By Cam Lucadou-Wells and Danielle Kutchel
The urgent need for more social housing has become sharper during Covid-19, a Greater Dandenong Council report has stated.
Greater Dandenong, with 12 other councils in the East and South East, has endorsed a draft regional charter on homelessness and social housing.
According to the report, “housing is a human right for every person, … housing solves homelessness and … social housing is core infrastructure for local communities.”
“The economic and health and wellbeing implications of COVID-19 means that now more than ever, the local government sector needs to be a powerful champion … for permanent, safe and
timely housing for those experiencing homelessness or at-risk of homelessness.”
Social housing is rented to low income households at no more than 30 per cent of household income.
It provides relief from increasingly unaffordable private rentals for low-income households.
A paper by Council to Homeless Persons stated the 13-council region is ‘home’ to about 32 per cent of Victoria’s homeless people and 40 per cent of people waiting on Victoria’s social housing list.
More than 44,000 Victorian households are waiting for social housing.
Social housing supplies hadn’t kept pace with population growth in the past 10 years, creating the widening shortfall, according to the CHP paper.
In Greater Dandenong, there were more than 2100 homeless people, 2016 national census stats show. There were 1285 in Casey.
Most of them were living in “severely crowded” premises.
Greater Dandenong councillor Matthew Kirwan said the council had to match its endorsement of the charter with “real action”.
The council needed to make sites in Greater Dandenong available for social housing and to invest in social housing, Cr Kirwan said.
In April, the council knocked back a 43-unit social housing project at 2-4 Hemmings Street Dandenong amid concerns about entrenching crime in the area.
At the time, Cr Kirwan said the “well managed” social housing proposal wouldn’t feed crime but was “part of the solution”.
The draft charter council’s endorsement came ahead of National Homelessness Week, from 2 to 8 August.
To mark the week, the interim report of the State Parliamentary Inquiry into Homelessness in Victoria was released on Tuesday 4 August.
While the inquiry itself will continue until February 2021, the interim report provides a snapshot of the key areas that those who made a submission to the inquiry believe are the most important.
Respondents listed public housing as their top policy priority, but housing affordability and rough sleeping were also high priorities.
The survey results reinforce other evidence collected by the committee that “the key to preventing and ending homelessness is an adequate supply of safe, affordable, long-term housing,” the report said.
