Amanda Bresnan MLA, ACT Greens Housing Spokesperson, has pointed to new housing figures published in the Canberra Times today as evidence of the need to grow the supply of social housing in the ACT.

“What this information from Housing ACT shows is:

• that people remain stuck in crisis accommodation for too long,

• that the Housing ACT ‘high needs’ category is almost a ‘holding pen’ for people waiting to get onto the ‘priority’ list,

• that we do need more public and community housing in Canberra, and

• that we should be looking at ways to address the lack of affordable rental properties.” Ms Bresnan said today.

“In the past twenty years the whole idea of public housing has changed from being something that was available across our community to being limited to the very poor with high and complex needs.”

“I appreciate what a difficult job Housing ACT has in managing the demand for housing, and that the Federal housing stimulus funding will have an impact.”

“However, it’s time we started to undo some of those changes in the interest of making public housing itself socially and financially sustainable, and to provide an effective buffer to the low cost private rental market which, by looking at the current waiting lists, is clearly not meeting people’s needs.”

“That is why increasing the supply of public and affordable housing is such a big part of our agenda in the Assembly.” Ms Bresnan said.

Tags: housing

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Amanda Bresnan, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.