With a growing body of evidence backing the highly supportive Housing First approach, including the recent evaluation of the Aspire SIB, why has it not been funded and adopted more extensively across Australia?

Homelessness is a significant and complex issue that is often met with fragmented and inadequate responses. In 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated that the population of people experiencing homelessness in Australia was over 116,000, with around 8,200 people sleeping rough on Census night.

There are solutions to addressing and eventually ending homelessness. The Centre for Social Impact put forward five key policy actions in a report released earlier this year. One specific action is the adoption of Housing First supportive models of care, which have increasingly been trialled in Australia.

Housing First is an approach to housing and supporting people experiencing chronic homelessness. Programs applying this approach typically include intensive case management and specialised supports alongside permanent housing.

Evaluations of programs in Australia as well as internationally have consistently demonstrated the success of the model for people experiencing chronic homelessness as well as for governments through the resulting cost savings.

Barriers to embedding this approach in the policy and service delivery landscape include the disconnect between the funding of program costs and the resulting savings across government agencies; the complexity of reforming the homelessness service system; and the shortage of social and affordable housing.

This article looks at what the Housing First approach is, the findings of evaluations of this approach (including outcomes achieved and why this approach works), and then explores why these pilots haven’t yet become standard policy.