Seniors Housing & Healthcare Trends

LOS ANGELES: Older women in who don’t own their own home and are planning to retire could be plunged into poverty, and it can happen to anyone.

Affordability and availability are the biggest contributors to single female seniors not being able to find a roof for their heads.

Shelter SA executive director Alice Clark said rents had gone up “dramatically” since the pandemic started. Also, people would be “plunged into poverty” if they didn’t own the home they were living in when they stopped work and planned to rely on income support.

“The age pension was never designed as a housing subsidy,” she said.

“It was for homeowners essentially to have a little bit of money to put food on the table and live out their old age.”

Dr Clark is also chair of the state government’s Older Women’s Housing Taskforce, which met for the first time in January. The taskforce was set up in October by state human services minister Nat Cook. By the end of this year, Cook and state women’s minister Katrine Hildyard aim to present to government some ideas about how to improve housing security for women aged over 55.

The unavailability, unaffordability trap

This is where the gender divide widens – women often don’t have as much super as men to fall back on in retirement, and that may be from taking time out of the workforce to raise children, to care for family and having lesser paid jobs over time than their male counterparts.

The rental market has also gotten incredibly tight; SQM Research data shows Adelaide’s vacancy rate has been generally less than 0.5 per cent since January 2022, and the last time it was so low was about November 2010 at one per cent.

“It’s no longer the case that if you need a cheap rental, you can just move to the country and there’ll be a house waiting for you. This means there are hundreds of applicants for every one property that becomes available and there are fewer properties becoming available,” Dr Clark said.

Single women can be discriminated against as potential tenants, partially on age and also their low income, Dr Clark said.

While it’d be easy to say such women should get a job or the government needs to do more to help them, throwing money at the situation wouldn’t necessarily help their plight. Dr Clark has seen instances where women get separated at older age and if the family home is sold and the female gets a portion of the funds, that money is too little to cover the cost of buying another property outright or it’s slowly used up to supplement their income to pay for a private rental.

“What’s happening is that there’s sort of this myth that if you’re a working woman who’s owned a home at some point, you’ve been married, you’ve raised your children and everything, that this won’t happen to you. But that is simply not true,” she said.

“There’s women who actually don’t need a social worker, they don’t need support services. They had good jobs, they’re educated, they’ve had families, and they’re falling into this ‘unavailability, unaffordability’ trap.”

“You could give them all the money in the world and they’re still not going to be able to get a place because there’s so few vacancies and obviously we don’t have a source of funds that can give people all the money in the world.”

Can governments help?

Dr Clark said while such a group would be “perfect” candidates for public housing, the demand for it across the country far exceeds supply and trying to build enough properties to accommodate everyone would take years to do.

While it may seem like a hopeless situation, Dr Clark is adamant that the taskforce has such women at the forefront of their minds.

“There’s a bit of cynicism around, about, “oh, another task force, oh, this is just busy work, nothing’s going to change”, and I would argue against that,” she said.

“This task force is an action group, so we are not just going to sit around and talk to ourselves and write a paper. We are developing very clear, short, medium, and long term actions for not just government, but all sections of the community to act upon, to ease this situation that’s going on.”

Besides increasing the supply of social housing, other items the taskforce is looking at include a home share program, where people who own their own homes, might be living alone, getting older, can be safely matched with people who need a home. There is also a review of the Residential Tenancies Act in SA at the moment, which the taskforce is having input into, for example what can legislation do to improve security in private rental for everyone, but for older women as well.

“Everything’s on the table, it’s not just, ‘oh, it’s all government and we’re all just waiting for them to spend money’. We’re looking at land use, we’re looking at the provision of services as well, like how can they better serve older people who often might not think of themselves as homeless, and therefore might not look for a service that can help them. So I think I would like to say that definitely we do care about these women in these situations, we are working hard to make things better and they are definitely worthy of our care.”

Money already on the table

Nat Cook said South Australia has a government-owned mortgage provider that specialises in lending to people on low incomes – including those receiving Centrelink payments. Products including shared equity loans can help people to stay in their home if they become single or use the proceeds of a property settlement to buy a new home. Where this doesn’t happen, public housing and private rental supports are available.

The government is also working through allocation and tenancy arrangements for its election promise of 400 new affordable homes and refurbishing of another 350. The new homes include a 50-unit development with onsite supports for people exiting homelessness. Early this week, the state government also announced it planned to built an extra 564 public housing homes on top of the 400 mentioned at the election.

Housing SA’s Private Rental Assistance Program can save people up to $3150 when they rent a home with rent up to $450 per week. Under the program, tenants avoid having to pay a bond (up to six weeks rent) and Housing SA pays for one week’s rent in advance. Renters who receive a range of Centrelink payments may also receive an ongoing rent assistance payment of $50 to $100 per week depending on who lives in their household.

“Single older women are already one of the largest tenant groups in public housing noting that Housing SA has been developing and managing homes for older people – and older women in particular – since the 1950s,” Ms Cook said.

For personal safety, public housing tenants are regularly supported with home modifications to improve safety if they are escaping family violence and our homelessness system includes around $15 million per year for dedicated family violence support services. The state government also extended funding for a domestic violence housing and support pilot program that helps victims and perpetrators, with housing for the latter group helping to prevent them returning to the family home or their ex-partner’s new accommodation.

In addition to the $177.5 million public housing package, the government has been working on a range of housing reforms and is partnering with the federal government on its $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund and the Housing Accord – that together aim to deliver 50,000 new social and affordable homes over five years from mid-2024 across the country.