people, including
Photo supplied by Wintringham
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Table 1: Selected characteristics of older female SHS clients, at the beginning of support, in 2018–19 Homeless
At risk of homelessness
25% (3,000) of older female clients were homeless
75% (9,000) were of older female clients were at risk of homelessness
46% (1,400) were aged 55 to 59, 26% (780) were aged 60 to 64 and 28%(820) were aged 65 and over
38% (3,400) were aged 55 to 59, 25% (2,300) were aged 60 to 64 and 37% (3,400) were aged 65 and over
19% (500) of clients were Indigenous
17% (1,400) of clients were Indigenous
60% (1,800) presented alone 18% (500) lived with other family 8% (250) one parent with child/ren
50% (4,200) presented alone 16% (1,300) lived with other family 13% (1,000) one parent with child/ren
27% (780) experienced family and domestic violence
35% (3,200) experienced family and domestic violence
38% (1,100) had mental health issues
29% (2,600) had mental health issues
5% (160) had problematic drug or alcohol issues
4% (330) had problematic drug or alcohol issues
55% (1,600) were not in the labour force 39% (1,100) were unemployed 5% (140) were employed full-time or part-time
58% (4,500) were not in the labour force 31% (2,400) were unemployed 10% (780) were employed full-time or part-time
Notes: 1. Proportion calculations based on a denominator using either homelessness or at risk of homelessness data. 2. Calculations exclude not stated. Source: Specialist Homelessness Services Data Cubes
Characteristics of Older Female SHS Clients
The typical older female SHS client in Australia was aged 55 to 59, presented to an agency as a lone person, was not in the labour force and was at risk of homelessness at first presentation (Table 1).
Homelessness clients
Main Reason for Seeking Assistance
The main reasons older female clients sought assistance from SHS agencies was different for those experiencing homelessness compared with those presenting to services at risk of homelessness (Figure 1). For those older women
Clients at risk of homelessness
Housing crisis
Family and domestic violence
Inadequate or inappropriate dwelling conditions
Financial difficulties
Family and domestic violence
Housing crisis
Number
1,400
460 Number
Figure 1: Older women, by main reasons for seeking assistance, 2018–19
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Clients of SHS may receive multiple support periods in a single financial year, or may receive more than one support period over several years. Patterns of service use among older women is enhanced by analysing clients’ data over a longer time-period than a single year.
• Around 49,100 female SHS
1,600 580
Service Use Patterns of Female Clients: Five-year Total View
Analysis of SHS client data for the total period 2013–14 to 2017–18 was conducted for a recent study. Of older female SHS clients (Table 2): 2,600
790
experiencing homelessness, the main reason for seeking assistance in 2018–19 was housing crisis (27 per cent or 790 clients). For those at risk of homelessnes, the main reason was family and domestic violence (29 per cent or 2,600).
clients received at least one service during the total period 2013–14 to 2017–18.10
• Most (70 per cent) received
support during a single financial year only and a further
Three People At The Dance, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
16 per cent received service in two consecutive years and 10 per cent in two, three, four or five financial years. • Older female clients received
an average of 93 days of support and 18 nights of accommodation per client.
• Over three in five were aged
55 to 64 (30,700 or 63 per cent clients); there were fewer clients aged 65- to 74 (12,800 or 26 per cent) and aged 75 and over (5,600 or 11 per cent).
Where to from Here
Evidence shows that an increasing number of older women are homeless and in need of support.11 Linking the SHS collection to other data sources would help identify and improve estimates on the number of older women who are homeless. Further analysis of linked data would also provide better understanding on the circumstances of older women who have experienced homelessness or who are at risk of homelessness and their pathways into more stable and secure housing.
Endnotes 1. ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) 2017, Housing Occupancy and Costs, Australia, 2015–16. ABS cat. no. 4130.0, ABS, Canberra.
2. ABS 2018 2012, Census of Population and Housing: estimating homelessness, 20106. ABS cat. no. 2049.0, ABS, Canberra.
3. The Human Rights commission 2019, op cit. 4. ABS 2018, Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia — Stories from the Census, 2016, ABS cat. no. 2071.0, ABS, Canberra.
5. The Human Rights commission 2019, ‘Older Women’s risk of Homelessness: Exploring a growing problem’, Background Paper April 2019.
6. Stone S, Parkinson S, Sharam A and Ralston L 2016, ‘Housing assistance need and provision in Australia: a household-based policy analysis’. Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). AHURI Final Report No. 262. Melbourne: AHURI.
7. The Human Rights commission 2019 op cit. 8. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) 2019, Specialist Homelessness Services annual report 2018–19, AIHW cat. no. HOU 318. Canberra: AIHW. 9. Ibid.
10. AIHW 2019, ‘Older clients of specialist homelessness services’, AIHW cat. no. HOU 314. Canberra: AIHW. 11. AIHW 2019, Specialist Homelessness Services annual report 2018–19, op cit.
Table 2: Access to services by older female clients accessing services, between 2013–14 to 2017–18 No. of clients
Median days of support
Average number nights of accommodation
1 year only
34,400
9
4
2 consecutive years
7,700
111
29
2 non-consecutive years
2,100
34
7
3, 4 or 5 years
4,900
262
104
49,100
23
18
Total
Note: percentages are based on total older clients.
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More Than Double Jeopardy The National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group*
Ending homelessness for older women is the right thing to do. We know how to do it. We also know it is less expensive to house someone than to use government funded services.1 Yet, the numbers of women experiencing homelessness increases year after year. We have let this happen. Why is there an absence of political will to act and address homelessness among older women? We know the primary reason older women experiencing or at risk of homelessness is structural gender inequality. In Australia, we have come to understand the voices of older people are not heard. Our aged care system is a shocking tale of neglect,2 with ageism prevalent in Australia’s health and care systems. Australia needs to ask: is the escalating social ill of older women’s homelessness evidence of ongoing ageism and sexism in our society? The women impacted are our grandmothers and mothers, our aunties, sisters and cousins, ourselves. They deserve better. We all deserve better. With little response to the 2018 report, Retiring into Poverty — A National Plan for Change: Increasing Housing Security for Older Women,3 it is increasingly important to have a clear strategic and policy course to ensure future cohorts of older women do not face homelessness in their retirement years. Older single women are the fastest growing cohort of people to experience housing stress and homelessness, with the latest Census showing an increase of 31 per cent on the prior Census. In the ten years to Census 2016, there was a 97 per cent increase in the number of older women renting in the private market, at a time of increasing unaffordability and
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instability in that market.4 The number of older women experiencing homelessness is undoubtedly underestimated due to the hidden nature of their homelessness with women staying with friends or family, housesitting, living in their car or remaining in at-risk situations. Current estimates are that 405,000 women aged over 45 years are at risk of homelessness.5 Of this group, 165,000 women are aged between 45 and 55 years and 240,000 are aged 55 years and over.6 The scale of this issue demands state, territory and national leadership.7 Most women do not self-identify as homeless, instead describing their situation as a ‘housing crisis’.8 Women living homeless often move from place to place frequently in a downhill trajectory, in terms of mental and physical health, as their situation becomes untenable. Importantly, most older women who are homeless have not been homeless before and are therefore unlikely to approach traditional homelessness services for support.9
Factors Affecting the Incidence of Homelessness
Older women are at greater risk of financial and housing insecurity because of compounding structural and systemic factors: • They have not had the benefit of
compulsory superannuation.
• Their pay rates were lower
than male counterparts.
• Their work was likely
casual or part-time.
• Many took time out of
the paid workforce to have children and fulfil caring roles.
• Many have suffered lifelong
systemic disadvantage in relation to past employment practices which discriminated against married or pregnant women.
• Women bear the disproportionate
impacts of domestic and family violence, and elder abuse.
• There remains significant
ageism in the labour force.
Systemic economic disadvantage is acute in later years, as disadvantage compounds over the life cycle. The current gendered total remuneration gap of 20.8 per cent, the continued concentration of women in part-time, casual and lower remunerated work and our failure to alter the distribution of unpaid care between men and women means that the present increases in the number of homeless older women are unlikely to subside for the current generations of working women.10
Superannuation
Australia’s superannuation system was not designed for workers who move in and out of the workforce during their lives. The superannuation system requires re-design to ensure future older women will not face financial and housing insecurity at retirement.11
Critical Shortage of Affordable Housing
Housing is older women’s most basic need. Provision of long-term housing is an important health intervention. Housing is a social determinate of health. Women’s health needs generally increase as they age and are exacerbated for those women living in precarious housing and thereby at risk of homelessness. Appropriate housing is the cornerstone to health, social participation, utilising community aged care to maintain
the National Plan to Respond to the Abuse of Older Australians, recognising the growing problem of abuse of older Australians. The plan estimates that 185,000 older people in Australia experience some form of abuse or neglect.19, 20
Lack of Mainstream Services for Older Women
Government programs have not yet been designed to meet the needs of older women at risk of homelessness. Among the more than 1,500 homelessness services across Australia, only three are funded as specialist services for older people. Australia knows how to address older women’s homelessness. We have existing exemplars of service provision and practice that need to be extended: Judith, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
independence, and preventing premature entry into residential care. Housing must be at the centre of ageing and health policy because it is central to wellbeing in later life.12 Older women will often not get access to priority social housing as they are usually homeless due to their low incomes, not because of ‘complex’ needs. The limited stock of quality, safe, secure, longterm, affordable housing options, including social housing options, creates considerable instability for marginalised older women. A significant increase in the supply of public and community housing is the long-term solution to this ‘housing crisis’. We support the Australian Alliance to End Homelessness’ call for a health-informed end to homelessness and the establishment of an Australian Network for Health, Housing and Homelessness to drive policy and practice reform. It will benefit all homeless people, including older women.13, 14
Future Trajectory of Older Women’s Homelessness — The Covid‑19 Effect
The economic and social conditions which have led to our current high levels of homelessness among older women are acutely exacerbated by the Covid‑19 emergency. Women are disproportionately affected by the economic downturn, losing
employment at a higher rate, with working hours reduced, and higher rates of underemployment.15, 16 The Covid‑19 effect is likely to significantly increase older women’s risk of homelessness.17 Early access to superannuation introduced in response to the pandemic is likely to further deplete the balance of women’s superannuation on retirement. Before the pandemic, the superannuation savings gap between men and women aged between 25 and 34 was about 23 per cent. The savings gap is now estimated to be 45 per cent. It is expected that this will affect between 250,000 and 300,000 millennial aged women.18
Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) and Elder Abuse
Women are too often the victims of DFV and elder abuse, with clear impacts on household resources and life circumstances, including housing pathways and housing security. DFV is a key driver of homelessness among women. The Fourth Action Plan under the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Children identifies the need for safe, accessible and stable accommodation as crucial for the safety and recovery of women and their children impacted by violence. In March 2019, the Australian Government launched
a. Assistance with Care and Housing Program (ACH) The ACH program assists older people on low incomes, homeless or at risk of homelessness, to find housing through the private rental market or applying for affordable and social housing options. The ACH Program must be sufficiently resourced to meet demand. b. The Next-Door Program, YWCA Housing Canberra Next Door is a specialist women’s service that empowers older women to access and maintain affordable, appropriate and safe homes in the ACT. c. Older Women’s Housing Project, Women’s Property Initiatives The Older Women’s Housing Project will enable low‑income women over 55 with modest assets to invest in safe, secure and affordable housing where their assets/ contribution will be preserved. d. Older Women’s Housing Projects, Women’s Housing Company (WHC) Two recent Older Women’s Housing Projects in New South Wales (NSW) have provided a new supply of housing targeted for women aged 55 and over. The projects are a collaboration between the WHC and the NSW Government specifically designed for single older women, with amenity and accessibility in mind to support ageing in place.
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e. The Seniors Housing Gateway (for older women and men) The Seniors Housing Gateway is an initiative of the Ageing on the Edge project funded by The Wicking Trust. The proposal recommends a national Seniors Housing Gateway to assist women navigate their way to a housing solution. The gateway would offer every older person a one-stop contact point to assist them to avoid or escape homelessness and establish a network of support across all key service systems.
Recommendations
The National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group highlights the need for a tailored response that raises older women and their financial and housing insecurity to the policy forefront. The plan must address eight distinct elements. These elements are what the federal, state and territory governments need to do now to address the unacceptable and growing number of women impacted by, or facing, housing insecurity. 1. Develop a National Housing and Homelessness Strategy, supported by a national policy on health equity, housing and homelessness, with actions and measurable targets to create additional permanent social and affordable housing options for women in each state and territory, and particularly for older women. 2. Implement a comprehensive Federal Government Strategy to address the current financial insecurity of older women. The strategy must rectify inequities in superannuation policy and legislation and examine the national income support system and Commonwealth Rent Assistance with a view to improving financial outcomes for women. 3. Special measures are required to assist women currently at retirement age who have not had the opportunity to accumulate superannuation due to lower lifetime earnings and caring duties. Gender inequality and discrimination must be recognised and addressed culturally, and within multiple policy domains, to prevent deprivation in older age for women.
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4. To prevent problems for older women continuing to happen in the future, there needs to be a comprehensive Federal Government Strategy to address the underlying causes of gendered economic inequality. 5. Establish a Seniors Housing Gateway to better address the housing support needs of vulnerable older women. This program must include locating a central older persons housing information and support service in each capital city with state-wide reach. 6. Expand the ACH Program geographically, through the provision of brokerage (untied) funds and with strong intersectoral collaboration at both state/territory and national levels. 7. Ensure that national aged care policy and programs address housing adequacy – especially for those programs that are predicated on delivering care to women in their own homes – supporting women to be healthy, safe and secure in their own homes as they grow older. 8. Develop better national datasets and data‑informed responses based on gendered data collection and analysis to inform better policy, strategy and programs targeting older women, their circumstances and needs. Failure to respond to key social issues such as entrenched poverty, housing insecurity, homelessness and gender inequality will quite simply ensure a more unequal community, more demand for expensive interventions to assist people in crisis, and costs for individuals, families, communities and Australia that are simply unacceptable. * More Than Double Jeopardy, is from the National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group Membership includes: Sue Mowbray, CEO, Mercy Foundation (National) Dr Selina Tually, Academic, University of South Australia Dr Maree Petersen, Academic, University of Queensland Debbie Georgopoulos, CEO, Women’s Housing Company (New South Wales) Gloria Sutherland, Women’s Health Researcher, University of Notre Dame (Western Australia) Dr Alice Clark, CEO, Shelter SA (South Australia)
Frances Crimmins, CEO, YWCA Canberra (Australian Capital Territory) Helen Dalley-Fisher, Manager, Equality Rights Alliance (National) Jeanette Large, CEO, Women’s Property Initiatives (Victoria) Endnotes
1. Parsell C, Petersen M and Culhane D 2017, Cost Offsets of Supportive Housing: Evidence for Social Work, The British Journal of Social Work, vol. 47, no. 5, pp.1534–1553. 2. Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety 2019, Interim Report: Neglect, Commonwealth of Australia. 3. National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group 2018, Retiring into Poverty: A National Plan for Change: Increasing housing security for older women, Mercy Foundation. 4. Faulkner D, Lester L and Social Ventures Australia 2020, At Risk: Understanding the population size and demographics of older women at risk of homelessness in Australia, Housing for the Aged Action Group. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group 2018, op cit. 8. Petersen M and Parsell C 2014, Older women’s pathways out of homelessness, Institute for Social Sciences Research report for the Mercy Foundation. 9. Ibid. 10. https://www.wgea.gov.au/ topics/the-gender-pay-gap 11. National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group 2018, op cit. 12. Ibid. 13. Australian Alliance to End Homelessness 2020a, Australian Network for Health, Housing and Homelessness (ANH3), Fact Sheet, <https://aaeh.org.au/assets/docs/ Publications/2020-ANH3-Fact-Sheet.pdf>. 14. Australian Alliance to End Homelessness 2020b, Leaving No-one Behind, A National Policy for Health Equity, Housing and Homelessness, <https://aaeh.org. au/assets/docs/20200120-POLICYPROPOSAL_Leaving-no-one-Behind.pdf>. 15. Coates B, Cowgill M, Chen T, Mackey W 2020, Shutdown: estimating the Covid‑19 employment shock, ACT: Grattan Institute, available: <https://grattan.edu.au/. 16. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020, Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 5 September 2020, cat. no. 6160.0.55.001 <https://www.abs.gov.au/ statistics/labour/earnings-and-work-hours/ weekly-payroll-jobs-and-wages-australia/ latest-release#data-download>. 17. National Women’s Alliances 2020, Disaster Recovery, Planning and Management for Women, their Families, and their Communities in all their Diversity. 18. Dastoor C 2020, Early access raid most likely to hurt women, <https:// superreview.moneymanagement.com. au/news/superannuation/early-accessraid-most-likely-hurt-women>. 19. Council of Attorneys General 2019, National Plan to Respond to the Abuse of Older Australians (Elder Abuse) 2019–2023 <https://www.ag.gov.au/sites/default/ files/2020-03/National-plan-to-respond-tothe-abuse-of-older-australians-elder.pdf>. 20. Fiedler J and Faulkner D 2018, The seniors housing gateway: safety net for older people at risk of homelessness, Ageing on the Edge Older Persons Homelessness Prevention Project <https://www.oldertenants.org. au/sites/default/files/seniors_housing_ gateway_federal_proposal.pdf>.
The System is Failing Older Women: We Need Specialist Services Gemma White, Early Intervention Worker, Melis Cevik, Outreach Worker/Home at Last Service and Kobi Maglen, National Development Worker, Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG)
Most older women experiencing homelessness have not been homeless before and have experienced ‘conventional’ housing histories throughout their life. This means they often do not identify as being homeless or know where to turn for help. For this reason, the cohort of older women at risk of homelessness is often described as ‘invisible’. Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG), in partnership with Debbie Faulkner of the University of Adelaide (and now University of South Australia), has documented the homelessness trends of older people in all states and territories over the last five years. Consistently, we see older people on low incomes, particularly women, living in the private rental market in housing stress, paying more than 30 per cent of their income in rent. Many manage by cutting back on essentials like food and medication. Yet they are vulnerable to homelessness. The catalyst is often a life shock, or a series of life shocks, such as being made redundant and not being able to find another job, relationship breakdown, death of a partner, illness, a rent increase or eviction notice. Older women on low incomes tend to live precariously by house sitting, couch surfing, house sharing, living in a caravan, often moving from place to place, rather than rough sleeping. Research by Debbie Faulkner and Laurence Lester from the University of Adelaide estimates that over 400,000 women aged 45 and over are at risk of homelessness in Australia. We know that the women who present at homelessness services represent the tip of the iceberg.
While there are organisations around Australia working hard to support this group of older people, service responses are limited and fragmented. In part, this is because the numbers of older women presenting at homelessness services remains relatively low and so this issue is still considered emergent. It is also due to the homelessness service system being oriented towards crisis and the provision of emergency relief and temporary accommodation. For women who have been self-reliant and have not previously interacted with the social service system, these services can be confronting and scary. Meanwhile, the aged care system focuses on in-home and residential care. Both systems are stretched and difficult to navigate and neither serves the needs of older women at risk of homelessness – so older women get bumped around, referred on and often feel disrespected and condescended to. The exception is HAAG’s Home at Last service in Victoria. HAAG is the only organisation of its type in Australia that specialises in older persons’ housing and straddles the housing, homelessness and aged care systems. The Home at Last service provides state‑wide information and referrals to over a 1,000 older people a year, community and sector engagement to reach people before they hit a crisis point and one-on-one housing support for over 100 older people a year in the Melbourne metro and Barwon regions. 60 per cent of Home at Last’s clients are women. HAAG’s approach to community engagement is designed to ensure that people from communities who are more vulnerable to homelessness can access the
Home at Last service. Research has repeatedly suggested that persons from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities face significant difficulties in accessing appropriate and affordable housing options. There are cultural and systemic barriers to access such services which are influenced by how long a client has lived in Australia, fluency in the English language, available resources for CALD groups in their specific language, plus whether there is the presence or absence of advocates in a client’s language/cultural group.
The HAAG community engagement system has three tiers: 1. HAAG Community Advocates HAAG Community Advocates are trained, bilingual community leaders who work as volunteers within their community to share information about HAAG and the Home at Last service. They can recognise when a person needs help with housing and, with their consent, make a referral to Home at Last via a single, nominated worker. 2. HAAG Volunteer Cultural Liaison Worker This is a volunteer worker who can attend home visits with HAAG Housing Support workers, when the client is from his/her community (with the client’s consent). This worker is more than an interpreter, they understand the cultural nuances and can explain processes in ways that make sense in the cultural context. This role is used in very small communities where interpreters are hard to come by and where establishing rapport and a personal connection helps.
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3. The HAAG Cultural Diversity Reference Group HAAG Community Advocates are members of the HAAG Cultural Diversity Reference Group, which meets monthly. The Reference Group provides a forum for Community Advocates to share information about community needs, gaps in service provision and experiences using the Home at Last service. The forum also provides an opportunity for HAAG to share information about the ever‑changing Victorian housing system, housing options and any new initiatives. Pre-Covid‑19, HAAG also held inlanguage community education sessions. These began as part of a 2015 Project, Preventing Homelessness in Older CALD Communities, and have been continuing ever since. These sessions offer tailored information which has been designed collaboratively with cultural reference groups from six communities. Case studies from the communities (which have been made into films) are used to emphasise some of the cultural aspects of being at risk of homelessness. For instance, in some communities the common experience of being at risk of homelessness may be living with family (adult children) in an elder abuse/conflict situation, whereas for other communities, most older people who are at risk of homelessness are renting on their own. Many people who attend community education sessions are not at the point of housing crisis. However, they can use this information if they do face a crisis in the future. Perhaps the greatest benefit of the community education sessions is that they help to erode stigma in the community about those facing homelessness, which means people feel more able to seek services at a point where they can prevent a housing crisis, rather than during a crisis. It may take multiple community education sessions before the community lets the stigma of a housing crisis go. For instance, in one Indian community group, three community education sessions were delivered. At the first session, the group was silent at the end. No one asked any
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HAAG Community Advocate, Vivian
questions. At the second session, people started talking about people they knew who were experiencing stress or elder abuse in their family home and wanted to leave and live alone. By the third session, people were talking openly about their own experiences of housing stress and crisis within the group and seeking help from the HAAG worker. Sixty per cent of Home at Last’s clients are from CALD communities and 60 per cent of those are women.
A Case Study
This is a story of one of the Home at Last clients, Sameerah. Sameerah is 62 years of age, from an Assyrian background, who came to Australia from Syria as a refugee. She has very limited English language proficiency and therefore needs an Assyrian interpreter. She is a single woman and was living with her mother and sister in a two-bedroom property when she was referred to Home at Last. Sameerah shared a room with her sister who often displayed challenging behaviour due to severe mental illness.
insecure or unsuitable housing. Housing support workers provide intensive support to find clients suitable long-term affordable housing. They provide a flexible service which is based on priority and duration of service provision, depending on each client’s level of housing and care needs. The approach taken is based on an empowerment model that assumes that the situation clients find themselves in is largely a function of structural inequality and a lack of affordable private housing stock. With support, clients can plan, make decisions and find solutions to their housing situation once they are provided with information, resources and opportunities. Vivian was present when the HAAG Housing Support worker met with Sameerah to undertake an assessment of her housing options. Sameerah was quite distressed during this meeting as the possibility of becoming homeless had become very real to her. Vivian was able to explain, in Assyrian, the complex process of applying for social housing and assist in asking and answering the questions of the Housing Support worker. Following this meeting, the Housing Support worker completed a housing application for Sameerah. Following some active advocacy on her behalf, the Housing Support worker was able to secure Sameerah a social housing property in an area that she is familiar with. This support transformed Sameerah’s life.
Sameerah was referred to Home at Last for urgent housing assistance by a HAAG Community Advocate, Vivian. Sameerah knew that Vivian volunteered for an organisation that helps with housing and asked her for assistance following a church service.
This case clearly highlights the importance and critical benefit of working in a partnership with HAAG’s Community Liaison volunteers. This approach to the provision of information/referral and advocacy enables HAAG to intervene early. In Sameerah’s case, a coordinated and comprehensive housing referral service helped overcome cultural and language barriers to facilitate access to affordable housing. This service is not available anywhere else in Australia.
Following a call from an intake worker, Sameerah was referred to HAAG’s housing support team. This team assists all older clients who are homeless, at risk of becoming homeless or who live in unsafe,
HAAG is working with networks of people and organisations around Australia to advocate for housing information and referral services to be established in each State and Territory based on the Home at Last model.
Homelessness and Health Needs Among Trans Women: A Trans‑Pacific Dialogue Cal Andrews, Department of General Practice, University of Melbourne and Aaron Munro, Long-time advocate of housing solutions in Vancouver and owner of Public Alley Counselling and Consultant Services
This article is concerned with a highly stigmatised and underserved group of older women experiencing homelessness: trans women. For brevity, we use this term collectively to include women who identify as transgender, gender diverse, non-binary, other trans feminine and female-identified gender nonconforming identities and experiences, and Two-Spirit and other non-western understandings of gender and sexuality as appropriate. We also do not wish to be exclusionary and recognise considerable limitations in adopting this approach. Drawing principally on North American literature, we discuss what is known about homelessness and health needs in trans populations and among trans women especially, including challenges associated with gender-
Reflection I remember meeting one trans woman struggling with insecure housing when I was an outreach worker; I think as a trans man, I felt a certain affection towards her. Wait that’s not totally true. I felt affection for her because she was wonderful. She was a refugee who landed in this part of Canada, a country that has provided refuge for many people for sure, but not for women such as her. Her reality was sex work for survival and, as I discovered, company in some ways. She was one of a number of trans women that taught me that isolation was the biggest indignity of all. So, she was further marginalised and further isolated in a new land. For her, and many trans women I met during my work, the ability to access medical affirming care was
specific services. This is augmented by reflections drawn from one author’s many years of practice and newly acquired male privilege across the Pacific in Canada, on the streets in Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-waututh beautiful lands, also known as Vancouver. Intimate partner violence is an established major driver of homelessness among women, and while rates of intimate partner violence are at least as high among trans compared to cisgender people,1 trans women face added risks due to transmisogyny, cissexism, and services in multiple sectors that do not recognise or are not sufficiently responsive to this population’s needs, or that further reject them when seeking help.2, 3, 4 Other out of her reach. So, I guess as a trans person I didn’t feel affection for her as a trans woman. I just felt affection for who she was and her generosity, and I guess I felt an outrage that I had more affluence and the ability to ‘pass’ and have access to gender affirming care and the resulting ‘male’ privilege that made my life a bit softer. An outrage but also, a deep moral imperative that we need to let women be women, however they become one. I remember her in the back seat one day, driving to a housing appointment reaching around to the front seat and grabbing my chest and squeezing it. I gasped in shock and then I howled laughing, surprised by her forward gesture. Remember I grew up protecting my chest as I was socialised female and she did not, because
contributing factors to heightened risk of housing instability and homelessness for trans populations include higher rates of renting, poverty, unemployment or underemployment, family rejection, and HIV; issues with name and gender on identification documents; stigma and discrimination with regards to accessing healthcare, housing, and employment; and sequelae of additional barriers such as addiction and poor mental health.5, 6, 7 When accessing mainstream homelessness services, trans women often have additional burdens in being expected to comply with binary gender stereotypes; to answer inappropriate questions concerning their surgical status; to have transitioned medically or otherwise; of that I think she understood the gesture differently. She said, ‘why didn’t you give them to me!’. I said, wish I could have. This is not a trans‑specific desire. To give something you don’t really need to someone else. It’s a human or maybe humane response. People give so much to their children that comes with personal cost, heck people give kidneys to complete strangers. This is a humane response to human suffering. This makes me really question, why in shelter systems are trans women still expected to wear wigs, make up and ‘pass’ as an outdated idea of what a woman is. The reality is they are already working harder than most women to be women and yet we uphold an idea of what a woman looks like towards them we would never ask another woman to do.
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and to ‘pass’ so that they may receive assistance, not ‘upset’ other cisgender residents, and attempt to maintain their own safety.8 In shared areas (such as bathrooms), preserving privacy around trans experiences can be particularly challenging.9 Hiding their gender identity also has mental health impacts.10 Sakamoto et al.’s study demonstrates some of the ways in which it is communicated to trans women that they ‘do not belong’ in homelessness services for women in Toronto.11 When it comes to supporting more inclusive approaches, Pyne identifies an underlying challenge in the ‘notion that trans women make women’s spaces unsafe’.12 Lyons et al.’s research on trans women and Two‑Spirit people accessing services in Vancouver discusses various examples of discrimination, violence, and harassment from cisgender women, and lack of supportive responses from staff on these occasions.13 As Pyne and Lyons et al. suggest, the misbeliefs facilitating such behaviour must be addressed through policies that support the self-identified gender/s of clients accessing services, and more trauma-informed staff education, so as
Reflection
I’ve often been asked when I knew I was trans. Back at that time it was a difficult question to answer. I didn’t know transitioning was an option. That was until I saw my first trans woman. At the time in Canada one had to live as the gender that they wished to transition to for two years to prove to medical providers that they were in fact sure that they wanted to transition. I would watch this woman from a café I worked in and witness the ridicule and threats she would face. She would inevitably lash out, looking ‘crazier’ in her ill‑fitting outfits and raging at people who picked on her. I’m a bit ashamed now, but at the time I wondered if she wasn’t a bit crazy. I had no idea of the courage it takes to don an outfit and walk head held high through a rural community that imagines you more as a circus freak than a human being. I finally lost it one day and yelled at the people I worked with as they had yet another chuckle at her expense.
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not to deny the needs and traumatic experiences of trans women in efforts to support those who are cis.14 The specific healthcare needs of older trans women experiencing homelessness, and the unique barriers to having those needs met — including fears of accessing services and internalised stigma 15 — are often poorly understood by homelessness and housing service workers. Trans women commonly require access to gender-affirming treatment, for example.16 While they may have difficulty accessing housing without that treatment, stable housing with adequate privacy is essential to healing and recovery from genderaffirming surgeries. Apart from impacts on mental health, when healthcare services are not accessible, inclusive, affordable, and responsive to the needs for gender‑affirming support and treatment, there is a risk that treatment will be gained through other means, and that medical attention to other health issues is also delayed.17 Conversely, access to gender-affirming treatment such as hormones for older trans women has been linked to positive impacts on mental health.18
My sense of justice woken by witnessing her obvious suffering. This woman taught me that when we see people living rough losing their tempers it doesn’t mean that they are ‘crazy’. It’s how we would all respond, should we be brave enough to stick up for ourselves during such humiliating times. I’ve wondered if the doctors that required her to do such an exercise, had they witnessed the harassment she received on those walks to get groceries or simply fresh air, would have been assured that she was committed to her goal of medically transitioning. Perhaps, they might have viewed it as I came to. That the gatekeeping and barriers to her gender affirming healthcare drove her to scream at others to defend herself. The irony being when marginalised people fightback, they are often labelled as not able to participate in healthcare decisions or are told they aren’t stable enough for
Earlier this year, The State of Women’s Housing Need and Homelessness in Canada report reinforced the importance of an intersectional feminist framework in discussions of homelessness affecting women, and noted particular risks, barriers, and vulnerabilities for trans populations.19 More recently, Kroehle et al.20 stressed the importance of a transfeminist approach in social work generally that situates — and importantly ‘confronts’ — a binary understanding of gender as one of various ‘normalized categories that promote power and control’ and is ‘linked to and acts together with constructs of whiteness, nationhood, citizenship, and ability’.21 This is a critical corrective to a system where trans and cis women (of all ages) have historically been pitted against each other and where, in the absence of finding common ground, it is not women who ultimately benefit. Dedicated to all the women, regardless of how you got here. Your braveness and struggle to be who you are despite gender conforming expectations makes us all better.
treatments. The expectation to prove to medical providers led to conditions for many trans people, especially trans women, to become traumatized further in their journeys, which later led to being disqualified for gender affirming services. An old friend of mine who also worked with people without housing once said to me, ‘It ain’t easy being a woman in this world. I don’t care how you became one, it ain’t easy being a woman in this world’. trans women’s health and housing rights should be a concern for us all. Our trans aunties, mothers, and Elders deserve no less. Their bravery and tenaciousness, despite barriers that caused them to be made to feel a public spectacle, a cruel act regardless of good intentions, made it visible and possible for people like me that came along after them to make a different kind of life for myself. We need to take good care of these heroic women.
Endnotes 1. Brown T and Herman J 2015, Intimate partner violence and sexual abuse among LGBT people: A review of existing research, The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, CA <https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/ publications/ipv-sex-abuse-lgbt-people/> 2. Abramovich A 2017, Understanding how policy and culture create oppressive conditions for LGBTQ2S youth in the shelter system, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 64, no. 11, pp.1484-1501. 3. Grant J M, Mottet L A, Tanis J, Harrison J, Herman J L and Keisling M 2011, Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Washington, DC. 4. Sakamoto I, Chin M, Chapra A and Ricciardi J 2009, A ‘normative’ homeless woman?: Marginalization, emotional injury and social support for transwomen experiencing homelessness, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, vol. 5, no. 1, pp.2–19. 5. Badgett M V L, Choi S K and Wilson B D M 2019, LGBT poverty in the United States: A study of differences between sexual orientation and gender identity groups, The Williams Institute, Los Angeles, CA <https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla. edu/publications/lgbt-poverty-us/> 6. Cunningham T J, Xu F and Town M 2018, Prevalence of five health-related behaviours for chronic disease prevention among sexual and gender minority adults — 25 U.S. States and Guam, 2016, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, US Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, vol. 67, no. 32, pp.888–893.
7. Fredriksen-Goldsen K I, Cook-Daniels L, Kim H-J, Erosheva E.A, Emlet C A, Hoy-Ellis C P, Goldsen J and Muraco A 2014, Physical and mental health of transgender older adults: An at-risk and underserved population, The Gerontologist, vol. 54, no. 3, pp.488–500. 8. For example: Begun S and Kattari S K 2016, Conforming for survival: Associations between transgender visual conformity/ passing and homelessness experiences, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, vol. 28, no. 1, pp.54–66; Lyons T, Krüsi A, Pierre L, Smith A, Small W and Shannon K 2016, Experiences of trans women and twospirit persons accessing women-specific health and housing services in a downtown neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada, LGBT Health, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 373–378; Pyne J 2015, Transfeminist theory and action: Trans women and the contested terrain of women’s services, in LGBTQ people and Social Work: Intersectional Perspectives, edited by O’Neill B, Swan T and Mule N, Canadian Scholars Press, Toronto, Ontario, Chapter 7, pp.129–149.
9. Abramovich 2017, op cit.
10. Fredriksen-Goldsen et al 2014, op cit. 11. Sakamoto et al., op cit, p. 2. 12. Pyne, op cit, p.140.
13. Lyons et al 2016, op cit.
14. Lyons et al, op cit, p. 376; Pyne, op cit, p. 141.
15. Fredriksen-Goldsen et al 2014, op cit.
16. James S, Herman J, Rankin S, Keisling M, Mottet L and Anafi M 2016, The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, National Center for Transgender Equality, Washington, DC.
17. For example: Munro L, Marshall Z, Bauer G, Hammond R, Nault C and Travers R 2017, (Dis)integrated care: Barriers to health care utilization for trans women living with HIV, Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, vol. 28, no. 5, pp.708–722; Sevelius J M, Patouhas E, Keatley J G and Johnson M O 2014, Barriers and facilitators to engagement and retention in care among transgender women living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, Ann. Behav. Med, vol. 47, no. 1, pp.5–16; Spicer S 2010, Healthcare Needs of the Transgender Homeless Population, Conference Proceedings the Psychiatric Needs of the Transgender Homeless Population, Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, vol. 14, pp.320–339.
18. Bouman W P, Claes L, Marshall E, Pinner G T, Longworth J, Maddox V, Witcomb G, Jimenez-Murcia S, Fernandez-Aranda F and Arcelus J 2016, Sociodemographic variables, clinical features, and the role of preassessment cross-sex hormones in older trans people, Journal Sex Med, vol. 13, no. 4, pp.711–719.
19. Schwan K, Versteegh A, Perri M, Caplan R, Baig K, Dej E, Jenkinson J, Brais H, Eiboff F and Pahlevan Chaleshtari T 2020, The State of Women’s Housing Need & Homelessness in Canada, edited by Hache A, Nelson A, Kratochvil E and Malenfant J, Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press, Toronto, Ontario < http://womenshomelessness. ca/literature-review/>
20. Kroehle K, Shelton J, Clark E and Seelman K 2020, Mainstreaming dissidence: confronting binary gender in social work’s grand challenges, Social Work, swaa037. 21. Kroehle et al, op cit, p.1.
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Establishing the Number of Older Women at Risk of Homelessness Dr Debbie Faulkner and Dr Laurence Lester, The Australian Alliance for Social Enterprise, The University of South Australia Introduction
In recent times it has become clear that older people and particularly older women are struggling in the housing market. The extreme outcome of this, or most conclusive example of this, is the representation of older people in the homelessness statistics. Work by Pawson et al. and CEPAR based on Census data indicates older people represent a greater proportion of the homeless population and over the years 2006 to 2016 the population aged 55 to 64 and 65 to 74 experienced the greatest increases at 53 per cent and 60 per cent respectively.1, 2
The difficulties faced by older people are also reflected in the growth in the number and proportion of older people interacting with Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS) with many of these older people at risk of homelessness. Since 2013–14 there has been a 33 per cent increase in older people seeking help.3 Women who approach homelessness services are more likely to be at risk than experiencing homeless. Data for the year 2018–19 indicates 75 per cent of women registered in the SHS system were at risk of homeless compared to 57 per cent of men.4 This data however only reflects those older women and men who approach homelessness services and cannot indicate the potential size of the population at risk. The development of policy and practice to address the risk of older people experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness requires a clear understanding of the size and complexity of the issue yet there are significant gaps in the available evidence to understand the numbers and the factors that influence the risk of homelessness for older people. This article reports on a recent work to understand the potential size of the population of
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older women at risk of homelessness and the risk factors that increase their probability of becoming homeless.
estimate people at risk this does not necessarily match people who would self‑identify or feel they are at risk.7
Data Availability
Estimating Women at Risk of Homelessness
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has spent considerable time defining homelessness and developing its data collection methodology to get an accurate estimate of homelessness in Australia from the five yearly Census. Establishing the number and characteristics of those at risk is much more problematic: both measures are constructed characteristics. For example, when describing homelessness, the ABS concludes it is not a ‘characteristic that is directly collected in the Census of Population and Housing, estimates of the homeless population may be derived from the Census using analytical techniques based on both the characteristics observed in the Census and assumptions about the way people may respond to census questions.’ 5 Defining at risk of homelessness faces the same constraints. The debate about the most appropriate generalised measure of housing affordability stress (At Risk of Homelessness) has been long-running in Australia.6 The most commonly applied measure is the 30/40 Rule (households in the lowest 40 per cent of the income distribution spending 30 per cent or more of income on housing costs) but there is no specification of the income type to be used (that is, gross income, disposable income or equivalised income may be used) or the housing costs that are to be included and in each case the estimates of the number or proportion of people at risk of homelessness will vary. In addition, research indicates even though the calculation may predict/
To examine those at risk of homelessness — if a ratio rule (for example, the 30/40 rule) is to be used — then the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) annual data collection (currently 2001 to 2018 are available) is a strong contender to be the most useful data set. HILDA is considered most helpful, primarily, as it has been available annually since 2001, following more than 17,000 Australians and so can provide a picture of change over time for individuals and the same groups of people. Only the HILDA data allows the individual experience to be tracked over several years. All other data sources that are collected on more than one occasion are not linked; they can only provide average annual changes; it is not possible to identify if those at risk experienced it for the first time, if it has been an ongoing situation, or if their life has been a series of risk periods between non-risk spells.
Study Outline
In recently work completed for Social Ventures Australia, using the HILDA, we estimated an econometric model of At Risk of Homelessness (At Risk) for the post-Global Financial Crisis years 2009 to 2018 for women aged 45 and over in housing tenures that include mortgage holders, private renters and renters of public housing with the 30/40 ratio to define risk. Using the model results we focused on 2018 to estimate the risk faced by older females. For this study we used gross household income and for housing costs rent or first mortgage. The 40th percentile is based on the ABS gross income scales.8 We select this
set of measures as they tend to give a conservative estimate of the number at risk. To estimate an approximate population value from the sample we weigh the data. When applying weights to sub-samples, it should be noted that the results are not necessarily an accurate representation of the population, but a guide.
Key Findings
The weighed HILDA data for 2018 indicates the number of women aged 55 years and over at risk of homelessness could be as high as 240,000 (±10 per cent) and an additional 165,000 (±10 per cent) women in the pre-older ages of 45 to 55 were also at risk of homelessness. Considering the negative implications of Covid on women’s employment these numbers are likely to considerably increase as these age groups will find it considerably harder to re‑enter the workforce or maintain employment.9, 10 Recent work by the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the Nous Group has found: The economic impacts of the pandemic on mature-age, lowincome people have been particularly severe. We estimate up to 30 per cent of the newly un-or underemployed are aged 51 to 65. This means nearly 400,000 Australians aged 51 to 65 have had their hours and/or employment impacted. The result is that this group of mature-age, low-income Australians is growing rapidly.11 In addition, in relation to the early effects of Covid‑19 on the employment of women, they state that women have lost jobs at a greater rate than men and, between March and April 2020, part‑time work declined by nine per cent, having a disproportionate impact on women who are significantly more likely to be in part-time employment. Yet, the type of economic recovery projects promoted have typically focused on male-dominated industries and have overall benefitted men more than women, despite their overrepresentation.12 Our research indicates that employment is a major factor in increasing a woman’s risk of homelessness. In our research women employed part-time or
unemployed are between two to four times more likely to be at risk than those women employed full time. Overall from our modelling women aged 45 years and above are more likely to be at risk if they have one or a number of the following characteristics:
life and older women’s employment prospects there is considerable reason for concern. Without policy recourse, the housing, lifestyle and wellbeing outcomes of lower income women without the safety net of home ownership looks grim.
• have been previously at risk
Further details via a report are available at: https://www.oldertenants.org.au/news/nationalforum-fans-flames-for-action-older-womenshomelessness
• are not employed full time
Endnotes
• are an immigrant from a non-
English speaking country
• are in private rental • would have difficulty raising
emergency funds
• are Aboriginal • are a lone-person household • or a lone-parent.
Older women in the private rental market are at greater risk than those holding a mortgage or living in public housing. Noting limitations due to small sample sizes for disaggregated data, the data indicates that, on average, over the 2009– to 2018 period women aged 55 to 64 in private rental had a 28 per cent chance of being at risk but this increased to about 34 per cent for women not employed full time and to over 85 per cent if they had experienced at least one prior occurrence of being at risk. In addition, the research found that the probability of being at risk increased with age. Although there is a strong association between at risk and age, age is not the cause of increased probability of being at risk. Causal factors are a set of multiple individual factors — several of which occur prior to the individual being at risk (for example in the labour market, or a consequence of events in the past such as education level). Many of these are intuitive; that is labour market status is strongly correlated with ability to pay rent and accumulate wealth.
Conclusion
These data provide some parameters around the size of, and the risk factors for, the female population at risk of homelessness. This analysis was pre Covid‑19 and considering the impact this outbreak has and will have on mid-
1. Pawson H, Parsell C, Saunders P, Hill T and Liu E 2018, Australian Homelessness Monitor 2018, Launch Housing Melbourne. https://www.launchhousing.org.au/ site/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ LaunchHousing_AHM2018_Report.pdf
2. Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR) 2019, Housing in an ageing Australia: Nest and nest egg? ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, UNSW, Sydney. http://cepar. edu.au/resources-videos/research-briefs/ housing-ageing-australia-nest-and-nest-egg
3. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2019, Specialist Homelessness Services Collection data cubes 2011–12 to 2018–19, AIHW, Canberra.
4. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2019, op cit.
5. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018, Census of Population and Housing: Estimating Homelessness, 2016, Key Findings, Cat no 2049, ABS, Canberra.
6. Gabriel M, Jacobs K, Arthurson K, Burke T, and Yates J 2005, Conceptualising and Measuring the Housing Affordability Problem, Background Report for Collaborative Research Venture 3, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Melbourne. http://www.ahuri. edu.au/global/docs/doc853.pdf
7. Lester L, Baker E, Beer A 2013, The ROC and Role of the 30% Rule (2013) 7th Australasian Housing Researchers’ Conference, Perth. 8. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019, Household Income and Wealth, Australia, 2018, Cat No 65230DO001_201718, ABS Canberra.
9. Batchelor R 2020, The impact of Covid‑19 on women and work in Victoria, The McKell Institute, NSW August. https:// mckellinstitute.org.au/research/ articles/the-impact-of-Covid‑19-onwomen-and-work-in-victoria/ 10. Zycher A 2020, The impact of the pandemic on older women, Probono September https://probonoaustralia. com.au/news/2020/09/the-impact-ofthe-pandemic-on-older-women/
11. Mills A, Finnis J, Ng S, Grutzner K and Raman B 2020, Hidden in plain sight: The impact of the Covid‑19 response on mature-age, low-income people in Australia, Brotherhood of St Laurence and Nous Group, Melbourne, p.1. http://library.bsl.org. au/jspui/bitstream/1/12062/1/BSL+Nous_ Hidden_in_plain_sight_Jun2020.pdf 12. Mills A, Finnis J, Ng S, Grutzner K and Raman B 2020, op cit. p. 5.
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The Policy Response to Women’s Homelessness That You Might Not See Coming Helen Dalley-Fisher and Romy Listo, Equality Rights Alliance The structural roots of homelessness and housing stress in older women are so well known as to be almost trite, were it not for the fact that under the litany of causes lurks real human suffering. We know that women accumulate poverty over their lifetimes as a result of gender inequality in our employment, taxation and other social structures. Women are on the wrong side of the gender pay gap, are more likely to work in gender segregated industries performing undervalued work, acquire less superannuation and have historically taken extended unpaid breaks from work to raise children. The result is a gendered vulnerability to housing stress across the life course. For older women the compounding effects of economic inequality over time resulted in older women becoming the fastest growing group at risk of homelessness in the 2016 Census.1 Other factors which increase women’s vulnerability to homelessness include gendered and family violence and the lack of investment in public and community housing. For many women, the factors above are in complex interplay with other features of their identity or lives. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, Australia’s history of colonisation and dispossession, racism, structural discrimination, intergenerational trauma and a lack of culturally appropriate services foster a rate of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women more than twice that of non-Indigenous women. Women with disabilities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, women from migrant or refugee backgrounds and trans, intersex and gender non-conforming people face discrimination in the private rental market and are particularly
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hard hit by difficulties in finding and accessing appropriate support services to maintain housing or address homelessness. Many women face additional poverty triggers arising from factors such as visa status or casual or insecure employment which exacerbate the risk of homelessness. While much has improved in the working lives of women, Covid‑19 is recreating the structural drivers of older women’s homelessness for today’s generation of younger women. To date, Covid‑19 has increased the disproportionate level of unpaid care done by women in cis-heteronormative partnerships,2 and has set back women’s economic equality by one year for every month of the crisis.3 Women’s (particularly young women’s) disproportionate loss of work and hours,4 alongside the increase in unpaid care work, create a significant risk that women impacted by the downturn will become detached from the labour market permanently or longterm. Women will also experience greater future disadvantage from measures enabling early access to superannuation,5 as they already accumulate less superannuation by retirement.6 It is concerning that people under 30 are the largest group wanting early access to super,7 as the negative impacts of an early loss of super are compounded over a lifetime of savings for young women and non-binary people who experience multiple forms of disadvantage. Over time, these factors may lead to an exacerbation of the gender gap in retirement savings and a greater risk of homelessness for this cohort. The potential policy responses to these factors are many and varied, but there is one policy intervention that we don’t discuss much in housing circles. Indeed, it’s not so
much a policy intervention, as an intervention into the policy process. At the moment, housing and homelessness policy is made through processes which claim to be gender neutral, but which are in fact gender unaware. While token gestures are made towards including references to the situation of women in housing funding agreements and the occasional target is set, policy interventions which aim to address the underlying causes of women’s homelessness are limited, siloed and generally ineffectual. When policy makers in any sphere of Australian Government sit down to develop policy, they unconsciously use a mental model of an ‘average’ person. While specific policy interventions might require policy makers to think about ‘women’ or ‘people with disability’, more general policy measures lack a granular analysis of the characteristics of the people who will be the subject or recipient of the policy. In practice this means that overarching policy is developed for people who are unconsciously assumed to be white, cis, hetro, able bodied and male, with policy relevant to the lives of people outside this category bolted on as an afterthought or addressed in separate, siloed initiatives. This failure to consider gender has paradoxically allowed a rock-solid belief to form at the federal level that Australia’s systems and policy processes are gender neutral. By ignoring gender, public servants and parliamentarians can also ignore the differential impact of policies on men and women, even when the differences are pointed out. The Prime Minister formerly known as Treasurer, Scott Morrison, declared in 2018 that we don’t have pink and blue tax
returns in this country and declared his confidence that the tax system was gender neutral.8 This was in spite of modelling which demonstrated that a significantly greater proportion of the 2018 program of tax cuts would flow to men than women and repeated demonstrations that effective marginal tax rates operate to disincentivise women increasing their hours of work when they have children.9 To make the most of limited funding opportunities and tight Covid‑19 affected budgets, we need social housing policy which has been developed with the actual users of social housing in mind. Women make up 60 per cent of people who are assisted by specialist housing services,10 and women are 56 per cent of social housing tenants.11 Given that women are the majority of users of housing support services, one way to do this is to apply a gender lens to policy development and implementation, using tools such as Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB).12 Gender Responsive Budgeting (GRB) monitors whether a country’s resource allocations matches its goals for gender equality. GRB in practice involves tools and processes which are used to analyse the gender‑differentiated impacts of budget and revenue measures for a budget that equitably distributes benefits to people of all genders. GRB can involve multiple actors, including public service agencies, Members of Parliament, and civil society and its different tools can be implemented at different points throughout the budget cycle. GRB is widespread and growing — almost half of OECD countries have, are considering or are in the process of implementing GRB. A gendered policy development process would lay bare the role played by housing and homelessness policy as a short-term approach to addressing gendered poverty, while also enabling the impacts of specific housing policy measures on women to be visible and considered. Given that women are the majority of users of public and community housing, greater clarity about gendered impacts can only improve the efficiency of government measures and public spending.
Crazy Eyes, 2012 by Dorothy Lipmann
Endnotes 1. Cerise S 2009, Accumulating poverty? Women’s experiences of poverty over the lifecycle. Sydney: AHRC, available: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/ourwork/sex-discrimination/publications/ accumulating-poverty-womens-experiencesinequality-over, 7 May 2020; National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group (2018). Retiring into Poverty, ACT: YWCA Canberra, available: https://www.equalityrightsalliance.org. au/retiring-into-poverty-a-national-planfor-change-increasing-housing-securityfor-older-women/, 7 May 2020.
2. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2020, Table 6.1 and 7,1, 49400DO002_2020 Household Impacts of Covid‑19 Survey, Monday 6 July - Friday 10 July 2020, Australia, 4940.0 — Household Impacts of Covid‑19 Survey, 6-10 July 2020, available from: https://www.abs.gov.au/ AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Previousproducts/ 4940.0Main %20Features206-10 %20July %202020?opendocument&tabname= Summary&prodno=4940.0&issue=6-10 %20July %202020&num=&view=, 18 August 2020
3. Financy 2020, Women’s Index: The pandemic impacts progress and timeframe to economic equality, April – June 2020, available from: https://financy.com.au/ wp-content/uploads/2020/08/FWX_ JUN20_Report_Final.pdf, 18 August 2020.
4. Jericho G 2020, ‘Past recessions have mostly smashed male-dominated industries. But not this time’, The Guardian Australia, 18 August 2020, available from: https://www.theguardian.com/business/ grogonomics/2020/aug/18/past-recessionshave-mostly-smashed-male-dominatedindustries-but-not-this-time, 18 August 2020. 5. Hodgson H 2020, ‘Superannuation and Covid‑19: What does early access mean for women?’, Women’s Policy Action Tank, 27 May 2020 available: http:// www.powertopersuade.org.au/blog/ superannuation-and-Covid‑19-what-doesearly-access-mean-for-women/17/4/2020,. 6. ABS 2019, ‘Data Cube 2. Economic security — Earnings, income and economic situation’, 4125.0 — Gender Indicators, Australia, Nov 2019, available:
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/ abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/4125.0Nov %20 2019?OpenDocument, 27 May 2020.
7. Borys S 2020, ‘Coronavirus financial concerns have young people accessing their superannuation’, ABC News, 26 May 2020, available: https://www.abc. net.au/news/2020-05-25/coronavirusearly-access-superannuation-youngpeople/12282546, 27 May 2020.
8. Bagshaw E 2018, Labor switches tax cut battle to question of gender equity Sydney Morning Herald June 6, 2018 available at: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/ labor-switches-tax-cut-battle-to-questionof-gender-equity-20180606-p4zjsa.html
9. National Foundation of Australian Women Gender Lens on the budget 2018–19 available at https://nfaw.org/genderlens-on-the-budget/gender-lens-on-thebudget-2018-19/ See also: Herault N and Kalb G, Understanding the rising trend in female labour force participation ANU Crawford School of Public Policy Tax and Transfer Policy Institute Working Paper 5/2020 May 2020 Available at: https:// taxpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/ files/publication/taxstudies_crawford_ anu_edu_au/2020-05/complete_herault_ kalb_may_2020.pdf and Gareth Hutchens ‘Pink and blue forms: is gender-based tax really as crazy as it sounds?’ The Guardian 8 June 2018 Available at: https://www. theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/ jun/08/pink-and-blue-forms-is-genderbased-tax-really-as-crazy-as-it-sounds 10. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2019, Specialist Homelessness Services annual report 2018–19. Retrieved from https://www.aihw. gov.au/reports/homelessnessservices/shs-annual-report-18-19
11. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2020, Housing assistance. Retrieved from https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/ australias-welfare/housing-assistance
12. Williamsm G and Gissane H 2020, Analysing the Gap Policy Paper: Opportunities to improve gender equality in Australia’s public policy processes, Equality Rights Alliance, ACT, available: https://www. equalityrightsalliance.org.au/publications/ analysing-the-gap/ 7 May 2020.
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LGBTI Older Women Rebecca Walton, Rebecca Walton, ACSN Volunteer Coordinator, Housing for the Aged Action Group
The public perception of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people is largely one of a young, affluent community. However, the reality is that within the LGBTI community, a large share of LGBTI adults are older, of low-socioeconomic status and at risk of homelessness. LGBTI elders are more likely to live in poverty and experience homelessness, compared to the mainstream population due to both the complexity of their experiences and difficulty accessing services. A recently released report by HAAG highlighted the high levels of homelessness, housing insecurity and risk of homelessness among older LGBTI people. With findings indicating that at least 16 per cent of older LGBTI people surveyed in Victoria are currently experiencing or at risk of homelessness and as many as 40 per cent have had previous experiences of homelessness.1 While there are many commonalities among LGBTI older people that lead to these figures, this relationship is nuanced. The reality is that this cohort is not a homogenous group and each letter of the acronym have a unique set of challenges, experiences and needs when it comes to housing and homelessness.2 For older women who identify as LGBTI the chances of experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity are compounded by their simultaneous social membership in at least three marginalised groups (age, sexual orientation and gender). These multiple identities intersect and overlap in ways that impact on securing and maintaining safe and affordable housing.3
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This cohort has lived through periods of discrimination, social stigma and legislative inequality. Whereby gender inequality on top of a long-term lack of legal and social recognition of their LGBTI identity has led to downstream adverse effects on income and housing resulting in reduced lifetime earnings and fewer opportunities to save for retirement.4, 5
Differences Among the Cohorts Our research report, Out of the Closest, Out of Options shows the current housing trends of older LGBTI people in Victoria. For women (both cisgender* and transgender**), housing vulnerabilities and experiences vary. While the numbers of bisexual and intersex cis-women in our survey are too small to report on, the findings for lesbian women highlighted that older lesbians are an at-risk, yet resilient population.
Although lesbian older women were found to be the most likely in our cohort to own their home outright, their rate of homeownership is considerably less compared with the general population (33 per cent vs. 80 per cent, respectively).6 In addition to this figure, one quarter of lesbian older women are currently living in a private rental. Of this group, 33 per cent are on a government pension, and over a third of those renting stated that they are unable to afford their rental property. Significant numbers of LGBTI older women highlighted that due to a large portion of their income spent on housing costs they live in significant poverty as they have little money left for essential needs after their rent. ‘The house is costing me more to rent than I’m earning and I’ll need to move when the lease ends next January’ — Vicky, 72*
More concerning is the high number of older lesbians that have experienced homelessness (45 per cent) at some point during their lifetime. Although older lesbians were found to be more likely to know about housing and homelessness support services, this awareness of services was strongly linked to lived experience of homelessness or from working in the sector, not due to community education.
Transgender Women
While the sample size for people identifying as Transwomen was too small to analyse separately, anecdotal evidence suggests that older Transwomen experience significant barriers to accessing and securing safe and affordable housing due to a cycle of systemic discrimination, oppression and transphobia.7 ‘I had changed my name during my transition so, when my partner left me and I needed a new rental accommodation, I had no rental history in my name, I had rented for 30 years and never paid late or not had a bond returned but suddenly I could not get a property’ — Jane, 60* As a whole, Trans and Gender Diverse (TGD) elders are more likely to rent and live alone and had the lowest rate of homeownership among those surveyed, with only 14 per cent owning their house outright. Even more concerning is the fact that close to half of TGD elders surveyed are currently at risk or experiencing homelessness and 57 per cent have previous experiences of homelessness. The high rates of homelessness among TGD older people is likely to be at least partially explained by the additional barriers faced by TGD older people noted above. Despite the high
Portrait Of A Woman, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
prevalence and risk of homelessness among TGD older people, almost a third of respondents had no knowledge of support services.
Conclusion
LGBTI older people experience a range of unique issues that makes them more vulnerable to homelessness than the general population. However, for women within this cohort, these vulnerabilities are often compounded by genderbased economic and social inequalities. This places LGBTI older women at significant risk of experiencing homelessness. Yet despite the triple threat of vulnerabilities for being older, women and LGBTI, there is a severe lack of affordable housing options and services for older LGBTI women and a lack of community resources and programming specific to LGBTI older women’s needs. As a result, many LGBTI women feel they have no option other than to navigate the informal, expensive, and often
discriminatory, private housing system on their own — a journey that can often lead to homelessness. There is a clear and immediate need to ensure that this vulnerable and often‑forgotten population of older people are provided with the tools needed to navigate the housing and homelessness system to avoid housing crisis. This means, raising awareness among older LGBTI communities about the risk factors for homelessness and facilitating early referral before a housing crisis, including planning for retirement and affordable and secure housing options for LGBTI older people. Older LGBTI women and the LGBTI community more broadly must be afforded access to secure, affordable and appropriate housing that can be enjoyed for the rest of their life. * Cisgender is a term used for people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth. ** Transgender is a term used for people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.
Endnotes 1. Housing for the Aged Action Group 2020, Out of the Closet out of options; Older LGBTI people at risk of homelessness (Report, HAAG).
2. Romero A, Goldberg S and Vasquez L 2020, LGBT People and Housing Affordability, Discrimination, and Homelessness, The Williams Institute.
3. Fraser B, Pierse N, Chisholm E and Cook H 2019, LGBTIQ+ Homelessness: A Review of the Literature, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16 (15), 2677. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16152677 4. Romero A, Goldberg S and Vasquez L 2020, op cit.
5. Maree Petersen and Cameron Parsell, Older Women’s Pathways out of Homelessness in Australia (Report, Mercy Foundation, 2014) p.18. 6. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012, Year book Australia, Housing and life cycle stages, Retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/ AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/0/ CA779FF79576CDA6CA257737 00169C7E?opendocument 7. Persson D 2009, ‘Unique Challenges of Transgender Ageing: Implications From the Literature,’ Journal of Gerontological Social Work, vol. 52, pp.633–646.
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From the Ground: The Perspective and Experiences of an Older Person’s Intake Coordinator Elaine Smith, Wintringham Advice and Information Coordinator The Advice and Information (A&I) team is Wintringham’s centralised intake service. Men and women over the age of 50, their representatives or family members contact the A&I team to make enquiries about obtaining housing, housing support and outreach services, Home Care Packages, National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) services, Supported Residential Services (SRS) accommodation and residential aged care. Approximately 50 per cent of referrals to Wintringham are for housing from people who are experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of homelessness. From there, the team assists with filling Wintringham’s housing vacancies, but the majority of callers are referred for housing support within Wintringham or to external housing and homelessness services. Many are referred for crisis accommodation and most are placed on the Victorian Housing Register waiting list. I have taken hundreds of calls every year from older women who are in need of housing. So far this year, we have received 470 housing referrals for older women, which is not unusual.
What causes these women to become homeless?
I have worked in Wintringham’s A&I team since 2014, and in that time I have noticed a significant increase in women who are firsttime homeless due to a life event.
throughout their lives than men, resulting in fewer assets.1 Many of the first-time homeless women have spent most of their adult years caring for their children or worked in a time when superannuation was not available. Often they face a relationship breakdown or their partners have passed away, and suddenly they find themselves with little savings and unable to afford housing. Recently, I spoke to a woman in her 50s who had spent the last two and a half years living in her sister’s shed. There was no toilet, no natural light. She was previously employed, but was made redundant as a result of an injury, and was no longer able to afford rental on Newstart. She felt that nothing was moving forward for her and that she had no prospects. She told me that ‘suicide seemed to be the only logical thing for me to do’. Fortunately, she has received support and is no longer suicidal, but she is still without a home. I hear from older women escaping family violence perpetrated by their own children, women trying to get their lives on track after surviving family violence, women from all sorts of backgrounds — Aboriginal women; women from CALD backgrounds; women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and unbelievably in their 90s.
Resilience Like No Other
Many women reference a relationship breakdown, family violence, an injury or disability (preventing them from working), or elder abuse as factors that contribute to their situation.
The older women I speak to often report that they experience poor mental health and self-esteem as a result of homelessness. While not always on the street, they often couch surf with friends or family take them, but still feel humiliated to be intruding on others’ lives.
Women are likely to spend a greater amount of time caring for others
So many older women say they never dreamed that they would
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become homeless. These women are amazingly resilient, often trying to work it out themselves with their own resources. In the end they have to involve external housing services, like Wintringham. This is a most unfair outcome, especially for those who spend so much time caring for others.
Moving Forward
Services have caught on to the rise in homelessness for older women, but governments have not responded well. We know about it, we have been told about it; there have been reports on it; there have been seminars given at conferences, but there’s been very little done by governments to address the issue. We need safe places for these women to live. A lot of them are put into unsafe rooming houses when they are in crisis, because there are no other options. We need to improve our crisis accommodation, and we also need to increase our social housing stocks urgently. We have to work respectfully with these women in a way that preserves their dignity. It is important to listen. It is important not to judge and to understand their background and the causes of their disadvantage, like superannuation and workforce participation. It is up to us to help them access the services that they need. Remember these older homeless women are our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters and daughters and they have a right to affordable housing. Endnote 1. Thredgold C, Beer A, Zufferey C, Peters A and Spinney A 2019, ‘An effective homelessness services system for older Australians’, AHURI Final Report No. 322, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne.
Older Women on the Brink Jeanette Large, Chief Executive Officer, Women’s Property Initiatives
Housing stress and homelessness are deeply gendered issues. It has been widely reported that the rate of homelessness is growing fastest among women, particularly older women. The inherent financial disadvantage that women face bites hard as they age. This disadvantage is based on gender inequality and is experienced at every age and stage of a woman’s life. In Australia, more than 400,000 women over the age of 45 are at risk of homelessness.1 With the impact of a global pandemic yet to be fully felt, and a 2020 Federal Budget that allocated a devastatingly small amount to addressing the economic security of older women, the proportions of this crisis are frightening.
are many ordinary, hardworking, single women and single mothers who can no longer make ends meet. Chances are you know one of them. Their income is sufficiently low that their access to affordable housing is severely limited. Most of these women didn’t think they would ever experience homelessness. The figures, alarming as they are, are also likely to under-report women, particularly older women. They are quite resourceful when it comes to ‘keeping a roof over their heads’, and because they don’t identify their situation with being homeless, in many cases they are not included in the reporting. The social stigma associated with homelessness also prevents many of these women from seeking help.
Women earn less than men. They have limits on their ability to work full-time and spend more time out of the work force caring for children and the elderly — work that is unpaid and chronically undervalued in economic terms. They are over‑represented in casual employment and in the lowest‑paying industries and professions. All of this has made them more vulnerable during the pandemic and Genvic has reported that 55 per cent of job lost were held by women. They retire with almost half the superannuation that men do. They are three times more likely to experience violence at the hands of a partner. Eighty‑two per cent of single parents are women and single parents are three times more likely to live in poverty. More women live in poverty than men — it’s that simple. This gendered poverty, which is closely linked to housing crisis and homelessness, is deeply entrenched in our workplaces, our homes and our relationships.2
People on low incomes, and most low-income earners are women, have been priced out of the private rental market. This lack of affordability is often exacerbated by the discrimination that single women and mothers face in the real estate market. They are simply viewed by landlords and real estate professionals as being a greater risk.
It is no longer the stereotype of the old woman on the park bench, there
Poverty and ageing collide for many women. It is estimated that there are more than half a million older Australian women living in long-term income poverty and more than half the single women in Australia over 50, earn the minimum wage or less, and we know that the minimum wage does not cover the costs of even the most basic housing. Between the 2011 and 2016 Census’ there’s been a 31 per cent rise in homelessness among older women and since 2006, there has been a 97 per cent increase in the number of older women forced to rent in an increasingly unaffordable private market. These women are reaching out for help in record numbers as
a last resort. Many others continue to couch surf or live in grossly inadequate accommodation. Many older women are not given priority access to social housing as their need stems from a low income and not, other complex issues. The impact that housing insecurity has on the health of these women and its implications for our society are only just starting to be thought about. Women’s Property Initiatives is about to break ground on a four home property development in Beaconsfield that will be the pilot of older women’s housing project. It is designed to assist women with some savings (usually a small superannuation payout). This makes them ineligible for social housing, yet they have limited or no working career ahead of them. They certainly don’t have the financial capacity to access a mortgage or own a home on their own. These women, currently locked into the private rental market and depleting their savings, can invest in a secure, affordable, appropriate home for life (or for as long as they choose to stay in it), and still preserve their capital. As an alternative to private rental it will provide security of tenure at an affordable rate and maintain the value of their invested assets (subject to normal housing price fluctuations). This is a preventative approach, where these women will avoid the depletion of their savings, will not have to contend with unstable and often highly inappropriate housing, they will pay an income-based rent and they will not become homeless or require more-costly social housing in the future. They can access a home that is highquality and accessible, allowing them to age in place. It’s not a solution for all women — many do not have the savings to invest —
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but innovative solutions are needed if we are to stem the rising tide of older womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homelessness. The four-home pilot of the program has been made possible with generous grants from Lord Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Charitable Foundation, Gandel Philanthropy and Homes for Homes, and with other essential funding provided by the Mercy Foundation, the Ian Potter Foundation and the Westpac Foundation. After evaluation we hope that this will become a valuable and replicable
model for housing older women and preventing homelessness. There needs to be broader acknowledgement of the gender factors at play within the housing and homelessness conundrum. A lifetime of discrimination in terms of income, savings and the nature of unpaid or low paid work, cannot be ignored or expected not to influence outcomes, specifically housing outcomes for women. We need a national strategy to address the issues of financial and housing insecurity for women,
particularly older women and the underlying causes of gendered economic inequality. This is more crucial in light of recent events which have simply magnified the problem. Endnotes 1. Faulkner D and Lester L 2020, Centre for Housing, Urban and Regional Planning, At Risk: Understanding the population size and demographics of older women at risk of homelessness in Australia, The University of Adelaide, Social Ventures Australia. 2. Dawson E, Most-poor people in the world are women. Australia is no exception, The Guardian, 7 May 2019.
Barbara Roddenby, 2009, courtesy of Mission Australia Centre
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Little Reason to Celebrate: Older Women, Trauma and Homelessness
Leanne Wood, Research, Social Policy and Advocacy Advisor, Anglicare Southern Queensland and Carol Birrell, Service Manager, Homelessness Services Women and Families, Anglicare Southern Queensland
Debbie is nearing her 60th birthday. She has little reason to celebrate, however — her hours in a local cafe have been cut back to a single shift each week, and she’s struggling to pay rent where she lives alone in a private rental. She knows that if any kind of emergency arises, she’ll have no way of meeting the costs. Each aspect of Debbie’s current situation increases her risk of homelessness. For women aged 55 to 64 years in a private rental, about 28 per cent are likely to be at risk. Debbie’s precarious employment raises the odds of homelessness to 34 per cent; and if she were a lone parent, the risk would rise to over 65 per cent.1
As an older woman facing homelessness, Kath deals daily with that entrenched trauma. It is likely however that Kath was also a traumatised young woman, and that the years have made it nearly impossible to disentangle the complex ‘web of vulnerability’ that characterises Kath’s life experience, where interwoven risk factors have accumulated over time and resulted in homelessness.2 As Faulkner and Lester note, that risk is also cumulative over time — the odds of homelessness surge to 85 per cent if a woman has experienced at least one prior occurrence of being at risk in addition to her current circumstances.3
What does this mean for services such as HSWF where most of the women we support are highly vulnerable, often because of past experiences of abuse coupled with being in crisis?4 At the most foundational level, it requires recognition of the fact that some women experiencing homelessness will require long‑term ongoing support. Robinson and Searby point out that funding and service frameworks in the homelessness sector tend to assume that a ‘crisis’ is temporary, and that stability — stable employment, the ability to maintain housing — is achievable in the short term.5
The introduction to this issue of Parity highlights the recent undeniable and significant increase in older women’s homelessness, to which women’s greater longevity, fewer financial resources, marginal housing and carer responsibilities are often contributing factors. These are indisputably causative factors, and there are many poignant accounts of the invisible homelessness of women who have slipped down the housing ladder due to the kinds of challenges that Debbie faces. For some women, however, the likelihood of homelessness is even more extreme. Kath is characteristic of the women who use the services of Anglicare Southern Queensland’s Homelessness Services Women and Families (HSWF) programs. Over the years, Kath has had recurring periods of unstable housing and homelessness, made increasingly likely with each additional and intersecting risk factor that she faces. Each period of risk has added to her trauma.
Day Dreaming, 2012 by Dorothy Lipmann
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For most of the older women who use HSWF services, exiting to independent housing does not mean a return to a stable life. The reality is that many of these women never had a stable life to begin with. HSWF has a three-pronged approach to supporting the women who use our services. Fundamentally, our approach is based on a systems approach, acknowledging that focusing on individual issues, outcomes or events in women’s lives is unlikely to unravel the ‘web of vulnerability’ most are dealing with, and can in fact lead to unintended consequences and further harm. Working holistically with women in this way supports a service model that is both trauma-informed and
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recovery‑oriented. Trauma-informed practice is, as the term implies, where workers are sensitive to the impacts that trauma has on a person’s psychological, physical and emotional self; and adapt their practice to cater for such impacts. The core of trauma-informed practice is establishing a sense of safety, so that the women who use our services can exercise their unique skills and strengths to explore opportunities and make their own choices about their recovery and wellbeing.6 This is good practice of course, in working with all of the women who use HSWF services. For older women, who may carry layers of embedded trauma over many years, and face daily the complex and overlapping challenges that arise from and feed into that trauma, this approach is even more important.
Endnotes 1. Faulkner D and Lester L 2020, ‘400,000 women over 45 are at risk of homelessness in Australia’, The Conversation, 4 Aug 2020 <theconversation.com/400000-women-over-45-are-at-risk-ofhomelessness-in-australia-142906>
2. Hamilton A, Poza I and Washington D 2011, ‘Homelessness and Trauma Go Hand-inHand: Pathways to Homelessness among Women Veterans’, Women’s Health Issues, vol.21, no.4, Supplement, pp.S203–S209 <www.whijournal.com/article/S10493867 %2811 %2900090-9/fulltext> 3. Faulkner D and Lester L op cit.
4. Birrell C 2010 ‘A Crisis Unrecognised: The Invisibility of Women’s Homelessness’, Parity, vol. 23, no. 6, pp.24–25.
5. Robinson C and Searby, R 2005 Accommodation in Crisis Forgotten Women in Western Sydney, University of Technology Sydney Shopfront Monograph Series No. 1, p. 18 <https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/ bitstream/10453/5744/1/2006005356.pdf> 6. Wood L and Birrell C 2017, ‘Now it’s my time’’: of being an expert in one’s own life’, Parity, vol. 30, no. 9, Nov 2017: 111–112
Image provided by The Mission Australia Centre’s artwork program
Chapter 3: Housing Issues and Solutions
Innovation is the Key to Responding to Older Women’s Homelessness Leah Dwyer, Senior Adviser, Policy and Engagement, YWCA Canberra
YWCA Canberra has a long history of providing housing solutions to women and their children in the ACT. Our mission is to strengthen communities by supporting girls and women through our services and advocacy and in this contribution we highlight how we achieve this through our innovative housing solutions that assist older women who are experiencing housing stress or homelessness. Innovation has always been at the heart of YWCA Canberra’s work. For nearly 80 years, we have provided housing and housing support services to women in the region that are safe, trauma-informed and inclusive. Along with our partners in the sector, we have been advocates for evolving housing responses that meet the unique needs of older women who are in housing crisis, and community awareness of homelessness among older women is gaining momentum. YWCA Canberra shared our experiences in documenting the stories of older women through our mini-documentary, Hidden Women, in the November 2018 edition of Parity. Hidden Women highlighted how a lifetime of wage inequality and unequal distribution of labour left women facing a perilous retirement. The consequences of short-sighted and gender-blind policies of the past are now catching up with the generations of women who lived through them. The women in Hidden Women found a home in one of our purpose-built share homes for older women, but the need remains. Specialist Homelessness Services data from 2018–19 shows that 139 women in Canberra who presented for assistance in the year had no shelter; they were sleeping in cars or improvised dwellings. Nearly 500 more were in insecure
tenure arrangements. Responding to this demand underpins our front-line work in the Canberra community. In this article, we share three housing solutions to meeting the needs of this cohort by lifting the supply of affordable and quality housing for older women experiencing housing insecurity.
Next Door
It took a pandemic for shelter to be recognised as a fundamental component of public wellbeing. And for many older women, the pandemic brought to the surface the insecure nature of their own tenancies: women who were sleeping on the couches of friends were suddenly unwelcomed, women living with violence were confined with their abusers, women who were already in financial stress were more vulnerable than ever. During the period of the Canberra lockdown and in the weeks following, our community services experienced a 170 per cent increase in inquiries relating to housing support. Next Door is our specialist housing service targeted to older women who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Support is tailored to the woman’s individual situation and can include finding a home or temporary accommodation, help with maintaining an existing tenancy or support to access services to live the life they choose. Funded by an ACT Government grant, initial expectations were for Next Door to help up to 15 women, however, in just over a year the service has assisted 85 women into new homes or to maintain their existing tenancies. Clients are referred to us through Canberra’s housing connections and information service ‘OneLink’. The client base
is diverse, with 50 per cent being culturally or linguistically diverse. Five women were also assisted into transitional housing through a targeted Covid‑19 program, including women who had been housesitting, uninterrupted, for several years until the pandemic forced holidaymakers to return. These stories highlight the latent nature of the housing crisis among older women and praise the client-centred approach taken by programs like Next Door.
Rentwell
Like most metropolitan centres, Canberra has a chronic shortage of affordable rentals and a vacancy rate that frequently drifts to under one per cent. The image of Canberra as an affluent city isolates those who find their modest incomes insufficient when competing for property in a city of public service wages. The demographics of those looking for private rentals is evolving; inspections buzz with families, single parents, students and older people looking for a convenient and safe place to rent. The shortage of affordable rentals, growing population and competition between applicants leads to a substantial demand for affordable private rentals. Enter Rentwell. Launched in May 2019, Rentwell is our charitable property management service targeted for individuals and families on modest incomes. Rentwell invites property investors to lease their properties through us at less than 75 per cent market rent. The scheme is incentivised by a land tax exemption from the ACT Government provided investors lease their property through a community housing provider. As a community housing provider, YWCA Canberra was also exempted from the Agent’s Act (2003) which
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precluded us from needing to obtain a real estate licence to deliver Rentwell. Under the model, philanthropically inclined investors sign a head lease with YWCA Canberra and we identify suitable tenants and sub-lease the property at below 75 per cent market rate. As a registered charity, investors are also provided with a tax-deductible gift receipt meaning foregone rent (the difference between the market rate and the leased rate) is considered a taxable donation. To date, Rentwell has leased 31 properties to nearly 60 people, including young families and people living with disability, and reconnected them to a community all while paying rent they can afford. More properties are in the pipeline, soon to be available.
Y-Homes
Our work with both Next Door and Rentwell demonstrate that most of our tenants are tertiary qualified, retired public servants who cannot access the
mainstream rental market. Provided with the right mix of community and rent that is affordable, they can make excellent neighbours. Y-Homes is our newest and most ambitious venture to deliver on our mission. Unlike both Rentwell and Next Door, however, Y-Homes begins with a block of land purchased by the YWCA Canberra in 1992 and it requires planning, consultation, and a build. Since purchasing the site it has been used by YWCA Canberra to deliver early childhood and youth services as well as a suite of community activities. As with other metropolitan centres, however, there is a pressing need for quality housing in the inner suburbs for older women and single-parent families who require convenient access to community amenities and services. Zoning for the block permits supported housing that will benefit the community and as a specialist women’s service with a strong history of delivering services for Canberra
women, we see Y-Homes as a natural continuation of our work. Our proposal is for ten, single-story supportive dwellings which will blend studio and two-bedroom units catering for women aged 55 years and older and women with children on modest incomes. In designing the build, we consulted with the women in our shared homes, some of whom featured in Hidden Women, to ensure the build would be in-step with what older women wanted in a home. A private courtyard, space for a small car and a communal outdoor space for those residents who want the company of their neighbours have all been incorporated in the design. We anticipate development for this project to commence in 2021 and for suitable tenants to be housed by 2022 and the YWCA Canberra will maintain ownership over the site into the future. We are focused on being good neighbours and providing accurate information. While feedback has been mixed it remains overwhelmingly positive and we are looking forward to contributing to a healthy and vibrant neighbourhood community. YWCA Canberra’s housing portfolio is a dynamic mix that blends community housing, purpose built share homes, affordable private rentals and client centred responses that cater for individual need. Our work sees us collaborate with community housing providers as well as the ACT Government and our client base is broad from young single mothers balancing work and parenting to older women who cherish the social networks afforded by our share home facilities.
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Photo supplied by Wintringham
We have found that innovative housing models, that embrace both a diversity of options and client inclusion, shirking a one-size-fits‑all approach, are key to meeting the needs of Canberra’s homeless. We have a longstanding and trusted reputation as a provider of quality accommodation for Canberra women in all stages of life. We have seen the population of this planned city diversify and transition and today, with a growing and aging population and of course a limited land supply, the time for governments and community to be ambitious and innovative in housing is now.
Older Women on the Edge: Struggling in the Private Rental Sector Emma Power; School of Social Sciences and Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Older women who live in the private rental sector in Australia are at high risk of homelessness, struggling in housing that is increasingly unaffordable and insecure. Many report living in sub-standard housing and having insufficient money left over from rent to be confident that they can afford sufficient food or pay their energy bills. In their recent research Lister and Faulkner find that older women who rent have more than two times the risk of homelessness compared to those with a mortgage.1 Unaffordable rents and evictions are two key factors that drive first time homelessness in later life.2 These housing struggles are underpinned by gendered risks including differences in pay and superannuation across the life‑course. They are also a product of a housing system that fails to provide housing for the lowest income groups, and are compounded by income support payments that have failed to keep up with the rising cost of housing in Australia.
Rental Affordability
Many low income renters struggle with housing affordability. The Productivity Commission’s report on Vulnerable Private Renters 3 found that two thirds of households in the bottom of 40 per cent of incomes spend almost 40 of their income on rent. The bottom 20 per cent, mostly income support recipients, spend even more. This is well above the affordability quotient of 30 per cent. In my research, single older women (aged 55 and over) living on the low incomes in the private rental sector explained that high and rising rents left them struggling to meet essential day-to-day costs.4 Most reported that they would pay their rent before buying food or paying other costs
because failure to do so would result in eviction. As Lily explains: The rent has to come out first. Yes, where a lot of people don’t have paying rent as their first priority. But to me, that’s my security. If I’ve paid my rent, well I know that for the next fortnight, I’m fine. Yeah. But I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get older. After paying rent many had little budget left to afford food or other essential costs. They described stretching budgets through buying cheaper packaged foods and avoiding social activities with friends. Some women relied on local charities like churches and neighbourhood centres that opened weekly food pantries in order to make ends meet. For example, Tracey lived in a house that leaked. The landlord took two years to repair the leak, during which time Tracey lost access to approximately 40 per cent of her property. When the leak was repaired her rent went up, leaving her with only $30 per week after rent and other essential costs were covered. She described her efforts to survive at this time as being ‘like my job’. She explained that she relied on one local charity where she could get a monthly food voucher and another that opened a weekly food pantry. Another woman, Toni, had a lowpaid contract during school terms and received JobSeeker (or what was then Newstart) over the break. She managed by buying vegetables that the local greengrocer bundled and discounted before throwing out. But during winter when she had extra heating costs, and over summer when she could not get work, she attended a local church
that opened a weekly food pantry. This food, which was donated by local supermarkets and community members, was frequently past its ‘best before’ date. As a low paid community worker living in an area with a significant number of disadvantaged families, she described to me how she collected food alongside her clients. These examples speak to a broader experience and are why the Productivity Commission in 2019 5 described the private rental system in Australia as a ‘driver of disadvantage for low income households.’
Rental Security
Older women are also struggling in a rental sector that is notoriously insecure. In most states the average fixed-term lease is six to 12 months. For older people hoping to age in place, to make a home, connect with their local community, access local services, keep a familiar GP or dentist, rental insecurity can lead to feelings of personal insecurity. Women in my research identified the high financial costs of moving house. These costs include bond, which is typically four weeks rent paid in advance to secure the new property, two weeks of rent paid in advance, disconnection and reconnection of utilities, and the cost of removalists or van hire to execute the move. For many these costs caused financial stress. Women emphasised that they needed to save continually so that they were prepared if they received an unexpected eviction notice. Some took out loans from friends, family and Centrelink to cover the costs, placing them at further financial risk. Moving house is also emotionally and physically taxing. Many women described having to downsize their furniture and get rid of
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important possessions so that they could better manage and minimise the costs of moving house. Women described giving away, selling and leaving furniture and other important items on the street for others to collect. That was pretty hard because I used to do up old furniture. So it became a matter of priorities what you’re going to need the most is what you keep. I think probably it would be the same situation as somebody whose house caught fire or who’d had a flood, only you don’t get a choice. Stuff just goes. That’s what this felt like. There’s no choice. You can’t take it, you can only take a few things, a certain amount. — Michelle You’ve got no choice. You’re parting with things that – well, everything you’ve got together are part of your belongings and part of who you are and who you’ve established yourself to be. I don’t want to sound like everything revolves around what you own and everything, but it’s part of your home. And what – you’ve got to be comfortable in your surroundings. — Jenny I didn’t want to get rid of some of the furniture. It sounds silly but one belonged to my grandparents
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but I went, ‘I can’t put it anywhere’. Yeah, it is, it’s a tough thing. — Kerry As Michelle, Jenny and Kerry explain, this loss of valued possessions had an emotional toll. The ideal home is a place where we feel a sense of belonging and connection, it is a base within which we establish a sense of identity and self. Getting rid of treasured possessions can erode this sense of home, making it more difficult to feel secure and to achieve a sense of home in a new house. For some women this leads to feelings of homelessness even while they remain housed.
What Next?
The solutions to these problems are clear and well known. With the private market failing to provide housing that is affordable to the lowest income groups there is a need for direct government investment in social housing. Low income households that live in social housing have better wellbeing outcomes and they are better able to meet essential needs. They also feel more secure and have greater capacity to plan for the future. For older renters this is critical. Secure housing not only supports wellbeing; it brings the capacity to age in place. In the shorter term there are simple solutions like permanently raising the JobSeeker rate and an
immediate rise in Commonwealth Rent Assistance. These payments are critical to many low income Australians and particularly older women: 56 per cent of women who receive JobSeeker are aged 45 years and over.6 With a will to address the housing risks that older women face it is possible to quickly diminish the growing numbers of women who find themselves not only in housing stress, but at risk of homelessness. Endnotes 1. Lister L and Faulkner D 2020, At Risk: Understanding the population size and demographics of older women at risk of homelessness in Australia, Social Ventures Australia. https://www. oldertenants.org.au/sites/default/ files/at_risk_final_report_web.pdf. 2. Petersen M and Parsell C 2015, Homeless for the First Time in Later Life: An Australian Study, Housing Studies, vol.30, no. 3, pp.368–391.
3. Productivity Commission 2019, Vulnerable Private Renters: Evidence and Options, Productivity Commission Canberra. https:// www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/renters. 4. Power ER 2020, Older women in the private rental sector: unaffordable, substandard and insecure housing, Western Sydney University. https:// doi.org/10.26183/5edf0f0d75cf8.
5. Productivity Commission 2019, Vulnerable Private Renters: Evidence and Options, Productivity Commission, Canberra. https:// www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/renters. 6. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_ Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/ Parliamentary_Budget_Office/Publications/ Research_reports/JobSeeker_Payment
Photo supplied by Wintringham
Keeping the Roof Over Her Head: Precarious and Lost Homeownership Among Older, Single Women Frances Every, Organising Committee; National Alliance of Seniors for Housing and Leonie Bessant, Coordinator, National Alliance of Seniors for Housing, Housing for the Aged Action Group Introduction
Older woman’s home owing status in Australia has been inextricably linked to partnering with a male because historically, single women were denied home loans.1 A critical life event such as illness, unemployment or loss of partner (and subsequent severance from male privilege) can have enduring consequences for housing security.2 Women on average are paid 17 per cent less than men throughout their life course and have half the superannuation and savings on retirement, with 55 per cent of women 60 years and older having no superannuation at all.3 Casualisation, interrupted workforce participation and unpaid domestic and caring labour mean that women have less diverse assets and greater financial risk in later years.4 Family violence is the leading cause of homelessness in women of all ages.5 Associated financial abuse has multiple impacts including damaged credit ratings and loss of the family home. Older women also have greater barriers to sustaining employment due to age and sex discrimination, and greater pressure to financially support adult children.6 There is moreover an emerging cohort of housing insecure older women who are tertiary educated, have conventional employment and housing careers and are former homeowners, challenging the stereotypical view of homeless and at-risk older people as a high needs group already engaged with support services.7 Unemployment in older, single women is a major factor in housing stress, with current unemployment benefits up to $190 per week below the poverty line.8 In 2001, women over 50 comprised five per cent of Newstart recipients compared to 20 per cent in 2019, with a
third of women over 55 on the payment for over five years, an increase of 13 per cent since 2009.9 Women below pension age are frequently trapped in a punishing ‘seeking work’ compliance system that fails to recognise employment barriers such as jobs shortages, locational disadvantage, family violence, sex and age discrimination, and poor health.10 Tightening of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) eligibility requirements has left many women in a no‑man’s‑land of being too sick to work, too young for the aged pension and not sick enough to meet DSP eligibility.11 This article explores two little understood facets of older women’s housing distress, precarious home ownership and lost homeownership which are both associated with vulnerability to homelessness and poverty.
Lost Home Ownership
While 28 per cent of Australians currently renting had previously owned a home, for older single women the figure has been found to be as high as 66 per cent.12 When couples separate, men are better resourced to pay out their ex-partner however disbursements are often insufficient for women to reenter the property market.13 Women retaining the family home are also more likely to be forced to sell in adverse circumstances.14 Many flee the family home to escape family violence while male perpetrators remain, and after settlement may receive limited or no payouts.15 Sex‑based power imbalances and financial abuse contribute to women falling out of homeownership. Historically, women have been disempowered through exclusion from financial decision making. This subjugation can have severe
impacts on women’s housing when it intersects with financial abuse by male partners and/or male relatives.16
Case study 1 Emma, 61 years
Emma is a mother of two children and an educated professional employed in the health sector. Over decades she had contributed her wage to a shared mortgage and had trusted her husband to manage the family finances. Because ‘male as household head’ was part of her cultural and ideological schema, she had never questioned him. Her husband unfortunately had channelled the majority of their equity into exploitative criminal activities leading to loss of the family home. Emma and her children were forced to find a rental property and set up house, a difficult task because her husband had drained their joint bank accounts. She now struggles as a sole parent to pay rent and cover living expenses. She has limited super due to interrupted labour engagement, while her husband was able to use his super to purchase another home and hire a lawyer to defend his financial assets. The trauma of betrayal plus her beliefs about marital obligation and right behaviour prevented Emma from pursuing her own legal, financial claims. Her mental and physical health has deteriorated, but she has no choice other than to continue working full time, and, with no savings or assets, she faces a lifetime of renting. Emma’s story illustrates the vulnerability of women to financial abuse within intimate relationships due to their normative, cultural exclusion from financial decision making. Emma also typically retained responsibility for children, giving her additional financial pressure. This case study demonstrates that tandem
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factors of financial disempowerment and abuse are strong risk indicators in homeownership loss for older women. For Emma the enmeshed financial, psychological and emotional abuse experienced is likely to have lifelong detrimental effect on her wellbeing and financial and housing security.17 Higher education and hard work have not provided lasting security for Emma, demonstrating the effects of ongoing, gender based economic disadvantage, and the financial vulnerability of women when separated from male privilege.18
Precarious Home Ownership
In 2015, 28 per cent of Australians over 55 years were still paying off a mortgage, double the figure compared to 1987.19 Single, older female homeowners may experience higher levels of psychological distress and ill health when experiencing
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financial pressure.20 Divorced women, particularly with children, are more likely to experience mortgage stress, with 60 per cent of women compared to 49 per cent of men, experiencing post-divorce financial hardship.21 The high costs of home ownership can also be financially crippling, with a home ultimately becoming a liability for older women with no other assets.22
Case Study 2 Torey, 64 years
Torey divorced when her three children were small and managed with her payout from the family home to buy an old country town hall, mortgage free. This enabled her to obtain a line of credit mortgage to fit the hall out as a dwelling. ‘I wouldn’t have got the mortgage without the equity from
the hall’. Torey juggled irregular earnings from her IT consultancy and local jobs, with judicious use of the line of credit. Torey had a chronic illness but in 2008 she became acutely unwell and was incapacitated for four years during which she lost her difficult‑to‑find job. Upon recovering from her illness, Torey was taken off sickness benefits and put on the dole. In a rural area of high unemployment, she was forced to apply for countless jobs which inhibited her re-establishing her IT work. Having to: ‘impose myself upon business who weren’t looking for workers, or when they had 200/300 looking for one job. When they know they don’t what you, too old, you feel rejected. I got depressed’.
Photo by Annie Cabrié
Due to Torey’s illness the credit had maxed out; $2,000 of emergency plumbing repairs, a leaking roof, rates. She could never afford insurance. Then at 56 years old, lured by the mining boom Torey went to Gladstone. While camping there in the wet season looking for work Centrelink told her they deemed her home an asset and she was off the dole. She was forced to return home. Torey then rented her house and worked as a security guard in Canberra. She clawed back her line of credit debt, but her tenants defaulted on the rent and damaged the property, leaving her $6,000 worse off. Back home again at the age of 60 she managed to stay afloat by getting a house mate and working 12-hour security night shifts in a nearby resort town. Torey has now, thanks to Covid, casual fulltime online work and has managed to drive down the mortgage again. She has no superannuation and the house absorbs all her Centrelink income. ‘The house is my other half. I never buy new anything or eat out. I give my adult son $100 each week if I can. But the leaking roof! Fuck, now what do I do? Start all over again. Start to think about selling’. Torey’s experience highlights the fragile nature of homeownership for older, welfare dependent women with episodic or no employment and a mortgage. Factors include the ongoing support of children, interrupted labour engagement due to ill-health and having no superannuation, savings or assets other than the family home.23 Additionally, welfare and fiscal policy do not support women like Torey to sustain homeownership, nor does it recognise or respond to the structural, sex-based inequality that underlie housing insecurity for this cohort.24 In Torey’s case, welfare policy concerning homeownership has created disadvantage and increased her susceptibility to homelessness, that is, the dearth of local employment forced her to relocate which lead to her being penalised by Centrelink. The psychological cost of constant financial pressure moreover, even for resourceful women such as Torey, takes a heavy toll on physical and psychological wellbeing.25
Conclusion
This article has discussed sex‑based inequity and its relationship to housing insecurity for older single, women. The male breadwinning, nuclear family norm that characterised Australia’s peak period of homeownership has long passed, yet it continues to exert great influence on policy direction.26 Older female homeowners are highly vulnerable when separated from male financial privilege because they have limited savings and superannuation and often, the ongoing responsibility for adult children. The above case studies of professional, working women and housing insecurity highlight emergent themes around financial abuse, female subjugation and financial disempowerment. Torey was only able to achieve a home by pursuing an innovative strategy to circumvent her inability to borrow for outright purchase, while due to family violence, Emma was unable able to re-enter the housing market. Both studies demonstrate the fragility of homeownership for women on low and insecure incomes and challenge market liberal assumptions that hard work and education will enable one to ‘get ahead’ and ultimately move into secure home ownership. It would be far better that government recognise and address older women’s barriers to attaining secure homeownership. Endnotes 1. Darab S and Hartman Y, 2013, Understanding single older women’s invisibility in housing issues in Australia housing, Theory and Society, vol.30, no.4, pp.348–367.
2. Bessant L, 2019, Narrating first time housing distress in older Australian women, Unpublished thesis, Victoria University, Melbourne, Reynolds F, 2018, Retiring Into Poverty: A National Plan For Change: Increasing Housing Security for Older Women, National Older Women’s Housing and Homelessness Working Group, Victoria.
3. Bessant 2019, op cit, Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, Older women’s Risk of homelessness: Background paper, Sydney; McFerran L 2008, The disappearing age: A strategy to address violence against older women, Older Women’s Network NSW Inc https://ownnsw.org.au/wp-content/ uploads/2019/10/TheDisappearingAge.pdf 4. Ong R, Wood G, Cigdem-Bayram M and Salazar S 2019, Mortgage stress and precarious home ownership: implications for older Australians, AHURI Final Report No. 319, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne; Austin S 2017, ‘Women rely on the family home to support them in old age’, The
Conversation, https://theconversation. com/women-rely-on-the-family-home-tosupport-them-in-old-age-76703; Sharam A 2017, The Voices of Midlife Women Facing Housing Insecurity, Social Policy and Society, vol.16, no.1, pp.49–63
5. Reynolds 2018, op cit, Sharam A 2008, Report; Going it alone: Single, low needs women and hidden homelessness, Women’s Information Support and Housing in the North, Brunswick. 6. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit; Bessant 2019, op cit, Sharam 2017, op cit.
7. Bessant 2019, op cit.; Petersen M and Parsell C, 2014, Older women’s pathways out of homelessness in Australia, Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland https://www.mercyfoundation. com.au; Sharam 2017, op cit.
8. Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and UNSW 2020, Poverty in Australia 2020. http://povertyandinequality. acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ Poverty-in-Australia-2020_Part1_Overview.pdf & UNSW 9. Henriques-Gomes L 2020, Discarded: the Australian women over 50 left to languish in poverty, The Guardian, https:// www.theguardian.com/business/2020/ oct/10/discarded-the-australian-womenover-50-left-to-languish-in-poverty 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid.
12. Bessant 2019, op cit.; National Shelter 2018, The consumer experience of renting in Australia, https://tenantsqld. org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ Disrupted: -2018-Report-by-CHOICENational-Shelter-and-NATO-1.pdf 13. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit. 14. Ong et al 2019, op cit. 15. Bessant 2019, op cit.
16. Bessant 2019, op cit.; Australian Human Rights Commission 2019 op cit. 17. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019 op cit. 18. Bessant 2019, op cit.
19. Ong et al 2019, op cit.
20. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit, Ong et al 2019, op cit.
21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, The Long Lasting Financial Impacts of Divorce for Women (8 July 2009). At https://aifs.gov.au/media-releases/longlasting-financial-impacts-divorce-women; Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit.; Ong et al 2019 op cit.
22. Gregory K 2018, The financial impact of divorce lingers for decades, but are men or women bearing the brunt? ABC News, https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2018-07-26/divorce-financial-impactaffecting-older-women/10037520 23. ACOSS and UNSW 2020, op cit.
24. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit, Henriques-Gomes 2020, op cit, Ong et al 2019, op cit.
25. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, op cit.
26. Colic-Peisker V and Johnson G 2012, Liquid life, solid homes: Young people, class and homeownership in Australia, Sociology, vol.46, no.4, pp.728–743.
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Bleak House in Paradise
Leonie Bessant, National Alliance of Seniors for Housing (NASH) Co-ordinator, Housing for the Aged Action Group
Airbnb 1 has changed the global rental scene, by increasing prices and removing properties from longterm rental. In Australia, there was an estimated 346,581 Airbnb listings between 2016 and 2019.2 Areas such as coastal New South Wales (NSW), Southern Queensland and Tasmania that attract tourism but also have large permanent renting populations are experiencing housing pressure as a result.3 The Northern Rivers (Northern Rivers) region of NSW, that nudges Southern Queensland and includes seven local government areas (LGA), is one such place. Northern Rivers has a large older population: Twenty‑three per cent are 65 years and older compared to the NSW average of 16 per cent, with a predicted increase in the aged population of 36 per cent by 2036. In 2016, Northern Rivers households had a third less income than the NSW average, including a high proportion of very low-income households (below $650 per week). However, property prices can be as expensive for purchasers and renters as inner Sydney prices.4 Northern Rivers is also a hotspot for storms and floods which are increasing in frequency and severity, causing extreme housing disruptions.5 Additionally, Northern Rivers is well known for a range of illegal dwellings, additions, sub‑divisions, and converted garages,6 with illegal conversions under houses being euphemistically called ‘studios’ where tenants often cannot claim government rent allowance as landlords will not declare the income or the dwelling. People have moved to Northern Rivers seeking alternative lifestyles since the days of the Nimbin Aquarius Festival in 1973. Fifty years on, many of those
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attracted to this idyllic part of Australia, and many born and working there, find themselves no longer able to afford rents in the ever-diminishing pool of long-term rentals. Up to 67 per cent of renting households experience rental stress, with few social housing options. Only 3.3 per cent of the total housing stock is social housing, compared to 4.9 per cent for NSW.7 In a recent Byron LGA study, 42 per cent of participants who rented had recently been asked to leave, with 64 per cent of these reporting that their rental property was about to be listed on Airbnb.8 Even a local estate agent, says, ‘Airbnb should be banned up here, the cost of living is insane. I’ve lived in all sorts of places here, and it’s not uncommon to pay at least 50 per cent of your wage in rent.’ 9 Older single women living on government payments are highly vulnerable in this housing environment. ‘Home’ can become a house share, a ‘studio’, staying with relatives, couch surfing, house sitting, dog sitting, living in sheds, camping, living out of cars and vans, and endlessly moving on. ‘Home’ can be hazardous and unhealthy, have no tenancy, no privacy or personal control. ‘Home’, rather than a refuge, becomes a wellspring of deep and ongoing insecurity and stress. To stay in their communities, many constantly move and downgrade until they are technically or unambiguously homeless. Here are three snippets from the lives of older women which illustrate many of the housing issues in Northern Rivers.
Hanna*
Hanna (66 years old) came back to her hometown in early 2018. ‘I came back to do a dog sit. The owner went away for a month to India. He put me
under the house, it was a makeshift studio, but the kitchen was functional, it was nice. The weather was warm, and I thought I’ll give it one last chance to see if I can find something affordable, accommodation, because this is my heart home. I’d even tried (a depressed and low SES inland Queensland town) last year for three months, but nupp.’ Hanna, as a single aged pensioner, considered living in an economically depressed outback town purely because it provided some of the last ‘affordable’ rent left in Australia.10 After three months, she preferred short-term dog sitting and ‘roofed’ homelessness to be back in her own community.
Enid*
Enid (70 years old): ‘I changed dwellings six times in six years because it’s so expensive, every time I just came to the point, I’m going to have to get something cheaper... I’m going to have to get something cheaper. It is exhausting. You can never claim rent allowance in the studios, so I have a cheap mobile phone that I tell Centrelink is my landlords. They have never rung’. Enid is now in a lovely but too expensive studio. To make the rent on her pension she lives very frugally and cannot afford to socialise. She has no tenancy and still has her special mobile phone.
Denise*
Denise (67 years old) came back to her hometown to help her homeless son, but the rental environment had changed since she last lived there four years earlier. ‘The price of rentals is off the charts and I blame Airbnb unequivocally. It was ridiculous that my son and his partner were living in cars and tents with their baby, in their own hometown’. Upon her return, the 2017 floods hit. ‘We couldn’t get the government help because we were homeless, you know, they were
giving out money, $1,000, but no fixed address, so we were [couch] surfing and camping and sleeping in cars. How many places have we had? ‘After the flood the community spirit lasted a month or so, people doubled their rents, me and the kids were in a shed for six months, $600 a week… water keep coming up through the ground because it was illegal. Now we’re underneath a house. Now we’re all in together in one‑and‑a‑half-bedroom studio with my son and his partner and my two grandkids. Between being with the kids I sleep in my car just to get a rest. Because I’m pretty exhausted. I can’t do it, too old for this shit. So, I just kind of stay in the background have no space, no life, to read or play music or anything and just engage with my granddaughter. I am virtually like a ghost.’ At the beginning of the Covid pandemic many Airbnb hosts pulled out to find cheaper long-term tenants or offered ‘14-day isolation suites’. There was hope that this would result in cheaper and more
supply of long-term rent for locals in Northern Rivers.11 However, since Covid restrictions have eased, there has been a strong resurgence of demand, driven by overseas travel bans and people avoiding hotels due to virus concerns. By July, demand for holiday rentals in the Byron Shire was up 150 per cent, occupancy was reaching pre-Covid levels, and prices for holiday rentals across Australia had increased by 60 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic.12 * pseudonyms Endnotes 1. Airbnb is an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent out their homes with people who are looking for short-term/holiday accommodations in that locale.
2. Watson M April 6th 2020, ‘Disrupting the disruptors: how Covid‑19 will shake up Airbnb’. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2020/ apr/06/disrupting-the-disruptors-howCovid‑19-will-shake-up-airbnb
3. Anglicare Australia 2018, Rental affordability snapshot 2018. Canberra: Anglicare Australia. http://www.anglicare.asn.au/docs/ default-source/default-document-library/ final---rental- affordability-snapshotb811d93 09d6962baacc1ff0000899bca.pdf?sfvrsn=4
4. Gilmour T 2018, Housing Needs Northern Rivers Housing Study. North Coast Community Housing. http://www.ncch. org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ NCCH-regional-housing-study-2018.pdf 5. University Centre for Rural Health 2017, After the flood. https:// ucrh.edu.au/after-the-flood/
6. Shand A 2020, Exploring the risks of illegal dwellings. Echo. https://www. echo.net.au/2020/09/exploringthe-risks-of-illegal-dwellings/ 7. Northern Rivers Regional Affordable Housing Strategy 2012, Clarence Valley Council.
8. Che D, Muschter S, Von der Heidt T and Caldicott R 2019), Airbnb in the Byron Shire — Bane or Blessing? An investigation into the nature and range of impacts of Airbnb on a local community. Southern Cross University School of Business and Tourism (SBAT) Tourism Research Cluster Project. https://www.scu.edu.au/media/ scueduau/news/images/Airbnb_Byron_ Community_Report-March-2019.pdf
9. Watson M April 6th 2020, op cit. 10. Anglicare Australia 2018, op cit.
11. Watson M April 6th 2020, op cit.
12. Kelly M(July 9th 2020, Special Report — short-term rentals bounce back, Byron Bay leads the way. Travel Trends. https://www. traveltrends.biz/ttn55-Special+Report+ -+decimated %2C+smashed+ and+challenged+during+the+Covid+crisis %2C+short+term+rentals+bounce+back %2C+Byron+Bay+leads+the+way
A powerful anthology of writing from people who have known homelessness. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to charities that work with people experiencing homelessness.
out now 20200128_WeAreHere_HorizontalPoster.indd 1
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29/1/20 10:31 am
It’s Time for Community Aged Care to Raise its Game Dr Victoria Cornell, Housing Research Manager, ECH
The 2016 Census found that one in six Australians are now over 65 years, compared to one in seven in 2011, and only one in 25 in 1911. Women are living longer than men — of those aged 65 years or older, 54 per cent are women and 46 per cent are men. Of those aged 85 years and older, 63 per cent are women and 37 per cent are men.1 Housing is fundamental to older people’s well-being, older people wish to remain in their own homes as they age,2, 3 and there is general consensus that ageing-in-place and being able to receive services in the same setting as physical and social needs change are critical for healthy and productive ageing.4, 5 Successful delivery of inhome care to older persons is premised on the fact that older people’s housing is stable and suitable. Yet, a growing number of older Australians are living in precarious housing and are at risk of homelessness or homeless, which leads to housing stress — both emotional and financial.6 While the numbers of older Australians experiencing housing stress are lower compared to other age groups, there is evidence that this population is increasingly experiencing housing affordability challenges.7, 8 Reductions in public housing stock numbers, cuts in funding for public housing and devolution of former public housing into the community housing sector are all having an impact.9
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Yes, the Commonwealth Government provides renters access to Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) payments, however, the rate of CRA is falling behind the rising cost of housing. The raw numbers of housing options for older people may be rising, for example within retirement villages, but many of the options are marketed on a full cost-recovery basis, requiring considerable entry capital. Better located retirement housing is unaffordable for all but the relatively wealthy, and the reality is that older renters are likely to be living — and probably struggling — in the private rental market.
Fluro Fun, 2016 by Dorothy Lipmann
The provision of affordable purpose‑built housing for older people is often not attractive for either housing development or the aged care sectors, given high land and infrastructure costs in appropriately located, accessible settings. Affordable housing options are frequently located on urban fringes, which then bring associated problems, such as lack of supporting infrastructure. The chances of finding suitable, affordable, accessible housing on a long tenancy, and/or finding a landlord who is willing to have modifications made, in a convenient location, are next to none. Older people on a fixed income are ‘particularly affected by the level at which rents are set and the costs of utilities, maintenance or the modifications that are necessary’ 10 especially when those modifications (if permitted) result in an increase in rent and/ or the requirement to ‘make good’ upon leaving the property. This is certainly the case in Australia, where the retirement income system assumes that people will own their own homes on retirement, with lower pension rates reflecting lower housing costs (in older age), based on the high level of home ownership. The backdrop of this evolution is the disconnect between housing and other social welfare policies, which has led to an inadequate response to pensioners in the private
rental market.11 The most recent update from Anglicare Australia on their Rental Affordability Snapshot showed that ‘A person on the Age Pension can afford less than one per cent of rentals…’ 12 Given the higher numbers of older women than older men, this has clear implications for older women’s housing security and subsequent ability to age well in place. As final salary schemes come to an end, the pension being predicated on home ownership, as — by virtue of living longer — spending more time in ill health, many current and future retirees will be increasingly likely to live in poverty. These issues will be exacerbated for older women due to risks that accrue to women across the life course including gendered differences in pay and superannuation.13 The retirement living sector, which includes private for profit and not for profit housing providers for those aged 55 years and above must actively explore alternative housing options such as shared housing and co-housing, which can be made available at lower costs and via more financial avenues than currently exist. Such models of housing have also been highlighted by the Royal Commission’s Integrated Care paper, which recognised the intersection of housing and the ability to receive care, and the assumption that home care clients have stable and sustainable housing. This is supported by recent research funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) which found that older Australians who are currently in the private rental market aspire to a more stable and secure form of housing, and the likelihood of being able to access advice services, relief and subsidised rent decreased with increasing age.14 The AHURI research recommends a number of policy innovations that could deliver the housing and housing assistance required to meet the diverse aspirations of older Australians: Housing assistance to develop alternative home ownership options to improve security of tenure and facilitate ageing in place. This assistance could include financial products such as low deposit ownership products, for example
through shared ownership or through a land rent type scheme, that could help deliver the safety, security and control characteristics of home ownership sought by older Australians. The assistance could also take the form of further reform of the private rental sector to ensure professionally managed rental accommodation with longer term lease structures, and a replacement for the National Rental Affordability Scheme. Housing diversity that better matches new housing supply to the aspirations of older people, especially in the private rental sector. Properties need to be in locations that are well serviced by amenities, and designed with older Australians in mind, for example, easily adaptable when required. Additionally, the AHURI research suggested that shared housing options may be suitable for certain groups and offer a solution for many single people on very low incomes. Giving community housing tenants more agency and choice in the selection of their homes, and providing greater control during the process of being offered a home (rather than requiring, for example, a decision to move within 48 hours and then a move made in five days) allowing the opportunity to research the property, location or the neighbourhood. These recommendations do not come without issue, however, with challenges including economics and the preparedness of investors and housing providers to invest in these new types of venture without a change in government policy. Those challenges notwithstanding, innovation in housing provision and financing models for older people is starting to happen — but not quickly enough. An improved range of housing and financial products are needed now, that recognise not all older people have a home that they can feel safe and secure in, and that they believe will support them to age-in-place. This article, therefore, is a call to action to the retirement living sector. It’s time to raise your game, acknowledge the existing reality of housing conditions for some older people — especially older women — and seriously think about alternative ways of providing housing and care options to older
Australians, that cater to all aspirations and abilities for people as they age. Retirement villages can no longer be the preserve of those who can afford to ‘buy-in’, and there needs to be a far greater number of retirement living providers who offer secure and appropriate rental accommodation, that is of the same standard and size as the properties available for rent. Endnotes 1. ABS, https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ abs@.nsf/mf/2024.0, accessed 17.09.2020 2. Connolly S 2012, Housing tenure and older people, Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, vol. 22, pp.286–292.
3. Lux M, Sunega P 2014, The impact of housing tenure in supporting ageing in place: Exploring the links between housing systems and housing options for the elderly, International Journal of Housing Policy, vol.14, pp.30–55.
4. Mollica R 2003, Coordinating services across the continuum of health, housing, and supportive services, Journal of Aging and Health, vol.15, pp.165–188.
5. Morris A 2011, Older renters in the private rental market: Issues and possible solutions, Parity, vol.24, pp.17–18.
6. Morris A 2016, The Australian Dream: Housing Experiences of Older Australians, The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Melbourne. 7. Colic-Peisker V, Ong R, Wood G 2015, Asset poverty, precarious housing and ontological security in older age: An Australian case study, International Journal of Housing Policy, vol.15, pp.167–186. 8. Anglicare Australia 2017, Anglicare Australia Rental Affordability Snapshot, Anglicare Australia, Canberra.
9. Committee for Economic Development 2015, Living Income- and Asset-Poor in Retirement, in the Committee for Economic Development (CEDA) ‘The Super Challenge of Retirement Policy’, The Committee for Economic Development, Melbourne, [Cited 2 June 17.] Available from: http:// adminpanel.ceda.com.au/FOLDERS/ Service/Files/Documents/27922~CEDA TheSuperChallengeofRetirement IncomePolicySept2015FINAL.pdf 10. World Health Organization 2015, World Report on Ageing and Health, World Health Organization, Geneva.
11. Milligan V, Pawson H, Randolph B, Yates J 2014, Submission to the Senate Economic References Committee Inquiry on Affordable Housing, Parliament of Australia, Canberra. 12. Anglicare Australia: Rental Affordability Snapshot, Special update August 2020. 13. Power E 2020, Older women in the private rental sector: unaffordable, substandard and insecure housing. University of Western Sydney. https:// doi.org/10.26183/5edf0f0d75cf8.
14. James A, Rowley S, Stone W, Parkinson S, Spinney A and Reynolds M 2019, Older Australians and the housing aspirations gap, AHURI Final Report 317, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited, Melbourne, http://www.ahuri. edu.au/research/finalreports/317, doi: 10.18408/ahuri-8117301.
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Opinion 1
Fiona York
Executive Officer, Housing for the Aged Action Group, (HAAG)
More than any other age group, homelessness among older people has steadily increased over the last 20 years, with the largest growth being among older women aged 55 to 64 years, increasing 74 per cent between 2001 and 2016. Many older women who have managed to pay the rent for years working in low income jobs or balancing caring and work responsibilities are finding renting increasingly unaffordable. With little savings or superannuation, they are vulnerable to a rent increase and other life shocks and being locked out of the housing market. For culturally diverse older women, that may have anticipated living with their families as they age, there are very few affordable housing options if relationships with their adult children break down. These older women become the ‘hidden homeless’ relying on family and friends, couch surfing, house sitting or living in overcrowded or unsuitable accommodation in order to survive. The Covid‑19
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pandemic has starkly revealed the importance of housing to health. However, for many of the ‘hidden homeless’ their options dried up overnight and they were largely invisible to policymakers and in crisis homelessness responses.
The first is those with savings or assets of around $30,000 or less. These people are eligible for the Victorian Housing Register and our service assists over 100 older people a year into long‑term and affordable social housing.
Housing for the Aged Action Group’s Home at Last service in Victoria sees over 1,000 people every year who are aged 50 years and older, and 60 per cent are women. Over the last three years, we are seeing more women who are pre-pension age, struggling to survive on Newstart or Jobseeker. Through our national work, we have found a similar story in every state and territory in Australia, and our research shows there are 405,000 older women at risk of homelessness in this country right now.
For those with more than $30,000 but without significant property or savings fall into another category, which we call the ‘missing middle’. They are not wealthy enough to buy their own homes or fund places in a retirement village, but also not impoverished enough for social housing. This leaves them with radically fewer, weaker and less clear options than other cohorts, and most housing services simply will not assist them.
People who retire without owning their own home or other property fall into one of two other categories.
Woman outdoors, 2012 by Dorothy Lipmann
While this problem affects all kinds of older Victorians, it disproportionately affects women because of the gendered retirement savings gap. In 2015–16, the average superannuation balance at retirement was $292,510 for men, but only $138,154 for women. The median figure for men was $110,000, while for women it was just $36,000. This doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s indicative: women are more likely than men to fall into the ‘missing middle’ in retirement. Australia urgently needs a plan to address the rapidly growing population of older women at risk of and currently experiencing homelessness. We need investment in social and affordable housing and appropriate service responses so that older women can look forward to their future, secure in the knowledge that they have a home.
Opinion 2
Yumi Lee
Manager, Older Women’s Network NSW Inc
sleep in Central Station as she does not feel safe in boarding houses. She is about 70 and does not qualify for priority housing because she is not yet 80, the age which qualifies you if you are older in New South Wales. Her life trajectory is common. She had a good job, fell on hard times and found herself homeless. She was in the Navy, and has not been able to get support from veteran services either.
Why Driving on New Roads Will Not Help Homeless Older Women When Josh Frydenberg stood in the House of Representatives and proclaimed, ‘We have your backs’ during his Budget 2020 speech, we wondered whose backs he was referring to. It was certainly not the backs of older women. There was nothing in the budget to help change the status quo of increasing numbers of older women retiring into poverty. Older women are also the fastest growing cohort among the homeless.1 Although the Older Women’s Network NSW does not provide case management services, and not many know where it is based, a steady stream of homeless older women still turn up at our front door seeking help. It is always distressing because after hours spent on the phone trying to find them housing assistance, we can only say ‘sorry, there is nothing out there’. One of them, Mary, says she does not want crisis accommodation. She wants a real home. She is sick of moving from one crisis accommodation to another, and living with drug addicted teens who steal from her. She prefers to
We hear stories often of women who have given up their professional ambitions to care for their families, but who could not count on anyone when they grew older. Our previous Board chair was homeless but did not realise it until a social worker pointed it out to her. She was shuttling between her daughters’ homes, or ‘couch surfing’ as they put it. A single mother, she was a professional fundraiser who raised money for causes. What an irony it was to find that she became a cause herself when she retired. Her story is also indicative that the Census count in 2016, which found that there were 6,866 homeless older women, may not be accurate.2 The figure is likely to be many more as we know that there are older women who would not categorise themselves as homeless despite the reality of their living situation. The reasons why there is a rise in homeless older women (30 per cent increase between the 2011 and 2016 Census) are manifold but entirely predictable. The population of Australia is ageing. Over the 20-year period between 1999 and 2019, the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over increased from 12.3 per cent to 15.9 per cent. This group is projected to increase rapidly over the next decade, as further cohorts of baby boomers (those born between the years 1946 and 1964) turn 65.3 These are women
who were young at a time when they were not permitted into pubs, and had to stop work when they got married. In 1961, it was common for women to marry early, with the median age of 21 years for first brides. It was also common for women to have their first baby in their early 20s and the fertility rate was higher than today at 3.5 babies per woman.4 It was common therefore for women to spend years looking after children, and do more part-time than full-time work, resulting in lower savings. With compulsory superannuation only coming into effect in 1991, and with more women working part-time, they could not squirrel away enough for their retirement. An estimated 220,000 women miss out on $125 million of superannuation contributions as they do not meet the requirement of earning $450 per month (before tax) from one employer as many women work more than one part-time job.5 It is therefore unsurprising that women currently retire with 47 per cent less superannuation than men.6 44 per cent of women rely on their partners’ income as the main source of funds for retirement.7 Jane Caro noted that ‘women have been told that a man is not a financial plan, but … it seems that is a big fat lie’.8 Women are falling into poverty when their relationships break down, or if their husbands become ill and are no longer able to work. Their lack of savings and superannuation, together with dim prospects of gaining decent jobs, all place older women at greater risk of homelessness. There has been much written about gender discrimination which impacts on women’s take-home pay, and their ascension to the top tier of decision-making. The discrimination starts early, with research showing
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that girls get on average 27 per cent less pocket money than boys.9 Added to this disadvantage is the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of domestic and family violence. We know that domestic violence is the main cause of homelessness for women. It impacts women across their lifespan, not just younger women. Experience tells us that not many women are able to bounce back from such situations of adversity to earn sufficient income to fund their retirement. However, the number one reason why older women are retiring into poverty and homelessness is because the government has not put policies into place to prevent this from happening. We have a massive shortfall in public, social and affordable housing. It would take a build of 5,000 units per year in New South Wales alone over the coming 10 years to meet the demand.10 Unfortunately, the Federal Government has failed to grasp the opportunity to make the necessary investment in Budget 2020 which would have also stimulated the economy and created jobs. Knowing full well the impact of Covid‑19 on the economy and employment, the government chose to ignore the homeless. Instead, the Federal Government opted to slash $41.3 million from homelessness services from July 2021. Measures such as JobMaker which incentivizes employers to take on employees who are under 35 years old are not matched with initiatives to encourage the employment of older Australians. A 2019 study by the University of South Australia’s Centre for Workplace Excellence found that if you lose your job past the age of 50, you were in the hardest age bracket to find work.11 Although age discrimination is unlawful, a survey has found that about 30 per cent of workplaces are reluctant to hire older workers and of them, nearly 70 per cent indicate this age is 50 years and above.12 The latest outlook for employment is dire. Reports have emerged that it is not uncommon to find thousands of applicants for one job.13 With the chances of finding employment already so slim prior to the pandemic, and with Newstart pegged to return to $40 per day, older women will
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be in greater danger of becoming homeless. The pension is now only accessible to those aged 66 years, so older women are forced to live in poverty for over a decade if they are unable to find employment after they are 50. The pension rate is another challenge because it was conceived on the assumption that the pensioner owns their own home. With 65 per cent of those between 45 to 64 in the rental market renting for over 10 years; and 58 per cent of those over the age of 65 renting for 10 years and over, there are few prospects for them to gain a foothold in the property market for home ownership.14 There is now an attempt to shift blame onto women for their predicament. Women apparently lack ‘financial literacy’ with tests showing that they are ignorant of basic financial concepts such as inflation.15 This is ludicrous because women understand their finances very well. They know clearly what inflation means because they need to make the dollar stretch and they know practically how little the dollar buys from year to year. With the government allowing early withdrawal from superannuation of up to $20,000, instead of providing supplementary income support, future governments will have to fund these shortfalls in retirement benefits. Fourteen per cent of women have cleared out their entire super balance compared to 12 per cent of men.16 The conditions remain, and arguably have become worse, for the continuation of older women having to live in poverty, and for many to slide into homelessness. When government ministers claim that their economic measures consider women because ‘women can take advantage of driving on new infrastructure and roads’, they demonstrate that they have turned a blind eye to the economic reality faced by older women.17 No amount of new roads will make up for the policy neglect of homeless older women. Endnotes 1. Australian Human Rights Commission 2019, Risk of Homelessness of Older Women, April 2019. At https://humanrights. gov.au/our-work/age-discrimination/ projects/risk-homelessness-olderwomen (viewed 18 October 2020)
2. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018, 2049.0 Census of Population and Housing: Estimating homelessness, 2016: Key Findings (2018).
At https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/ people/housing/census-populationand-housing-estimating-homelessness/ latest-release (viewed 18 October 2020)
3. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 3101.0 - Australian Demographic Statistics, Jun 2019, At https://www.abs.gov.au/ ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/1CD2B1952AFC 5E7ACA257298000F2E76?OpenDocument (viewed 18 October 2020) 4. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1301.0 — Year Book Australia, 2012, At https:// www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ lookup/1301.0main+features452012 (viewed 18 October 2020) 5. Women in Super, The Facts About Women and Super. At https://www. womeninsuper.com.au/content/ the-facts-about-women-and-super/ gjumzs (viewed 18 October 2020) 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.
8. Caro, Jane. ‘Australia’s Poor Old Women’, The Big Smoke, Aug 31, 2020. At https://www.thebigsmoke.com. au/2020/08/31/australias-poor-oldwomen/ (viewed 18 October 2020)
9. Australian Gender Equality Council, ‘Pink’ & ‘Blue’ Decisions for Children Including Pocket Money, Sep 4, 2018 At https:// www.agec.org.au/campaign/pink-bluedecisions-for-children-including-pocketmoney/ (viewed 18 October 2020)
10. AAP, Build 5000 social houses per year: NCOSS, April 28 2020. At https://www. aap.com.au/build-5000-social-houses-peryear-ncoss/ (viewed 18 October 2020)
11. Your Life Choices, Increasing number of older Australians on the scrapheap, 21 February 2020. At https://www. yourlifechoices.com.au/retirement/ news/old-and-on-the-scrapheap (viewed 18 October 2020)
12. Australian Human Rights Commission, Employing Older Workers: Research Report 1984, At https://humanrights. gov.au/our-work/age-discrimination/ publications/employing-olderworkers-2018 (viewed 18 October 2020)
13. Triple J Hack, 6190 applications for one dishwasher role: What it’s like looking for work in 2020, 24 September 2020. At https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/ programs/hack/sydney-dishwasher-jobreceives-6000-applications/12698720 (viewed 18 October 2020) 14. Choice, Shelter and NATO, Unsettled: Life in Australia’s Private Rental Market, 2017. At https://tenantsqld.org.au/ wp-content/uploads/2018/10/TheAustralian-Rental-Market-Report-2017final.pdf (viewed 18 October 2020)
15. Jane Hume, Address to the Women in Super: Women’s Super Summit, 26 August 2020. At https://ministers.treasury.gov. au/ministers/jane-hume-2019/speeches/ address-women-super-womens-supersummit (viewed 18 October 2020) 16. Warren McKeown, Kicking Australia’s superannuation problem into the future, 30 June 2020. At https://pursuit. unimelb.edu.au/articles/kicking-australias-superannuation-problem-into-thefuture (viewed 18 October 2020) 17. Yahoo News, ‘Women drive on roads’: Government defends Budget, 8 October 2020. At https://au.news. yahoo.com/michaelia-cash-anne-rustondefend-2020-budget-011608606. html (viewed 18 October 2020)
Opinion 3
Bryan Lipmann am Chief Executive Officer/Founder Wintringham
For those people who are unfamiliar with the Commonwealth aged care system, the first and most obvious point to make is that the program is designed around the perceived needs of a typical client, who more than likely will be a middle class white Anglo-Saxon woman of around 85 years with a supportive family. I didn’t see anyone remotely like that in the night shelter I worked at in 1985. So winning the right for prematurely aged homeless women and men to access Commonwealth aged care, became the central task of Wintringham in the 1980s.
The Aged Care Royal Commission and Homelessness The Royal Commission represents the best opportunity that we have ever had to reform the funding mechanism to redress the gross inequality facing providers of services to elderly homeless women and men, and to significantly improve their access to the aged care system. As reported by the Royal Commission, there have been 18 reviews of aged care since 1997. These have included the powerful Hogan Review, Productivity Commission review, Tune Review and a variety of Commonwealth parliamentary reviews. All have failed to significantly improve access to the aged care system for homeless elders and none of the reviews have had much impact on improving the financial viability of organisations who choose to work with the elderly homeless.
With that victory eventually won, we set about building an organisation that could deliver that care. With regard to capital financing, registered residential aged care facilities are not funded by the Government, but rely primarily on Refundable Accommodation Deposits which the provider levies on residents that can afford to pay it. The price of these bonds are capped at $550,000 but there are over 8,000 instances where Government has allowed providers to charge a higher bond. These can reach astronomical heights, with some reputedly around $2 million. The bonds are refundable on departure (usually upon the death of the resident) but the organisation gets to use the money, interest free, for the length of time that the person resides at the facility. This access to free money is what is driving the massive surge of for-profit listed companies into aged care. I cannot think of any other industry where business owners can get free access to, in some cases, hundreds of millions
of dollars and yet are not required to pay any interest. Astonishing. It is obvious that a homeless person’s ability to pay a bond is effectively zero, which therefore reduces their chances of gaining accommodation at an aged care facility. In order to address this issue, the Commonwealth introduced in the 1980s, a Variable Capital Funding program which paid a provider a capital subsidy if they contractually agreed to provide residential places to people who could not pay a bond. The first three Wintringham aged care facilities were funded in this way. With regard to ongoing operational expenses, recurrent subsidies were paid to all providers, including to those few who worked with the homeless. The situation as it exists today is remarkably different. The Variable Capital Scheme was abolished by the Howard Government and was never reinstated by any subsequent Labor government. As a result, organisations like Wintringham now have to rely on philanthropic grants or access to a tiny capital pool of Commonwealth funding. Mainstream charitable not-for-profit or for-profit aged care organisations remain uninterested in using their considerable funds to build facilities for the elderly poor. Turning our attention to the operational financing of aged care, let’s assume that each facility has a budget of about $6 million. Less than 20 per cent of income will come from resident rent, with the balance received through a recurrent payment from the Commonwealth for providing care based on three main service
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areas: medical or clinical care, non‑medical support and behaviour management, all individually calculated for each resident.
syphoning off subsidies in the case of for-profit providers to shareholders, and in the large not-for-profits to backing bodies such as the church?
When Wintringham started in the 1980s the method of calculating these recurrent payments was sufficiently flexible that we received on average, the same amount per resident as did mainstream non-homeless providers. The dollar value was not markedly different if you were a homeless woman receiving care, or a more typical resident in an aged care facility.
Whether that is the case or not, it is obvious that the level of transparency on how $20 billion of subsidies has been spent, is at best, opaque. And services to the homeless are particularly disadvantaged.
This has now been ‘reformed’ with the effect being, that dollars have been diverted away from behavioural care and into clinical or what is termed ‘activities of daily living’. This means organisations working with the homeless now face an income loss of over $20 per day, per resident as compared to a mainstream aged care provider. Faced with this dramatic drop in income, Wintringham who does not have other more lucrative welfare services that it can crosssubsidise with, was facing financial ruin. After more than two years of lobbying and presentations, Wintringham was able to convince the Senate cross bench to support a Homeless Supplement which was endorsed by the House of Representatives in 2014. This supplement does not cover the shortfall lost, but it does make it possible to remain viable. Throughout all of these changes, the fact remained that Wintringham together with other homeless aged care providers, was able to remain solvent even though we had only limited opportunity to earn income from Refundable Accommodation Deposits, and little or no chance of expecting family members to accept responsibility for meeting some of the expenses of our clients. This of course was a matter of some interest to policy makers in Canberra, who were regularly receiving complaints from mainstream providers about the lack of funding in aged care. An explanation can perhaps be gleaned from information arising from the Royal Commission. Is it that wealthy providers were simply
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For these and other reasons, I have great optimism that the Aged Care Royal Commission will highlight these inequities in its final report due in February. How the Government responds to the Report is of course unknown at this stage, but it is clear that this represents the best chance we have ever had to create a fairer aged care system and one that makes it possible for homeless people to have equal access to care and that care can be provided in a financially sustainable manner.
unrealistic for homeless service providers. There needs to be a pool of capital funding that is strictly quarantined and ring fenced for the sole use of those providers who contractually agree to provide for people who cannot pay a bond.
3. Recurrent Funding
It is difficult to imagine how any recurrent funding system could be more discriminatory against the needs of the elderly homeless than what we have with the present ACFI system, which heavily favours medical and routine care and minimises the ongoing support for residents who have behavioural or lifestyle issues. In a hopeful sign, the Commonwealth has engaged Professor Kathy Eager to create a new case-mix funding program which appears to give providers the best chance
So what is needed? Our various submissions to the Royal Commission cover a wide range of topics but the key ones remain. If we are ever going to get serious about providing quality aged care to elderly impoverished women and men, we must address some major issues. They include:
1. Access
The problem of providing appropriate care to the elderly homeless is not simply the lack of supply — it is also that the system is designed around how a typical elderly person is expected to access that system, and it is usually with the aid of a family member. Entry into the aged care program is not at all appropriate for disengaged prematurely aged people who have limited or no access to support. Outreach homeless workers need to be funded to negotiate access for their clients.
2. Capital
Once eligibility and access to aged care is obtained, there needs to be a sufficient supply of suitable residential aged care facilities for the infirm, or appropriate housing for those still able to live independently. Relying on Refundable Accommodation Deposits to finance the construction of needed facilities is totally
Photo supplied by Wintringham
they have ever had to provide appropriately funded quality aged care to homeless people. We have seen the program, but still do not understand the basis for individual assessments and therefore do not at this stage know the final impact on homeless service providers. We therefore must continue to argue for the continuation of the Homeless and Viability Supplements.
4. Home Care
It is possible to provide Home Care to homeless people, but it needs a totally different model of care compared to mainstream aged care. A key issue which we have regularly presented to the Royal Commission, is the need for flexible block funding that can enable a provider to work with a range of elderly impoverished people all of whom have quite different needs.
There are flexible models currently in existence such as the admirable Commonwealth ACH (Assistance with Care and Housing) program: all that is required is to boost their range and available resources. Engaging elderly homeless people can be a complicated process that requires time and patience, as a worker must slowly win the trust of a person who often for very good reasons, is extremely distrustful and wary of forming any relationship with strangers. Without wanting to overlyâ&#x20AC;&#x2018;generalise, it is true to say that many of the people that Wintringham engages with have indeed had a very difficult life. It is not uncommon for a Wintringham staff member to work for months â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and in some rare instances, even years â&#x20AC;&#x201D; with a disengaged
person before there is a successful outcome in terms of securing access to the aged care system.
5. Housing
Although not part of the Terms of Reference for the Royal Commission, we have taken every opportunity to remind the Commissioners that the lack of affordable housing for elderly women and men, drives many people into homelessness. Indeed, many people are needlessly entering residential aged care because they have no viable housing option. A significant reform to the aged care program would see a housing subsidy embedded within a flexible block funded Home Care package. We now eagerly await the Final Report from the Royal Commission, and the response from the Government.
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Opinion 4
Alison Standen MP Shadow Housing Minister
decade has failed to arrest escalating need, resulting in a current estimated shortfall of 11,400 social houses across Tasmania. Sadly, the recent Federal Budget missed the opportunity to invest further in social housing as essential infrastructure, which not only would have built homes but also created construction jobs.
We Must Flatten the Curve on Homelessness for Tasmania’s Older Women Access to stable, safe and affordable housing is a vital first step towards personal health and wellbeing. Having a home is not just about having a roof over your head, it’s essential to everything we value in life – the foundation that provides a base on which to build, or rebuild, our lives. The crisis in housing and homelessness was evident before Covid‑19, and all indications are that it is getting worse. That is why Tasmanian Labor moved successfully to establish the Housing Affordability Select Committee, which delivered a comprehensive report early in 2020 with 61 recommendations, comprising a blueprint for tackling this entrenched and worrying problem. To state the obvious, housing ends homelessness. But despite an awareness of a deepening housing crisis, investment over the past
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According to outdated official statistics from the 2016 Census, 130, or eight per cent, of the 1,622 Tasmanians experiencing homelessness on any given night are sleeping rough. Experts acknowledge the actual number has increased significantly over the past four years, and the problem is not confined to our cities. Among older women, the problem is escalating due to an ageing population, high cost of housing and a significant gap in wealth accumulation between men and women. The number of older homeless women in Australia increased by more than 30 per cent between 2011 and 2016. Many support services currently focus on women with complex issues such as family violence or mental health issues. But there are limited services available to older women who are renting, working and have savings, yet find themselves at risk of homelessness. They need help to achieve housing security and must not be forgotten by policy makers. Compounding the problem is the hidden nature of homelessness among older women, with 43 per cent of Tasmania’s older homeless women staying temporarily with friends. Official figures are recognised as understating the extent of the problem for older women and, particularly, those with disability.
The number of older people in private rental accommodation has increased, with older women more likely to be renters than older men. Family instability across a lifetime, whether through loss of a partner, divorce, family breakdown, or domestic and family violence can have a significant impact on women’s housing security. Mainstream housing support is available to older women but too many fall through the cracks. They may be ineligible or unable to access social, community and affordable housing and not in a position to enter the housing market. Housing solutions need to be appropriate and responsive to an individual’s current and future needs, and support ageing in place. One of the key problems that needs to be addressed is our ageing and inadequate social housing stock. The partnerships with community housing providers through the Better Housing Futures program have helped reduce the repairs and maintenance backlog in social housing. But there is an urgent need for more investment to improve liveability and appropriateness of housing, to address energy efficiency and cost of living pressures, as well as suitability of premises to support ageing in place. We also need to strive to remove the economic, structural and cultural barriers that contribute to women’s risk of homelessness in later life. This includes closing the gender pay and superannuation gap to enhance women’s financial security. Once again, unfortunately, the Federal Budget has virtually ignored Australia’s housing and
Photo supplied by Wintringham
homelessness crisis, failing to invest in social housing construction and repairs while cutting $41.3 million from homelessness services from July 2021. The Budget failed to provide adequate ongoing income support, and contained little to address significant job losses in industries dominated by women. And there was no new funding for frontline domestic and family violence service providers that support women and their children escaping violence. It remains to be seen whether the 2020 State
Budget will go some way towards making up for these shortfalls. Anglicare’s Rental Affordability Snapshot shows private rental affordability is getting worse, with pensioners forced to share their home, or choose between paying their rent, their electricity bill, or putting food on the table. Public housing waiting lists and average waiting times for priority applicants are also heading in the wrong direction — since the Liberals took office, the waiting list has increased by
64 per cent. Meanwhile, shelters are full and turning away, on average, 31 people every day. This is not good enough. We must move from short-term band aids to long-term fixes, and from a choked system to build in more exit points. Together, we have flattened the curve on a pandemic. Through urgent investment and concerted action, we also need to flatten the curve on homelessness.
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Homelessness in Australia: An Introduction
Homelessness in Australia: An Introduction justice system; trauma as both a cause and provides thought‑provoking, up‑to‑date consequence of homelessness; and people information about the characteristics who are long‑term or ‘chronically’ homeless. of the homeless population and Part 3 includes a piece on the ‘failure contemporary policy debates. of the housing system’ and a chapter Leading researchers and advocates from on ‘reforming the service system’. across Australia have come together to People will find the essays in Homelessness in contribute their expertise and experience Australia both illuminating and challenging. to produce a foundational resource that This important new book will be required will set the benchmark for the future reading for all people committed to analysis of homelessness. Editors, ending homelessness in Australia. Chris Chamberlain, Guy Johnson and Catherine Robinson are all recognised experts in the field. Order Form Payment Options Homelessness in Australia: An I would like to buy a copy or copies of Introduction is published by New ❏ Enclosed is a cheque/money order. ‘Homelessness in Australia: An Introduction’ South Press in association with ❏ Please charge my credit card. (PLEASE PRINT) the Victorian Council to Homeless $55.00 p er copy for CHP members Persons, one of Australia’s leading ❏ VISA ❏ Mastercard ❏ Bankcard plus $10.00 postage peak homelessness advocacy bodies. Card number: (up to 2 copies*) Homelessness in Australia: Member number: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ An Introduction contains 14 chapters. $65.00 per copy for non‑members Name on card: Part 1 includes: an essay on plus $10.00 postage Expiry date: _ _ / _ _ homelessness policy from the (up to 2 copies*) start of the nineteenth century to Signature: Number of copies: recent times; a chapter measuring ❏ Please invoice me. mobility in and out of the homeless population and a piece on the Total: $ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Please send order to: (including postage) causes of homelessness. Name: * For orders of more than two copies, please Part 2 is about contemporary Address: contact CHP — email: admin@chp.org.au policy issues and discussions. Send completed form and payment to: It has chapters on: the debate about definition and counting; gender and Council to Homeless Persons Tel: 2 Stanley Street Collingwood Victoria 3066 homelessness; young people; older Fax: people; Indigenous homelessness; T (03) 8415 6200 F (03) 9419 7445 domestic and family violence; Email: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Email: admin@chp.org.au people with complex needs and the
Subscribe to Parity
Parity is Australia’s national homelessness publication and subscribers have access to information and resources not available anywhere else. Subscribers can also receive both print and online editions, as well as a 13-year online back-catalogue. If you are a staff member of a CHP Organisational Member, you are already entitled to free access to online editions. Your employer can help you activate your account.
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Questions
If you have any difficulties subscribing, or don’t have internet access, please contact: • Trish Westmore: trish@chp.org.au / (03) 8415 6215 or, • Andrew Edgar: andrew@chp.org.au / (03) 8415 6207
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