Poor Caught In Rent Trap
The Age
Tuesday October 29, 1996
Homeless people who are most in need of rental accommodation are at the mercy of a shrinking private home rental pool, figures from a leading housing welfare agency show.
In the past four years, the vacancy rate for private houses and flats available for rent has fallen from 5 per cent to less than 2 per cent, according to a report by Hanover Welfare Services in South Melbourne.
This drop has mirrored a rise in Hanover clients being evicted from private rental accommodation, from 7 per cent in 1992 to 22 per cent by June this year.
The agency's chief executive officer, Mr Tony Nicholson, said the trend came as the Federal Government was planning to rely increasingly on the private rental market to solve housing crises.
Mr Nicholson said he did not see how subsidising private rents would increase the supply of accommodation.
"The majority of people who invest in housing do not target low-income people as their tenants," Mr Nicholson said. "What we fear will happen is that costs will simply inflate - rents will go up and the supply of private housing will not."
Mr Nicholson said priority access to public housing had become too difficult for people on low incomes with severe disadvantages, such as drug dependancy, chronic unemployment or domestic violence problems.
Victorian departmental officers required evidence of five refusals in the private market before a person went on the priority public housing list, he said. "This is too hard for disadvantaged families . . . and it has increased the workload of the Hanover staff assisting them by an average of 20 hours a week."
Since 1992, only 16 per cent of the people leaving Hanover's short-to-medium-term supported housing went to public accommodation. About 42 per cent went to private rentals.
The Hanover study comes as the Federal Government is proposing to cut capital grants to the states for public housing, instead providing rental subsidies for low-income people whether in public or private housing.
Mr Nicholson said the reform of housing assistance in Australia would only work if a mix was retained.
"People who are extremely disadvantaged and homeless do not have the necessary resilience to be able to cope with the vagaries of the private rental market," he said.
Last year, Hanover helped 4379 people with accommodation, he said.
A spokesman for Victoria's Housing Minister, Mrs Ann Henderson, said the states did not agree with the Commonwealth's proposed change in policy.
State housing ministers would meet in Melbourne on Friday to discuss the proposed changes.
© 1996 The Age