Canberra crisis housing wait times blow out past two months

People experiencing homelessness, or in high-risk situations, waited an average of 56.6 days in the quarter ending June 2022 for emergency housing, up from 44.9 days in the March quarter.

A shortage of public housing in the territory, on top of low vacancy rates in the private market, rent and cost-of-living hikes, were driving the issue.

The wait for crisis housing this quarter has been longer than at any point throughout the pandemic. The last peak was 42.8 days in mid-2020.

As wait times climb, the number of people housed has gone down, with 61 placed into accommodation between April and June, a drop from 90 in the first three months of the year.

The data is collected by OneLink, an ACT government-funded service which places people into crisis housing - short-term accommodation intended to bridge the gap between homelessness and long-term options.

The wait has been steadily increasing since mid-2021, highlighting while the pandemic crisis response has ended, demand has increased.

In April 2020, the ACT government spent $3 million bolstering specialist housing services and support services, allowing OneLink to accommodate 193 people in hotels.

Now that emergency funding has wrapped up, capacity had reduced and those people were moving into the crisis housing, too, causing further backlog.

Long-term public housing options were also overburdened, with 3000 people waitlisted, and lags on new builds due to supply chain delays.

The director of housing and community engagement at Woden Community Service, which operates OneLink, said pressure on the private market, and clean-up from the pandemic, was creating "that perfect storm". With nowhere else to go, people were staying in crisis housing for longer, leaving a queue behind them.

"It's great that those people have that support, but that does have the flow-on effect around capacity issues for new or returning clients," Lynton Sheehan said.

But the centre of the issue was that people have been locked out of the private market, ACT Shelter chief executive Travis Gilbert said.

"The single biggest problem for Canberra is that our private rental market is completely failing to meet the needs of anybody looking for a detached house that is earning less than $80,000, and any single person looking for a unit or an apartment earning less than $60,000," Mr Gilbert said.

"I try not to use the term crisis because what we're really looking at here is the predictable result of three decades or more of divestment from public housing, in particular."

It did not help that the Commonwealth had scaled back its investment in public housing in recent decades, in addition to the impact of delays to the Growing and Renewing Public Housing program, he said.

Mr Sheehan hoped the next quarter would bring some reprieve to wait times, but felt "there's an even chance of it going up".

Domestic and family violence were among the main causes of displacement, nearly 28 per cent of OneLink's new support service clients in the last quarter being affected by these issues.

Funding organisations like Canberra's Domestic Violence Crisis Service, were part of the solution to bringing wait times down, Mr Sheehan said.

The crisis service received no new money in the latest ACT budget.

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Supporting community-sector schemes which ease pressure on public housing was also key, Mr Sheehan said, pointing to YWCA's Rentwell scheme, which leases out private properties below market rates.

Though there is a struggle ahead, Mr Gilbert indicated "a little bit of optimism" beaming into the sector.

The federal government's promise to deliver 30,000 social and affordable homes across the country could provide some future relief, he said.

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