State of Australian Homelessness Services — Designing a Better Future.
Homelessness is a social issue, a data issue, a human rights issue, and a national problem which destroys quality of life en masse. Homelessness is widely regarded as the most extreme form of social exclusion a person can face, and places significant financial strain on Australia. Homelessness is a social and financial cost too high to ignore.
It is my core belief that as designers we have a responsibility to people. Every problem we solve, or design we create impacts other human beings, and it is our responsibility to strive for positive impacts. In 2019 I completed a research paper and analysis of Australian Homelessness Services, a systems design approach to help resolve and mitigate homelessness in Australia.
I feel obligated to share this research paper, but note that I myself, am not an expert or professional on homelessness. The sentiments and observations in this article draw directly from a wealth of research and papers from multiple expert bodies. My primary aim is to communicate information on flaws in the homelessness services system, and to propose an evidence-based redesign which could allow Australia to reach functional zero homelessness by 2030.
The Situation
116,427 Australians were homeless on Census night 2016.
The 2016 census categorised an estimated 116, 427 people as homeless. Latest figures show despite sustained economic growth, homelessness has continued to rise, and increases cannot be pinned on population growth alone. Causes of homelessness are multifaceted, often structural in nature and including but not limited to a complex array of discrimination, chronic shortages of affordability or available housing, domestic or family violence, poverty, long term unemployment, severe and permanent mental illness and economic or social exclusion.
Primary homelessness includes rough sleepers, people with no roof over their head, including but not limited to those sleeping on the streets, in make-shift shelters such as tents, sleeping in parks and cars or living in derelict buildings. Secondary homelessness includes those frequently moving between temporary shelters (emergency shelter, boarding houses or couch-surfing). Tertiary homelessness includes accommodations which do not meet minimum community standards, with no long-term leases.
In 1991 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared housing to be a basic right, and it is commonly accepted that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lists safety as a basic need, safety provided by a home. Yet the United Nations continues to identify homelessness as an urgent human rights crisis, with research clearly showing that homelessness is one of the most severe forms of disadvantage and social exclusion that a person can experience.
Homelessness indiscriminately affects men, women and children of any ethnicity or age. The 2019–2020 Australian Budget saw $1.56 billion provided to states and territories through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement (NHHA). Whilst a large contribution toward housing and homelessness, significant concern has arisen around state budgets restricting where this money flows, and that NHHA falls significantly short from providing a national housing strategy that would address housing affordability pricing out homelessness services and homeless people alike. This lack of economic and policy agreement does not bode well for Australia’s homelessness services system, which relies on Federal, State and Territory government funding to non-profit or non-government organisations to provide services.
Access to Services
In Australia access to Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS) is generally via referral only (through a referral body such as HART 4000 in Queensland). Those seeking support generally either become clients in either Supported Accommodation Assistance Programs (SAAP) or Crisis Accommodation Programs (CAP) in temporary, short-term or in rare cases — long term housing. Within these programs’ clients are assisted with other services or are referred to other services (the most common of which include mental health, drug and alcohol, disability or other financial support services).
Applicants who do not receive support are classified as unassisted requests and receive no help. Critically it is important to highlight this system works only for those who can seek referral and does not account for all homeless people in Australia. It is important to further note whilst Specialist Homelessness Services operate in each state in Australia, local levels of access and service provision varies. In 2016 the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) identified in an 88-page report that while there is a large body of evidence on the effectiveness of individual homelessness services in terms of client outcomes, individual services are not the barometer for effectiveness in a national program. AHURI indicates that due to the nature of agreements between Federal, State and Territories, there is no central national homelessness plan in place in Australia.
Homelessness is a collective responsibility.
In 2009 the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) commissioned Urbis to conduct an environmental review of the effectiveness of homelessness services. Urbis found that characteristics of an effective service model include services being ‘wrapped’ around individuals with case management allowing for regular progress checks. Urbis identified indisputably that “early intervention and prevention of homelessness gets better results. These terms need to be clearly defined and distinguished from one another” and that “homelessness is a collective responsibility”. They state, “Integration across agencies/services is needed to support coordinated responses”, a message that was not received at the time of the report and is still mostly ignored.
Outcome — Success (or lack of) of services, 2017–18
AHURI highlights systems level indicators of effectiveness include number and proportion of homeless persons in Australia, as well as national data on clients’ housing, income and workforce statuses. When assessing program effectiveness, it is important that individual outcomes as well as overall support is measured. SHS organisations periodically submit to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) data on recent applications for assistance, including: the nature of the help sought and provided; the applicant household characteristics, and the immediate housing situation of the person/s concerned. Drawing on this source, AIHW publishes an annual statistical report and makes available a wealth of data for further analysis.
I created the poster “Outcome” from this publicly available data to demonstrate the outcomes of clients in services in a more accessible manner. Often numbers do not convey information in a way that can be easily digested, and the poster seeks to illustrate the vast number of Australians who received service but were still exited into homelessness.
For a homelessness service to exit a person into homelessness shows flaws in the system, however the vast quantity of clients who were exited into homelessness between 2017 & 2018 demonstrates a catastrophic failure of services across the nation.
Proposal — Aligning Services to reach functional zero homelessness.
To exit clients into homelessness alone demonstrates a catastrophic failure in the system, yet it is important to remember these statistics do not capture the situation of people who may be homeless but who do not or cannot seek assistance from within the system. AHURI revealed the homelessness system falls short due a lack of a national homelessness plan and lack of coordinated responses from the government and policy systems, the stop-start nature of funding and insufficient resourcing of individual services, as well as limited and fragmented data availability. The lack of homelessness data linkage with housing, Centrelink and other human services is recognised to be causing issues nation-wide. Moreover, data being collected by such a wide array of service provider organisations primarily focused on assisting service users rather than taking statistical recording creates limitations and ambiguities in resulting statistics.
Linking data could provide powerful and actionable insights to client needs, pathways and outcomes, there is a desperate need for a whole-of-government approach to systems design, data collection and management and evaluation to enact preventative measures and for intervention to occur. Systematic change such as this could benefit Australia in working toward functional zero homelessness (defined as less homeless people than available shelters at any given time), a goal that is currently set by Adelaide and could easily be made nationally.
Functional Zero = No Waitlists & # Homeless Persons < # Available Accommodations
Functional zero homelessness is achieved through a model called “By Name List” and through supporting housing first models. This is what the poster “Proposal” demonstrates. A By Name List is a person-specific, real-time approach to homelessness data. It ensures that communities know who people are, and what they need to secure and retain housing.
By making informed systems and policy changes surrounding continued funding and support, ensuring that homeless are not left unassisted and allocating services as required, functional zero can be reached. Communities will require a real time data feedback loop, multi-agency command-centre-style teams capable of making fast decisions in response to data, flexible resources, and a menu of best practice based on problems over time.
This model is at its most effective when supported by a housing first approach to ensure that homeless people are not abandoned or exited into homelessness if services do not reach all client needs. Adopting a model similar to Finland’s successful housing first model but tailored for Australia would work well here. In Finland the success of their approach was due to an integrated national strategy including measures for prevention, Housing First and converting temporary shelters and hostels into permanent supportive housing. Australia currently has a record number of empty buildings, and political parties such as the Greens are calling for these to be re-purposed. If the actions suggested by the wealth of research are taken on board, Australia could end homelessness by 2030.
Whilst all of this might seem unattainable, it is necessary that we begin SERIOUS talks from a neutral political ground. I truly believe that systems design and human centered design approaches pave the fastest way for Australia to end homelessness. However given the current political climate, the fastest way forward may be for social enterprise and NGOs/NFPs to lead the charge.
