The homelessness crisis affecting Australia’s older women

‘Having to ask for somewhere to live, it’s difficult indeed’: Single, female, homeless. Australia’s shameful crisis.

Older women are the fastest-growing cohort of homeless people in Australia today. And for many, it’s an unexpected life shock that tipped them into destitution.

Currently, more than 330,000 single women over the age of 45 are living in a state of economic distress – that is, spending more than 30 per cent of their gross income just keeping a roof over their heads – with as many as 45 per cent of them earning the minimum wage or less. Additionally, reports the Career Development Association of Australia, in 2019, 273,000 work positions were made redundant, a 45 per cent surge on the figures for 2017.

Apartments at Robina to tackle city’s disability housing crisis

APARTMENTS are being built at Robina to tackle the city’s disability housing crisis and get young people out of aged care.

The 18 Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) units will be complete in September. They are part of a joint project between MS Queensland and designer, builder and operator LifeBright.

Their aim is to raise awareness of the issues around a lack of accommodation for young people living with a disability and to provide an affordable solution.

Classical music still an unwelcome lullaby for Brisbane’s homeless

Brisbane City Council’s use of loud music to move on rough sleepers in public spaces such as King George Square has come under question, with calls for a more “compassionate” approach.

In the council’s Tuesday afternoon chamber meeting, Greens councillor Jonathan Sri asked lord mayor Adrian Schrinner how it was “compassionate” to force homeless people out of public spaces with loud music and voices.

The council plays loud classical music at night between midnight and 6am to discourage people from sleeping in the square, a practice started in 2012 under the LNP administration.

US homeless student population reaches 1.5m, the highest in a decade

Families receive food at the Los Angles Mission homeless shelter in December 2019. Photograph: Christian Monterrosa/EP

The number of public school students experiencing homelessness in the US has increased 15% in the past three years, reaching its highest number in more than a decade.

More than 1.5 million students reported experiencing homelessness during the 2017-18 school year, according to a study by the National Center for Homeless Education, with California at the forefront with 263,000 students.

The 2017-18 number was the highest number that the NCHE has reported since it began tracking this data in 2004, George Hancock, the center director, told the Guardian. “We’re seeing it throughout the country,” he said.

However, the number of students living in unsheltered situations, such as on the streets, spiked by 137% to more than 102,000 in the past three years.

Berlin Freezes Rents for 5 Years in a Bid to Slow Gentrification

Rental prices on more than 1.5 million Berlin apartments will be frozen or lowered for five years as a result of new legislation aimed at halting a recent spike in rents that is driving out older and lower-income residents.

The measure, which lawmakers approved on Thursday and which is to take effect next month, is an attempt by Berlin’s leftist government to slow the gentrification of a city that built a reputation on a creative scene but is being squeezed by real estate investors and infrastructure projects.

“We have created an instrument that will stop the partially absurd price developments for the next five years,” Katrin Lompscher, Berlin’s senator for city development and living, said at a news conference on Friday. “It is up to politicians to create the basic conditions for lower- and middle-class earners to be able to afford to live in Berlin.”

This unique program is saving young veterans from homelessness

The number of veterans at risk of homelessness is rising but a program targeting younger ones has found a “bricks and mortar” approach is helping turn that figure around.

 

How to build a feminist city

In 2013 in Delhi, a city still reeling from the brutal gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on a city bus a year earlier, Dr Kalpana Viswanath and Ashish Bashu co-founded SafetiPin.

The app, which allows users to rate public areas on safety criteria and to pinpoint areas of concern, now has over 51,000 data points in its home city alone. They highlight lighting, visibility, transportation, density and more, and together create a map of exactly where and how the design of the city itself disadvantages women.

SafetiPin and other innovations like it are part of a growing movement around “women-led” or “feminist” cities. These initiatives and campaigns aim to bring a gender perspective to urban planning, transport design and infrastructure in order to create cities that work for everyone.

Visible homelessness is up. But don’t forget the hidden pain of Britain’s sofa surfers

It’s not often you’re led to consider your own birth in terms of convenience. Over the past few years I’ve led myself to the knowledge that my arrival, in the early 1990s, must have come as a relief for my parents, even if they never framed it that way to themselves.

Their lives were full of cares and stresses – some minor, some not. At the forefront was their housing situation, a blend of precarity and claustrophobia: what we would call “legal homelessness”, then as now. They spent that part of their lives between my grandmother’s housing association flat in Catford, south-east London, and the spare beds and sofas of various friends and family. My birth offered the promise of a modest council flat, a solid enough base for a less immediately difficult future.

There is another term for that kind of dependence on the goodwill and tolerance of others: sofa surfing. At the end of 2019, newly released research from the homelessness charity Crisis revealed the contemporary scale of an issue that has rarely before received serious scrutiny. Their findings are the latest attempt to articulate the realities underpinning what is the most common, and commonly misunderstood, form of “hidden homelessness” in the country.

Most poor people in the world are women; Australia is no exception

Most of the poor people in the world are women. In no country on earth are women economically equal to men, and Australia is no exception. Research from Acoss and the University of New South Wales last year showed that a higher share of people living in poverty in Australia are women.

The experience of living below the breadline in our very wealthy nation is a gendered one, for reasons that are complex and intertwined. As women progress through life, they encounter a series of barriers and setbacks that simply do not encumber men in the same way.

The cause of gendered poverty is structural. It is entrenched in our workplace settings, and embedded in our personal relationships. It is at play at every stage of a woman’s life, from childhood to the grave, making its mark on our education, our employment, our homes, our familial responsibilities and our retirement options.

How do Australia’s young people want to live?

Something that Councils always ask about is what type of housing do people really want to live in, as opposed to what they are living in? There is often the suspicion that people are living in housing that is not their first choice, and that the market is not providing what households are truly looking for.

This is especially the case with young people. So I thought I’d start by having a look at how young people, those aged 18-24 years, in Australia are living. I can almost hear lots of you answering this question for yourselves – at home with mum and dad!

For this age group, that’s pretty much spot on. Across Australia, 55% of people aged 18 to 24 years are living with their parents or a guardian. This is generally due to many of them continuing into post school education and having lower incomes. However, this trend does differ between the states. In Northern Territory, 41% of young people live with their parents, compared to 60% in New South Wales.