‘Housing stress’

By Lia Bichel
THE manager of a crisis intervention support centre in Casey has welcomed the announcement of additional public housing, but said there were thousands of Victorians still in need of help.
The State Government announced this week that it would invest in about 300 new public and social housing properties across the southern region, in areas including Narre Warren, Prahran and Frankston.
About 350 units across the southern region will also receive major upgrades.
Cranbourne Information and Support Service manager Leanne Petrides welcomed any amount of additional public housing but said there was still much more that needed to be done.
“Any more public housing can only be a good thing and this will make a difference to the families who get a home. There are 40,000 people in Victoria on a waiting list (for public housing) so every little bit helps,” she said.
“It’s wonderful, but what we need to see is more of it (to cater) for the rest of the 39,600 on the waiting list.”
Victoria currently has about 65,000 public housing properties with more than 127,000 residents.
Housing Minister Wendy Lovell said about $528 million was being provided for capital improvement, construction and acquisition of public and social housing in 2011/12.
The longer-term construction program will see at least 6500 homes being provided across Victoria over the term of this government.
Estates in Melbourne, including Prahran, will undergo major redevelopments as part of the overall planned capital expansion program.
Ms Lovell said the government inherited a waiting list for public housing with 41,212 applications.
“Over the past six months, this waiting list has been reduced to 37,430 as at the end of March,” she said.
Ms Petridis said skyrocketing rental rates were one contributing factor to the housing crisis.
She said most people who access CISS were experiencing “housing stress”.
“Some people have mortgages but many more are in rental accommodation and are paying about 50 or 60 per cent of their income on their rent. This means they have less money available for food or utilities, or things like their children’s school uniforms,” Ms Petrides said.
“We are also finding that there are people on the pension and their rental rates are going up, but not their pension.”
Ms Petridis said while CISS aimed to help everyone who needed it, a lack of funding meant the support service’s staff were unable to meet the growing demands of the community. We are getting more and more people coming in, and it’s much harder to meet the demand,” she said.
“I don’t think we ever will.”