By CHERIE DONNELLAN
THE region’s housing assistance falls well short of demand, a Barwon homelessness services coordinator has admitted.
Barwon Housing and Homelessness Support Service’s Andrew Edgar said the service was short of resources after new data revealed 56,000 Victorians sought crisis help in just six months last year.
“We currently don’t have the capacity to match demands so we prioritise people and work with them as they need,” Mr Edgar said.
An Australian Council of Social Service report found 66 per cent of housing and homelessness services “could not meet demand” but identified it as “the single biggest need” for crisis help seekers.
Mr Edgar said homelessness was “not a new phenomenon” but that poor housing affordability rates was largely responsible for a 20 per cent increase in Victoria’s homelessness rates in the past five years.
He had “not yet” seen a “huge flow on effect” from the major job losses with companies like Ford, Alcoa, Shell and Target but believed it could “become an issue”.
Latest Census data revealed 585 Geelong people were without permanent and comfortable accommodation, but Mr Edgar, who contributed to the data collation, said that could represent as little as one third of the real figure.
“Homelessness is transient and hidden in nature so collating data is inherently difficult.”
Mr Edgar said that while the region had benefited from projects like the Norlane-Corio Nation Building project, support services needed to continually lobby State Government for homelessness assistance grants.
