Homelessness and Ballarat
With the recent announcement of the new Ballarat suburb “Winter Valley” will it see the shortage in housing and emergency accommodation drop? The city is already battling with more people moving into the small rural city. However while the increasing demand for services provided by organisations such as UnitingCare and The Salvation Army suggests they struggle to keep up and will only get worse with the increasing population. Will we see an improvement?
There are several reasons why people become homeless mental disability and family violence just to name a couple. In 2012, UnitingCare was contacted 7600 times for access to homelessness services. Ten years prior (2002) the figure was almost half that, at 4000. UnitingCare
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The Housing first model has been proven to create an incentive for people to get their lives back on track, it’s an approach that centers on providing homeless people with housing quickly and then providing services as needed. What make the Housing First approach different from other strategies is that there is an immediate and primary focus on helping individuals and families quickly access and sustain permanent housing, rather than an incentive to have problems that lead to homelessness. “We’ve saved millions (dollars) on this,” Gordon Walker said, “though the state hasn’t tallied the exact amount”. It basically says that giving people with problems that aren 't coping with the current system a stable environment to become productive actually costs the taxpayer less money, which over the longer term will be better for you as a taxpayer. Secondly, it increases our real standard of living reducing the amount desperate drug addicted people on the