The housing crisis has pushed thousands onto social housing waiting lists. How could a key government policy help?

Dean McCarthy believes social housing has saved lives. (ABC News: Dominic Cansdale)

Dean McCarthy has taken plenty of hits, but housing almost took him out.

“Look, I’ve had over 50 general anaesthetic surgeries in my life,” the 62-year-old says.

An accident as a younger man resulted in years of hospital visits and ongoing health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

He says reactive arthritis “galloped” though his body, leaving him unable to work since 2009.

“I had very good job, good paying,” he says.

“I went from that to nothing and the rents became unaffordable.”

He faced homelessness until he was caught by a safety net he had almost forgotten he had applied for: social housing.

“I could have become homeless. I was stressing and I was sick,” he says.

He is one of the lucky ones.

There are an estimated 175,000 households on social housing waiting lists across the country.

More than 43,000 people are on the waitlist in Mr McCarthy’s home state of Queensland.

‘Vertical village’ in the suburbs

Now with a place to call his own and savings from his affordable rent, Mr McCarthy can buy things like fresh fruit and veggies.

He says his health conditions have improved greatly.

“The more you stress, your inflammatory levels go up, the worse your arthritis gets,” he says.

His Gold Coast home is only a short walk to the water and nearby shopping centres.

“It’s totally the opposite to what I imagined … just absolutely lovely,” he says.

The complex has been architecturally designed to increase housing density in an already built-up area.

A single suburban house has been replaced with 20 one-bedroom apartments.

Mr McCarthy says it is a lifesaver.

“This has saved countless lives, social housing. We need more,” he says.

The building is an example of what experts describe as the “missing middle” of housing supply, which has been highlighted as a key to easing Australia’s housing crisis.

Architect Paul Focic, who designed the project for the Queensland government, calls it “a little vertical village” and says it is proof that built-up areas can accommodate more homes.

He says similar buildings can be replicated across the country to destigmatise sorely-needed social housing projects, which are often thought of as urban monoliths.

“That was really a kind of a key ambition for us,” Mr Focic says.

“Fundamentally, we think housing is a human right.”

He welcomes a renewed focus on public housing in the federal government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)

Along with the federal government’s broader housing policy, the HAFF aims to help pay for community housing projects.

“This can be replicated in many ways. If [similar projects] were made possible by the HAFF fund, this would create an amazing legacy for Australians,” Mr Focic says.

“Now is a real opportunity and a moment in time and I think we need to grasp it.”

Is the funding enough?

University of Queensland economist John Quiggin says the $10 billion fund is cosmetic.

He says it appears as though the fund has been designed to look bigger than it is because the funding isn’t directly spent on building public housing.

The money has been put into an investment fund with the idea that the dividends are invested into subsidising social housing.

Before it became law, the policy was amended to guarantee that at least $500 million from the fund would be spent on community housing each year.

Professor Quiggin is unsure if the program will make a significant impact.

“If it was on the scale [the government] were saying, when people were talking about the housing crisis, they’d be saying ‘well, we’ve put in $10 billion, we’re really doing something’,” he says.

“But as far as I can see when housing prices rise nobody much talks about the funding anymore.”

Outrun by growth

More than 640,000 Australian households have unmet housing needs, according to a study from the UNSW City Futures Research Centre and Community Housing Industry Association.

This could blow out to 940,000 households by 2041 based on projected household growth.

The government says the HAFF will build 30,000 dwellings in the next five years, which works out to 6,000 homes per year.

But social housing has fallen behind the nation’s housing stock for at least the past decade and the HAFF won’t keep up with forecast demand, says Liam Davies, a research fellow at RMIT’s Center for Urban Research.

He says it has led to an annual proportional decline of 6,900 dwellings in that period.

“What this policy will do is it will slow the decline of social housing, but it won’t reverse the decline,” he says.

Dr Davies says the solution lies in past policies, when there was much greater government intervention into housing.

He says government development in the decades after WWII laid the groundwork for the “Australian dream” of home ownership.

“[In previous decades] government supported people to buy housing through keeping it cheap, now we see government supporting people to buy housing through making finance more accessible,” he says.

“These are two very different approaches with very different outcomes.”

‘Foundation to build on 

The Community Housing Industry Association welcomes the fund as a good start, but says it is only one piece of the puzzle in a very complex problem.

Chief executive Wendy Hayhurst says it will take at least two decades to get social housing on track.

“Before you gasp, we just think that’s realistic,” she says.

“What we don’t need is for this program to stop after it’s built 30,000 homes.”

She has called for the fund to be doubled in the next federal budget.

“I don’t think anyone, including the government, thinks that 30,000 homes is going to be sufficient,” Ms Hayhurst says.

“At the moment, we’ve been pretty lucky in that we haven’t really seen much [public] agitation.

“But you can see people are starting to get angry about the fact that can’t find housing.

“Rents are really high and it’s the people at the bottom who suffer the most.”