Albany’s Vital Signs: Evidence base key to focusing ‘shared vision’ of community to alleviate homelessness

The recent release of the Albany Community Foundation’s Vital Signs report was the culmination of more than a year’s work collating information about the community. As the first of its kind, the report serves as a baseline for future reporting and a catalyst for change. Earlier in the project’s development, four themes most relevant to the Albany community were identified: health and resilience, housing and financial stress, belonging, and education and employment. In a four-week series, the Albany Advertiser will dive deeper into each area by talking to those involved in the focus groups behind the report. Housing and Financial Stress Housing availability and financial stress exacerbated by a widespread rise in the cost of living have been front of mind for the local community. Housing stress was one of ACF’s top priorities when it established its Housing Crisis Response Fund earlier this year, while Albany Youth Support Association and Advance Housing Limited have been trying to combat the issue through several projects. Both organisations played a key role in curating data for the Vital Signs report and their community-driven project, Connection Point, provided some of the most localised and up-to-date statistics in the report. AYSA chief executive Ian Clarke said it was an issue because many government departments could not provide “contemporary data”. “From a strategic and local planning perspective in the short and medium term we need to know what’s actually happening now in our community,” he said. “If you take the connectivity data we did in May, all of that is about us trying to get as contemporary data as we possibly can.” AHL chief executive John Lysaught said the broader community sector and different levels of government had been working hard to respond to increasingly evident issues “particularly over the last 18 months”. He said there was now a “shared vision” but limited resources meant accurate and up-to-date data was vital. “Limited resources means that we collectively have to have good data to make good decisions, like preventing duplication and ensuring those limited resources are applied in the most acute areas,” he said. Data gathered at the first Connection Point event in May showed there were at least 130 impacted by homelessness in Albany and that a high proportion of them were aged 20-39. ACF’s James Leiper said sourcing local data was key to the Vital Signs project. He said ACF had previously applied for funding to run a By Name Project — which involves actively collecting data on people experiencing homelessness to connect them with services — but was knocked back because “Albany doesn’t have a homelessness issue”. “It does but the data hasn’t been there to show that,” he said. The demand for more well-considered affordable housing options in Albany has been driven by a continued low rental vacancy rate — below one per cent since June 2020 — and a sizeable public housing waiting list. Mr Lysaught, Mr Clarke and Mr Leiper all agree that promoting mixed-value housing developments was critical to lifting the social outcomes for all. “We can still meet critical needs without creating hubs of disadvantage and combat NIMBYism and all those sorts of negative behaviour issues that come out of society,” Mr Lysaught said. Mr Clarke said places with a good mix of people in them created a certain standard of behaviours. “It behoves everyone to work together and provide the best for their community,” he said. The report also highlights the difference in relative advantage across various Albany suburbs using the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas measure. Lower King, Middleton Beach and Mt Clarence all fare comparatively well according to the Australian standard, but Lockyer, Gledhow, Milpara and Orana are much further back on the scale. Mr Leiper said ACF was very conscious its projects would not create “ghettos” by placing “people all in one spot or suburb”. “It’s not the best response for the community and it’s not the best response for the people living in those houses,” he said. “They just end up in a similar environment to what they already were. “It helps everyone if there is a greater mixture.” Albany’s population growth, which by some metrics such as the Regional Movers Index has increased dramatically in recent years, has led to significant upward pressure on the cost of housing. At the time of the 2021 census, 36 per cent of Albany rental households were reporting housing stress because more than 30 per cent of their income was dedicated to rent, for mortgaged households the figure was 15 per cent. The growth of Albany’s median house price, up 20 per cent since 2018, and the median rent, up 17.5 per cent in the last 12 months, have likely seen that number grow in the last two years. Vital Signs project co-ordinator Katie Arbuckle said one of the biggest things she took away was that rough sleeping was only a small aspect of homelessness and that the housing crisis extended towards those with a roof over their head as well. “It goes all the way up to people facing mortgage stress,” she said. “That all relates to supply and demand, if one segment is suffering it has that trickle-down effect.” Mr Clarke said the data was collated to inform the community so that Albany could continue to be “one of the best places to live in Australia”. “In order to continue to make this a really, really good place to live we need to ensure we keep people informed to plan for the future and put things in place for the betterment of the whole community,” he said. Mr Lysaught said people, organisations and governing bodies who try to ignore the report would do so at their own peril. “Ultimately we’ve all been quite vocal about the need for good quality local data to inform our decisions,” he said. “This is a great initial benchmark for that. “I don’t think there is an option to ignore it.” The full report can be found on the ACF website.