Nowhere to live: Aboriginal Housing supply dries up

Nowhere to live: Aboriginal Housing supply dries up
Image: Just 125 dwellings were built in NSW in the past 10 years. Source: Treaty Republic

EXCLUSIVE

Just 125 Aboriginal Housing properties were built in the past 10 years, Housing NSW has revealed, while almost 2500 applicants remain on the waiting list statewide.

Only eight of those dwellings were constructed in the major urban areas of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, despite those cities being home to more than 40 per cent of the state’s Indigenous population.

Housing NSW provided the figures in response to questions posed by a state parliamentary inquiry into social, public and affordable housing.

Census data shows that large Indigenous communities live in the local government areas of Blacktown, Penrith, Campbelltown, Wyong, Gosford, Liverpool and the City of Sydney. And yet only one dwelling was built in one of those areas – Penrith – over the past 10 years.

The 125 dwellings cost a total of $51.2 million, at an average of just over $400,000. But the constructions fail to make a significant dent in the 2417 applicants on the Aboriginal Housing waiting list as of February 2014.

Mick Mundine, chief executive of the Aboriginal Housing Company, a not-for-profit community housing provider, was shocked at the high cost of providing so few dwellings.

“Somebody’s making a profit out of Aboriginal money,” he said. “It’s like a loaf of bread – [they] take a slice but leave the crumbs.”

Mr Mundine said the number of people waiting to be housed needs to be addressed urgently.

“How are you going to ever attack that waiting list if you are only building 12 houses a year?”

More housing must be constructed in city areas, including inner Sydney, he said.

“The facts show that the population is in the urban areas, and yet they’re building these houses in country areas,” Mr Mundine told City News.

“That’s not to take away from the needs of the country. But I don’t feel like we’re getting value for money.

A spokesperson for the Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) said its Aboriginal Housing Office receives funding through the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing to build homes in remote areas of NSW. The scheme aims to redress overcrowding, homelessness, poor housing conditions and severe housing shortages in remote Indigenous communities

“This has allowed the AHO to build and buy 175 homes for social housing in these high areas of need since 2008,” the spokesperson said.

“This is in addition to the 125 homes built over the past 10 years.”

Decisions on where to build new housing are made predominantly on the basis of need, the spokesperson said. But City of Sydney councillor Linda Scott said it was disappointing that no Aboriginal Housing had been built within the City LGA for at least a decade.

“Without affordable housing, particularly affordable Aboriginal housing, our city is fast losing its diversity,” she said.

“Looking to the future, serious investment in infrastructure for housing and transport from local government will be required to ensure Sydney’s inequality is not worsened.”

The NSW Land and Housing Corporation’s annual reports show that a total of 536 properties were constructed in 2012/13, more than a thousand fewer than the previous year. The total number of properties managed by the LAHC also fell by 1328.

The parliamentary inquiry asked whether all those properties had been sold. Housing NSW responded that “these figures are a combination of sales of residential and commercial properties, and completions of private sector leases for public housing”.

Government grants to LAHC also fell by more than $60 million in 2012/13, and it spent $42 million less on property maintenance.

Public housing is not the only mechanism by which FACS helps people find homes. It facilitates services such as the Rentstart bond loans, to help clients establish and maintain tenancies in the private rental market.

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