Tasmania's housing waitlist longest it’s ever been

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Homelessness services in Tasmania are inundated with demand, with crisis accommodation having to turn people away. The state's social housing wait list is longer than ever and people are waiting a year and a half for a home.

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00:00By nine o'clock every morning each bed at this crisis accommodation centre in Hobart has been

00:07booked by someone who's homeless. Another dozen or so people call but miss out, a number that's

00:12risen in recent years. We're seeing people who maybe their lease has come to an end and they

00:18might be on a disability support pension they just can't afford the rent. Two new bathrooms

00:22have just been built funded through community donations. We always want people to come in and

00:27just feel like whatever we've got is theirs to use. Tasmania's social housing wait list is the

00:33longest it's ever been. In May 2021 around 4,000 people were on the list. Now that's jumped to

00:405,069. The average wait time to be offered a house is 82.2 weeks or more than 18 months. Ryan Davey

00:48has first-hand experience. He and his two children spent two years on the wait list before securing

00:54social housing. I had to live day by day and that hyper vigilance is really stressful and

01:01takes a lot of energy away from trying to move forward out of that hole. This is a crisis make

01:07make no bones about it. The Tasmanian Council of Social Service has launched a new online dashboard

01:13to track the crisis and progress to address it. It says while the state government is on track with

01:19its 10,000 social and affordable homes by 2032 target that goal isn't adequately addressing the

01:25crisis. We would strongly urge the government to have a look at the targets. Are they adequate? Do we

01:31need to go back to the drawing board and do some more modelling in this situation? Tascos suggests the

01:38government needs to double the number of social homes it's trying to build. The government meanwhile says

01:43it's going full steam ahead with delivering its ambitious commitment and more than 40 percent have

01:48already been delivered ahead of schedule. Hobart City Mission is encouraging the community to get

01:53involved in its annual Sleep Rough fundraising event later this month. Learn what it is we do so that you

01:59can go out and agitate and maybe push back to government and say we need to do more as a collective. Raising much

02:06needed funds and attention.

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