A vacant Trust home at Kilburn.
Source: The Advertiser
HOUSING SA homes sit vacant for an average of nearly a month, previously secret documents reveal.
Housing SA refuses to release the information in its annual report, but documents it was forced to release under the Freedom of Information Act show it takes an average of 24.4 days to move sometimes desperate tenants into taxpayer-owned housing. There is a waiting list of 22,902 people for Housing SA homes.
It can take many months to tenant some “lettable” homes, and the average figure doesn’t include houses which are listed as “unlettable” or not ready because of major maintenance.
Housing Trust Tenants Association spokesman Tony Elmers said many houses took far longer than the average of 24.4 days to be occupied.
“That is the average but it is a hell of a lot longer than five weeks many times and I have seen them left empty for two years,” he said.
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Family First MP Robert Brokenshire said he has sought the information to find out why the homeless, including some people living in their cars over Christmas, could not be housed more quickly.
He said Housing SA should deploy enough staff to achieve the private sector practice of “vacate one day, clean the next and move in that day or the day after”.
“When you’re living in a car or homeless, a month is a long time, or if you are a domestic violence victim,” he said.
“The problem is caused by massive bureaucracy, red tape and administrative delays in getting the right check for this and paperwork for that and so on.
“It is about policy and paperwork over-riding good service delivery.”
In the worst area for filling houses, southern Adelaide, it took the department an average 32.3 days
Housing SA applicant Valerie Finicins, 65, moved to Berri four years ago so she could afford a private rental, but has applied to Housing SA to live in Adelaide so she can receive cancer treatment.
“I am at my wits’ end, stuck between a rock and a hard place, but I have been told I will have to wait for up to a year,” she said.
Mr Elmers said one house in Kilburn had been vacant since a tree had fallen on it on September 8, and the roof had been repaired.
Defending the delays, Housing Minister Jennifer Rankine said SA had the second fastest turn-around of any state or territory.
She confirmed the Kilburn property had been vacant since September, when it required a new roof, asbestos testing, a new front veranda, floor coverings and appliances. The work was completed in December.
“The property is currently with the maintenance division of Housing SA for final checks before it will be available to a prospective tenant,” she said.
UnitingCare Wesley spokesman Mark Henley, who described himself as a “defender” of Housing SA, said the problem was created because the department had been forced into the role of welfare-housing provider for people with multiple social problems and not an operator of rent-subsidised homes for those who could not afford market rent.
“There is a bit of a staffing issue but there is also getting all the support services together for tenants who have multiple problems,” he said.
“It is no longer a housing service, it is accommodation plus a whole range of other services which these people need.
“The Housing Trust was established to provide good quality, but affordable, modest housing and it was an economic initiative because originally the objective was to ensure that SA could remain competitive with the eastern states and to do that it had to have a cheaper final price for manufactured goods and the way to do that was to provide through the Housing Trust good housing at a lower rate than interstate.
“What happened during the 1980s and the 1990s is that governments believed developers could provide low-cost housing and so Housing SA is a welfare provider for people who haven’t got a home, and have all these other problems like domestic violence, drug and alcohol problems, and others.
“What happens then is that all the other underfunded services just shove people off to Housing SA.”