How can government do better at listening to people with disability? My experience of homelessness services and inquiries in Australia suggests there’s a long way to go.
Today’s article expands on a recent post by the same author published on Power to Persuade that exposed flaws in processes for government to capture the experiences of people with disability experiencing homeless in recent federal and state government inquiries. How can governments better factor the needs and circumstances of people with disability into consultation processes and policies, and how might this improve policy outcomes? The post’s author, who has lived experience of disability and homelessness, looks at the intersection of disability and housing insecurity and proposes some wide-ranging reforms. The author is in still in search of safe, accessible and stable housing and has asked to remain anonymous.
I am writing this from my experiences of being homeless and disabled, and supporting other homeless women with mental illness and/or disabilities as a peer/lived experience volunteer worker. My formal training background in peer work has been in mental health and in family violence. My immune and lung disabilities leave me at high risk of dying of COVID-19 or in an emergency like a bushfire, so I relocated interstate twice in 2020 to search for housing in regional and remote areas to reduce that risk. In my experience, the majority of homeless peoples have a disability, chronic illness, complex medical conditions and/or mental illness. Many homeless women I support experience major barriers and dead ends when trying to access or engage with the NDIS, and some I support do not want the NDIS because it has caused them too many problems.
In my experience, all homelessness services do not provide reasonable adjustments or extra support in supporting people like us to find appropriate stable housing, not even for people who are too unwell to find housing themselves. There are so many barriers to accessing support and completing housing applications in the first place. Private rentals don’t advertise whether they are accessible, so we have to inspect every property ourselves to assess accessibility, which isn’t always possible for many with limited mobility. Also, in my experience, high demand and disability discrimination are a double-edged sword. Over 2 years I applied unsuccessfully for over 1500 private rentals, with casual employment and university references, previous rental references, a rental guarantor, a clean rental record from a tenancy verification report (with databases checked), and not one of my referees has ever been contacted by a real estate agency. My tenancy application is strong, with 12 great references. If I don’t stand a chance at finding stable and suitable housing, what chance do other disabled peoples and homeless peoples stand?
Social and community housing providers and low-income private rental providers also avoid tenants with multiple needs, and there is no way to prove they are discriminating against you unless they say directly (with witnesses) or in writing that they are not housing you because you are on a low income /disability pension, and/or disabled and need disability modifications. Shockingly, very few women's refuges and crisis accommodations are disability accessible, despite women with disability being at higher risk of family violence and sexual assault than other women. This is complicated by disabled women being fearful of reporting abuse to services, experiencing disability discrimination when reporting abuse, distrust of police, government, or NDIS to keep them safe, and having no safe options to escape violent situations.
Because of the lack of affordable accessible housing and disability discrimination, many disabled peoples like me have been forced to sleep rough in tents, short-term accommodations and Airbnbs, going from place to place whilst looking for housing. I have been long-term homeless and am on numerous waiting lists that never eventuate to any housing offer at all. I moved around Airbnbs, short-term rentals and my tent over 40 times across three states throughout 2020, escaping the bushfires and escaping COVID-19, staying in many places unsuitable for my disabilities and harmful to my health. Many housing organisations and public housing offices had closed their intake for many months due to COVID-19, forcing people like me to stay in holiday rentals, motels, hotels, short term rentals, Airbnbs and caravan parks. These are often unsafe, dangerous, noisy, mouldy, have drug dealers coming and going, and pose increased risk of assaults, abuse and infections for peoples with disabilities and/or compromised immune systems. I am grateful for the NDIS, but I think it could do much better on housing.
Issues in the rental market and arrangements for short-term housing are worsened by the complicated and lengthy (over 1 year) process of applying for Specialist Disability Accommodation or Supported Independent Living. The National Rental Affordability Scheme has no system to identify which rentals are accessible or not, and NDIS won’t fund home modifications on private rentals unless you have a long-term lease. All the barriers and complex systems in the housing system, homelessness services and in the NDIS, are overwhelming, not easy to understand, and make many people feel doomed that they will never find any stable housing let alone housing suitable for their disabilities. Many homeless peoples with disabilities are too unwell to even engage with specialist homelessness services, let alone present at 8am or 9am to be seen by housing and homelessness access point services, that do not do appointments and only offer drop-in times for the first people who arrive in the mornings.
All these issues combined lead to many I know having died due to being left homeless long-term with complex medical issues. Many I know have given up on finding housing, have increased mental health issues, self-harm; many have attempted or completed suicide; and many have returned to dangerous living situations with high levels of violence, abuse and exploitation. All these issues, combined with the ongoing sleep deprivation which is a well-known form of torture, makes people fall into worse and worse health issues that further compound their ability to cope with all the trauma being homeless involves. Some homeless women with disabilities I know decided to commit crimes of stealing just to end up back in prison to have a roof over their head and 3 meals a day because that is less traumatic than finding housing. Many homeless women I know have been forced to return to dangerous housing and abusive relationships because there is nowhere else less dangerous to go, and many I know have become pregnant whilst sleeping rough, or escaped into homelessness fleeing family violence after becoming pregnant. Those I have lost in my life to homelessness and dangerous housing and/or family violence, are every reason I do my advocacy and peer work.
The siloing of services and sectors, the under-resourcing of specialist homelessness services (SHS), and the increasing service demand/inundation due to COVID-19 and the bushfires, mean SHS are likely to remain inaccessible, inflexible, and unable to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Victoria’s homelessness plan did not include any actions that will improve accessibility or access to, and prevent people from being turned away from inundated SHS’s, when the majority of people get turned away. There are over 200,000 people on the waiting list for social housing in Australia (Gooding, 2017), and 64% of tenants who left Unison’s social housing within the first year left due to negative reasons, such as conflict with neighbours. (Johnson et al., 2019). Such safety issues and long waiting times need to be addressed to prevent the cycle of homelessness continuing and reduce re-occurring and chronic homelessness, and make housing safe for peoples with disabilities to live in.
As a result of the lack of accessible housing, hundreds of thousands of disabled peoples are forced into institutions (nursing homes, aged care facilities, group homes, STA’s, Supported Independent Living accommodations, Supported Accommodation’s, Supported Residential Services (SRS’s), PARC’s, respites, etc.), because there are no other accessible or safe housing options. The highest priority waiting lists for disability housing social/community providers are over 5 to 10 years long in some states, and many people with disabilities and/or mental illness remain waiting this long or longer to find housing (that is often the only thing they get offered and unsuitable for their needs). Many institutions, public and social/community housing are unsafe due to the violence, abuse and neglect, and especially in institutions, the physical and chemical restraint and restrictive practices used against disabled peoples, making them extremely depressing, isolating and unsafe places to live. Our government has not learned from the horror stories in the aged care royal commission (from young disabled peoples or from older peoples), and our government has done nothing real to work towards getting disabled peoples out of institutions who don’t want to be institutionalised.
For me and many like me, it’s cop abuse in institutions that eat up our NDIS plan’s funding, or cop abuse on the streets homeless. I have tenancy and accommodation funding in my NDIS plan, but haven’t been able to use this funding because my specialist support coordinator still cannot find any way to spend this funding, and cannot find any housing worker or housing/disability advocate to help me find housing. I have changed specialist support coordinators four times in 2020, but none of them could help me find housing, and all of them took thousands of dollars from my NDIS plan. There is only two tenancy and accommodation support services in Victoria and NDIS tenancy and accommodation funding is extremely limited – only 15 hours per year was given in my NDIS plan.
I would like to see more legal services help with disability discrimination, housing, and NDIS issues. I would like to see more women’s only housing with accessible, self-contained one and two bedroom accommodation, well regulated by councils or disability housing organisations (HCA and Active Community Housing), that is safe and family, children and disability friendly. I would like the Victorian Housing Register to come on board with more family violence privacy reforms, such as a restricted access system for having greater privacy protections on addresses for people who have escaped violence. This is vital as many I know refuse to apply for VHR (public, social and community housing) until this issue is addressed, especially those who have escaped family violence - they don’t want their address on any government database and want to stay off the grid for safety reasons. Many need internal and external password protection (restricted access) on their files. The NDIS and Centrelink have a restricted access system, but VHR doesn’t.
Many disabled peoples and peoples with mental illness I know have been forced out of public, social and community housing, due to it being unsafe, the levels of violence, abuse, drugs and alcohol, and have increased barriers accessing these types of housing in the first place. I would like to see the government implement more 80:20 safer housing models, with 80% home-owner residents and 20% social and community housing tenants for peoples with disabilities and mental illness in self-contained apartments, like Nightingale Housing and the Summer Foundation housing models. I would like to see legislative changes and quotas developed to change the disability, racial and low-income discrimination in the rental market, and address disability-targeted abuse in the tenancy act. I would like to see government develop incentives and programs to actually do the work of making housing more accessible and overcome barriers to these home modifications happening in all types of housing arrangements. There is a lot more than 6% of people in the NDIS who need SDA and this type of housing should expanded to more peoples, after NDIS has caught up with housing the most severely in need first. The NDIS want me to waste my NDIS plan on spending up to $10,000 a week in a disability short-term-accommodation (STA) (see NDIS price guide), which would be $40,000 a month after they kick me out back into homelessness; or going from Airbnb to Airbnb after the short-term stay finishes; and my coordinator has told me to live in a caravan park despite it being noisy and unsuitable for my disabilities, mould allergy and compromised immune system. I can’t live in an STA institution because of the severity of my immune disability and chronic infections/viruses - I can’t have staff in my room and need to minimise face-to-face contact with staff and people, which all disability institutions and SIL providers won’t allow despite my medical evidence. So I have no idea how I will find any SIL housing when SIL providers won’t allow major disability modifications.
I would like to also see these reforms nationally:
Banks make available and approve achievable home-loans for peoples with disabilities and those on age pensions.
NDIS funding being allowed to be used to employ a disability advocate or housing advocate, given advocates are essential to supporting us to find safe housing suitable for our disabilities, and being witness to and speaking out about injustice and abuse.
The national rental affordability scheme (NRAS) and low-income private rental providers working together to create a separate database of low-income private rentals that are disability accessible, listing accessibility information clearly on every listing. This must include an accessible and simplified application form for any and all low-income private rentals, so people do not have to do hundreds of applications separately, given all tenancy managers currently use different and extremely long convoluted in-accessible forms.
Private Rental Assistance Program (PRAP) eligibility needs to be changed to not exclude unemployed people with disabilities. The current PRAP eligibility criteria is the rental must cost within 55% of the applicant’s income (severely limiting which rentals you can apply for and limiting accessibility of the rentals you apply for), and the lease must show applicant as lease holder – a major problem given many people with disabilities cannot get onto a lease due to disability discrimination.
The NDIS should buy housing outright for people with disabilities to rent, so they are not wasting millions of dollars a year on short- and medium-term accommodations, whilst forcing us to continuously move from one unsafe and unsuitable accommodation to the next with no certainty over whether or not we will have a roof over our heads at any given night.
More free-standing units need to be built for people with immune compromise and/or complex medical issues, who cannot live in high-rise high-density apartments for health reasons.
Creating a scheme that compensates people with disabilities funding their own home modifications (for when there are no other safe, or possible, or fast-enough provision options available otherwise).
A head leasing program where the government can act as a rental guarantor for private rental tenancies, and for those who still cannot find housing with a rental guarantor, the program could head lease properties to then sublet to people on low incomes.
More community and social housing that is disability accessible built by HCA, CHL, housing cooperatives, and Active Community Housing.
When the moratorium on housing evictions ends in March 2021, Australia will see unprecedented levels of homelessness compared to ever before in history, and increased stress and inundation on the housing and homelessness system. As peoples who are living homelessness, we know the solutions best ourselves. We know what we need and what needs to change, and we deserve to be heard and consulted on our ideas, and employed in housing reform work. We should not have our submissions to the homelessness inquiries ignored, deleted or archived.
References
Australian Human Rights Commission (‘AHRC’) (2019). Older Women’s Risk of Homelessness: Background Paper Exploring a growing problem. Sydney, NSW: Australian Human Rights Commission. https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/ahrc_ow_homelessness2019.pdf
AIHW (2018) Sleeping Rough, a Profile of Specialist Homelessness Services Clients.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australian Government, Canberra
Beer, A., Baker, E., & Lester, L. (2014). Non-psychiatric disability and homelessness: Understanding the risks. Parity, 27(5), 17-18.
Beer, A, Baker E, Mallett S, Batterham D, Pate A & Lester L (2012) Addressing homelessness amongst persons with a disability: Identifying and enacting best practice. A FaHCSIA National Homelessness Research Project. The University of Adelaide, Hanover Welfare Services, Melbourne City Mission, The University of Melbourne https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/assets/documents/hilda-bibliography/other-publications/2012/Beer_etal_Homelessness-and-Disability-FINAL-REPORT-2-2.pdf
Beer, A, Batterham D, Baker, E & Mallett, S (2011) Non-psychiatric disability and homelessness: Building an evidence base for better policy Parity Vol. 24, No. 9, Oct 2011a: 29-30. https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=677117470946874;res=IELHSS
Beer, A. & Faulkner, D. (2012). The Housing Careers of People with a Disability and Carers of People with a Disability. Melbourne, Victoria: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.
Johnson G, McCallum S & Watson J (2019) 'Who stays, who leaves and why? Occupancy patterns at Unison Housing between 2014 and 2016'. Melbourne: Unison Housing. https://unison.org.au/cms_uploads/docs/6121--unison--rmit-research-report-no-2--feb-2019.pdf
Parliament of Australia (2020) Shelter In The Storm – Covid-19 And Homelessness: Interim report of the inquiry into homelessness in Australia. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs Canberra, Australian Government, Canberra
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