PRIORITIES

1. Develop a gender-responsive national housing strategy that addresses the factors affecting women’s housing outcomes and includes actions and measurable targets. This should link to a new national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing strategy with increased resourcing for Indigenous Community Housing Organisations to provide culturally appropriate housing in urban, rural, regional and remote areas and a new inter-governmental remote Indigenous housing agreement.

2. Increase public and community housing to 10% of the total housing stock by 2050, including housing configured and targeted to women in each state/territory, in particular women and children fleeing domestic violence, single women, single older women, single mothers, Indigenous women, women with disabilities and CALD women including refugees and those on bridging or temporary visas.

3. Make affordable housing truly affordable by legislating a definition in the Housing Australia Future Fund to cap rents at 30% of income for people on the lowest incomes.

4. Implement a fairer tax system to recognise housing as a human right.

5. Fund innovative housing products to assist women in the ‘missing middle’ to access permanent housing –women whose equity or savings make them ineligible for social housing but are insufficient to enable them to purchase. These products aim to prevent women draining their savings or super in private rental, resulting in housing insecurity and homelessness.

6. Commit to increased funding for homelessness services and women’s domestic violence refuges and rapid access to housing and support. Funding for homelessness services should go to services that are appropriately specialised, competent, accessible, culturally appropriate and safe for the full range of diverse groups of women and children who need them. This should include more support for older people at risk of homelessness by funding specialist support services for those who can’t access aged care support due to insecure housing.

7. Make homes climate safe by prioritising retrofitting of public and community housing to improve energy performance and withstand extreme weather events.

RATIONALE

Australia is facing a cost-of-living crisis including a crisis in housing affordability, with significant increases in housing affordability related stress and homelessness in most LGAs, and overall harsher experiences of homelessness, including increased rough sleeping. At the same time, women’s inequality causes disadvantage in accessing housing.

The crisis in housing affordability affects all tenures. There is a lack of affordable private rental housing, with steeply rising rents and very low vacancy rates. Between March 2020 and June 2024, the median advertised rent overall rose by 51%. Average weekly earnings rose by only 14% in the four years to May 2024. By late 2024 the number of households in rental stress had increased by 18% or 141,000 since August 2021.

Purchase prices have also risen in relation to income, with home ownership rates falling, and longer waiting times needed to save for a deposit, placing additional pressure on the rental market. More people are carrying their mortgage debt into retirement, In the five years to June 2024 the mean national price of housing had escalated by 51%.

In recent decades there has also been reduced availability of social housing and a continuing fall in the proportion of Australian households who live in social housing, from over 7% of all households in 1991 to 4.1% in 2023. Between 1991 and 2017, lettings by social housing providers declined by around one third. Social housing is tightly targeted with long waiting lists.

These factors have led to the emergence of a cohort of people on low to moderate incomes who are in precarious housing situations, for whom an adverse event may trigger homelessness. There has been an increase in new users of homelessness services and a change reported by services in the mix of persons affected by homelessness. New groups disproportionately represented among those accessing homelessness services for the first time include families, people with a disability, people in work; older women and people (including women on temporary visas escaping violence) whose residency status means they are ineligible for social housing.

The housing crisis has also led to the growth of a ‘missing middle’ of people who are neither poor enough to qualify for housing assistance nor wealthy enough to secure housing as they age. Many of these people are private renters or live in non-standard housing such as caravan parks. They include women escaping domestic violence, women who have separated and older women whose lifetime employment disadvantage means they have insufficient funds. Innovative housing products which could assist include temporary assistance for caregiver women to transition their earnings and retain housing after property settlement and shared equity schemes such as the Older Women’s Housing Project managed by Women’s Property Initiatives, Victoria.

Women’s economic disadvantage and poverty result from multiple factors, including lower wages, gaps in paid work and superannuation and women’s greater responsibility for caring for children and other family members. In addition, women’s experiences of domestic and other gendered violence including the impacts of trauma, injury, dislocation, financial abuse and disproportionate loss of wealth upon separation cause immediate and long-term economic and other disadvantages that reverberate throughout women’s lifetimes.

Women are less likely to be able to save a deposit to buy a home, take longer to do so, and are less likely to own a home in retirement. Older women repaying a mortgage experience higher levels of mortgage stress than their male counterparts. Women are impacted more than men by the high costs of renting, as their weekly earnings are 14% less than men’s. The number of women experiencing homelessness continues to rise at a faster rate than for men. Between the Censuses of 2016 and 2021, women’s homelessness increased by 10% compared to 2% for men. The most dramatic increases are in the number of women aged 34-44 years and young women aged 12 to 18 years. Women’s housing disadvantage is also reflected in the fact that 62% of social housing tenants are women, 60% of people using homelessness services are women, and 66% of unassisted requests for homelessness services are women.

Women at particular risk of housing instability and homelessness include women in a range of situations who are on low incomes, in casual work and/or experience other disadvantage, such as single mothers and their children, women with disabilities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women. Single mothers face particular barriers to accessing housing as they need a dwelling with enough bedrooms for their children, and because finding shared housing with an unrelated housemate may not be an option. The worsening housing crisis has led to unprecedented demand for assistance, with frontline services unable to meet need.

Women and children escaping domestic violence are the largest group of those experiencing homelessness. Domestic violence is the single largest reason for women’s housing instability and homelessness, making up 41% of people, overwhelmingly women and children, requesting assistance from specialist homelessness agencies. Many women experiencing violence make the momentous decision to leave their homes, often with children, for their safety. Only 3.2% of these women and children are accessing the long-term housing that they need. Lack of access to affordable housing is a reason why women remain in or return to violent and dangerous situations. Women on temporary visas who experience violence and homelessness are ineligible for most forms of assistance and lack avenues to achieve safety and stability.

While many women do approach homelessness services, women’s homelessness is often hidden, with many not assisted by services. Women also generally avoid visibly sleeping rough, and few are assisted by programs for rough sleepers. Instead, they stay temporarily with family, friends and acquaintances or in other temporary places such as hostels or house sitting; remain at home in a violent situation; live in severely overcrowded dwellings; live in a car or sleep outside in hidden locations. As a result, women’s homelessness may be unrecorded and its extent obscured.

The experience of homelessness is damaging to people in many ways, and it is critical to ensure that homelessness lasts as short a time as possible. Homelessness involves trauma, dislocation and deprivation; disrupts social relationships and support networks; negatively impacts health including exacerbating or causing mental health problems and substance abuse; leads to loss of possessions; diminishes options available to people; and heightens the risk of early death.

There is a need to ensure that suitable housing is available for all women and children in need, and that if women do experience domestic violence and/or homelessness, that services are appropriately specialised and resourced, competent, accessible, culturally appropriate and safe. In 2018 it was estimated by a report for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute that there was an overall backlog of 433,400 social housing dwellings needed, and that it would grow to almost three quarters of a million by 2036. Each year there is an immediate need for around 17,000 additional social housing dwellings for women fleeing domestic violence alone.

While new investment in social housing by state and federal governments since 2020 is expected to deliver a significant number of new social homes this decade, this increase will remain small compared to unmet need, and there is a need for ongoing investment to increase social housing supply to 10% of all homes over the medium term.

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