With her possessions destroyed by fire, living in community housing and no superannuation to fall back on, Keki, a former journalist and law student, never expected to find herself on the front line of the housing crisis at the age of 72.
“I never thought I’d have to do this. I thought I’d just be using private rentals forever,” Keki, who asked not to use her surname, said.
Before the blaze, she was focused on getting enough money together to buy an apartment or move to Bali, where living costs are cheaper.
But that all changed one night in February as she was lying in bed and flames took hold of her living room curtains. Any furniture or electronics untouched by fire in her granny flat were destroyed by smoke.
It was devastating. Afterwards, she had nowhere to go and little to fall back on, as she had used up her superannuation to care for her terminally ill siblings. She spent the next two weeks in hotels before landing in crisis accommodation.
“It was a pretty horrible time,” Keki said. “You can be on the straight and narrow and doing fine. The housing crisis is one of the reasons why this happened to me.”
Until this point, Keki had been able to find and afford new leases, but it was no longer so straightforward.
The median weekly rent has risen to $580 in Melbourne and $470 in regional Victoria, and fewer than one in six new lettings are “affordable” for low-income households, according to Homes Victoria’s most recent rental report.
About17,000 women in insecure housing were assisted by specialist homelessness services last financial year – about 46 a day on average, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data shows. About 14,700 men the same age also needed help.
More than 1 per cent of the Australian population – 289,000 people – were supported by these services over the 12-month period, with one in six aged under 10. People over 55 and those with First Nations backgrounds are the fastest growing client groups since 2019.
Helen* hit the road the moment her living situation became unsafe in late 2024.
Money was already tight after the then 60-year-old lost her job, but she never expected to spend the next 16 months alternating between house sitting, pet sitting and sleeping in her car.
Sometimes, she would drive to camping grounds in regional Victoria or pay for a night at an unpowered caravan park site to just use public showers and laundry. Feeling vulnerable at night, she learnt to rely on a yoghurt tub as her toilet after dark. Winter was particularly challenging.
“You lie awake at night, and you think, ‘Oh, I just want a home, I want a toilet, I want a shower’, and then you think, ‘Oh my god, then I’m going to have to pay minimum $350 a week,’” she said.
Few friends or family knew of her situation, mainly because she didn’t want to be a burden.
“You’re too young and too fit to go into aged care, and you’re too old to compete with a lot of the rentals,” Helen said. “Most people live in denial; they think money equates to safety, but we’re so close to it. You could have a wonderful job, and then you come down with an illness that drains every resource you have and lose your house.”
Troy Martin, a community health nurse at Launch Housing’s Southbank crisis accommodation, said many older people he had met at the service hid their living situation from adult children.
Some clients are rough sleepers, while others who experience different forms of housing insecurity or homelessness may still be in paid work, but no matter their circumstances, their need for help often extends beyond just shelter.
Martin has encountered people with decades of inconsistent healthcare, as well as family violence victim-survivors stopped from attending appointment by their abusers or those who lost touch with GPs because they were too afraid to return to an area from which they escaped.
“We had someone who was from a very affluent Melbourne suburb that fled due to family violence and didn’t have anywhere to go [because] that family violence had leached so far into that person’s social supports and network that they felt like they had no one to turn to,” he said.
There has been a 33 per cent increase in women over 55 seeking help from Launch over the past five years, as well as a jump in pensioners and elderly people reaching out.
Chief executive Sherri Bruinhout attributes it partly to the aged pension or a person’s superannuation payments not keeping up with rising housing costs, while for women in particular it can be the cumulative effect of a lifetime in lower paying jobs, career breaks to care for others, low superannuation or violence.
“I met a woman in her late 70s applying for student housing – not that she was a student – but she was applying to rent in student housing because she couldn’t maintain her one-bedroom flat any more,” Bruinhout said.
“Women’s homelessness looks like couch-surfing, it looks like sleeping in cars, it looks like trading a night’s accommodation for an unsafe or unhealthy situation.”
More than 57,000 households made new applications for public (state-run) or community (not-for-profit) housing through the Victorian Housing Register as of March.
Bruinhout said that while more social housing was set to become available in the next few years after announcements from state and federal governments, an even greater pipeline was needed to counter decades of underinvestment.
La Trobe University social policy senior lecturer Jacqui Theobald said that while alarm bells had been ringing about the increasing number of older women plunged into housing insecurity, the lack of affordable rentals and placements in government housing was now dire, as demand outstripped supply.
She said stigma and safety concerns held many people back from asking for help, particularly after a lifetime in conventional housing.
“A lot of people tend to point the finger and think this must be something they’ve done wrong, their responsibility, their lack of preparation or planning, but actually, there are structural factors surrounding this,” she said. “For women, it can be a combination of things like a relationship breakdown, family violence or a lack of access to affordable and safe housing.”
Keki recently moved into a community housing development she adores after a two-month stay at Launch’s women-only supported crisis accommodation She-Oak Place, which finally gave her time to relax and recover after the fire.
She landed there after reaching out to her local council for help, and encouraged anyone else in housing stress to do the same.
Helen is also deeply relieved, securing a private rental with Launch’s help, where she treasures time tending to her garden and simple pleasures like buying fresh food to store in her own fridge.
But she will never take it for granted, recently cutting down on driving to save on fuel costs and eating plainly so she could afford to get ahead on her rent.
“People don’t want to know how close every one of us are to it,” she said.
* Helen is a pseudonym.
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