Housing stress, poverty and homelessness are all on the rise in South Australia. The rising rates of all three are driven by factors including low incomes, increasing rental costs, limited housing supply, insufficient social housing and under-resourced supports.
The Wyatt Trust recently commissioned new research to gather data and insights about where these challenges are hitting hardest in South Australia, and who is most affected.
The first stage of the project focused on desktop research - identifying where poverty is concentrated, which groups are at highest risk, and how housing policies at state and federal levels are shaping outcomes. That analysis led into a second phase: one-on-one interviews with stakeholders who helped refine and expand upon the findings.
The interviews brought to light issues that raw data alone couldn’t capture - from the loss of short-term housing options for young people to the financial barriers facing older women before pension age.
By mapping the current landscape in a two-stage process, the research captures the post-COVID context, identifies key population groups and regions most affected, and outlines opportunities for targeted, high-impact philanthropic investment by funders like Wyatt with limited resources relative to the cost of housing solutions.
Here, Per Capita’s Dr Kate Raynor, the project’s lead researcher and Director of the Centre
for Equitable Housing,
reflects on the key takeaways and where we should be looking for solutions.
Can you give an overview of your approach to the research project?
KR - The Wyatt Trust has been working in this space for some time, but the purpose of this research was to provide a statistical update to highlight which cohorts are disproportionately impacted, and how things may have shifted, especially after COVID.
The first phase looked at where poverty is most prevalent geographically and who is most likely to experience it, and what federal and state governments are doing in terms of housing stress and homelessness.
After that, we did 20 interviews to sense-check the findings with stakeholders. A lot of the recommendations from the desktop review were reflected in the conversations, but there was also much more nuance, and a few new recommendations that hadn’t come up in the first round.
Was there anything that surprised you from the research?
There wasn’t a theme that surprised me, but the scale definitely did. Adelaide and South Australia are interesting because the level of house price growth and rent increases is ridiculous. House prices went up across Australia after COVID, but South Australia really stands out. House prices increased 85 per cent in Adelaide, and 89 per cent in regional SA. Rent went up a massive 52 per cent.
What’s wild is that it took rental prices from affordable to unaffordable in about three years. It was a sudden and sharp shift.
I also expected young people would come up, but the degree to which they were mentioned, and the sense of hopelessness around that, was striking. There’s a sense that crisis accommodation doesn’t work anymore for young people because there’s nowhere to move them on to. It’s become so hard to exit young people into private rentals or social housing that services are saying, “If we can house someone for two years, that’s a win.” The difficulty in trying to deliver short-term housing for young people is that the next step just doesn’t exist.
One key issue is that it’s really hard to house young people in community housing. Youth Allowance is so low which means the amount they can pay in rent is tiny - too low for providers to make it work. In Queensland and some other states, there's a youth subsidy top-up for community housing providers. That doesn’t exist here.
There’s also a broader question about income support - not just for young people, but for women in their 50s and 60s.
We talk a lot about older women experiencing homelessness, and that’s true, but once you hit pension age, your income actually goes up a little, especially if you were previously on JobSeeker. So, the group that’s really in trouble is women in their 50s and 60s who can’t get a job because of ageism or sexism and who’ve been out of the workforce raising kids. That’s where people are really getting stuck.
What are the biggest opportunities for philanthropy to make a meaningful difference?
Some
of the themes that came through were about philanthropy generally, and some were specific to housing and poverty.
A key point was that philanthropy shouldn’t, and can’t, replace government. It can’t provide income top-ups at the scale required. But it can fill gaps in the system or bring people and resources together in ways that government can’t.
Philanthropy can also take on more risk. The ability to act with more humanity and with more trust is a strength.
There’s also a role for philanthropy to seed innovation - to be the startup capital for ideas that can later scale. Within housing, there’s a chance to use relatively small amounts of money for bigger impact like funding key staff roles, such as nurses doing outreach or specialist case managers.
There’s also a lot of government money flowing into bricks and mortar - especially through the Housing Australia Future Fund - but philanthropy could stack its funding alongside that to support wraparound services or new partnerships.
Brokerage funds were also seen as incredibly valuable and flexible.
What do you see as the best way to achieve progress on these issues?
I’m inspired by what Queensland is doing. They’ve just committed to 53,000 new social homes by 2044. That’s more than what Australia as a whole built in the past 20 years, to be delivered in just one state in the next two decades.
It’s bold. They did a housing needs assessment and said, “Right, we’re going to meet that need.” No other state is doing that. And I think if Queensland can do it, why can’t South Australia?
Yes, there are challenges - construction costs are high, there’s a labour shortage - but for years now, we’ve been watching social housing decline because of lack of political will. Social housing is affordable housing. So let’s build the houses.
South Australia is currently focused on land release and private sector supply but that’s a very roundabout way to get to affordability. We need more direct investment in social housing. That’s the solution.
Read the first output from this research, the Poverty and Housing in South Australia report, here.
