Homelessness in Hobart
This Homelessness Week its important for the community to be applying a metaphoric blow torch to politicians to step up to the plate and do more across all levels of government to address the housing crisis. As it stands more than 5,000 Tasmanians are on the housing waitlist, with three quarters of those either experiencing homelessness or are living in insecure, temporary accommodation. Its not good enough and it’s getting worse.
The housing crisis is complex, and not just limited to the provision of social housing by governments, although that is an important part of the puzzle. Drastically increasing rents are pushing families to the brink of homelessness, particularly in our capital city. Rental affordability in Hobart City is getting worse by the day. Driven by a pure lack of supply, rental costs are increasing at a disproportionate rate to both income and property prices. And those gaps are widening.
If you want to own your own house, which we know yields very high investment returns and is a good aspiration for every Australian, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so. With only 16% of all housing stock in the Hobart municipality being accessible to buy for folk on a moderate income. In fact, less than 1% of housing stock in Hobart municipality is affordable for a single person on a moderate income.
Some people say those who are not affluent should just live on the urban fringe, in places like Bridgewater, Brighton or Rokeby. But we know that pushing less affluent people into the urban fringe yields particularly poor results. Less affluent people are not just low socio-economic cohorts either. They are our service workers, such as nurses, hospital cleaners and aged care workers. They are also our elderly pensioners and our young people yet to get a head start in life. Worryingly, we know that there are increasing numbers of homeless elderly people in Tasmania. Should they all be forced to live 40 minutes from where they work, or where the services that they will increasingly need to access are? Areas where there is next to no public transport despite the elderly cohort being less likely to hold a drivers licence?
Forcing these cohorts to live further and further out yields terrible results for both the people that live there and the broader community. A useful tool to objectively assess this notion is the RMIT University VAMPIRE index which measures a household’s vulnerability to inflation, mortgage and fuel costs. It consistently shows that the further you live from the economic centre of any city, the more at risk you are of financial pressures associated with cost of living.
And it makes sense. For instance, if you live in the inner city, you can get away with having one car, and you probably only fill it up once every couple of weeks or less because your commute to work is easily achieved on foot, bike or by bus. You’re more likely to be in walking distance of essential services like grocery stores, pharmacies and schools too. So, while you pay a premium to buy or rent a property in the inner city, your day to day living costs are often drastically less than those on the urban fringe.
What’s more, building more homes on the urban fringe increases pressures on critical infrastructure. In the above example, you can see how living on the urban fringe generates car movements. Every time you need anything, you must get in the car. This, repeated across the urban fringe is a major contributor to worsening traffic congestion in Hobart. It also means we need to build new power distribution networks, sewerage lines and water supply infrastructure. Remember that news story about your TasWater bill? Well its about to get worse.
The 30 year greater Hobart plan, signed off my all four councils and state government suggests the need for 10,000 more dwellings in Hobart municipality by 2050 and despite council having approved almost 300 dwellings in the inner city, they are not being constructed because of market pressures associated with cost of construction.
Without a new way of thinking and without Government playing a considerably more active role in delivering both public and private housing, we will continue to see homelessness increase as families are brought to their knees by a cost of living crisis coalescing with a housing crisis. Government must do more, and while it’s nice to see support for the homeless community through art installations and story telling. I’d prefer to see no homeless people in our community at all.