Greens lead Senate candidate David Shoebridge and Eden-Monaro Greens candidate Vivian Harris have visited Far South Coast services to discuss federal policy to address the housing crisis.
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The candidates, along with Bega Valley Shire Councillor Cathy Griff, met with representatives from the Social Justice Advocates and South East Women And Children Services (SEWACS) on Friday, April 22.
Mr Shoebridge said he had been travelling around the state and no matter where he went, people were reporting to him having been affected by the crisis.
"The housing crisis here in the Bega Valley Shire, in the electorate of Eden-Monaro, is perhaps the worst that I have seen," he said.
"You have a vacancy here in the private rental market of 0.5% and the proportion of housing stock that's public housing and available for people who desperately need it is only in the order of 2 or 3 per cent of the housing stock.
"That's less than half of what you see in other parts of the state, where it's already woefully inadequate."
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He said the private housing market had been "failing", but the answer to the crisis was not to produce more apartments and homes with large asking prices, or housing with rising weekly rental prices, but to invest in public and social housing.
"That's why the Greens are bringing to the federal election a policy of building one million new public and affordable homes over the next decade," he said.
In the Eden-Monaro electorate, he said a minimum of between 3000 and 4000 housing units would be needed to adequately address the "proportionally greater need" for affordable and public housing in this part of the state.
He said the housing stock would also be "water and energy efficient" and be built with "immediate disability access" in order to create "universally accessible" housing.
Youth homelessness case worker for SEWACS Kylie Furnell said a housing policy that actually aimed to address the deep-rooted issues in the Bega Valley would go a long way in helping the people she assists on a daily basis.
"Young people I often work with are at the bottom rung of being able to get rentals, and any change in the system where people are housed gives young people more opportunity because there's less competition," she said.
"I would welcome more social housing stock. A lot of people we see now are young families and so they're given the opportunity to go into those public houses system and then you can of course work with those young people to build those skills and resilience."
Ms Furnell said waiting times to access social housing in the Bega Valley was anywhere from five to ten years, depending on the size of the house. She said the region was also considered a "high demand area", which meant applicants had to justify why they wanted to stay in the area.
SEAWACS regional manager Caroline Long said there was a huge backlog of families waiting for appropriate housing and it felt like a "funnel system".
She said although a long waitlist had "always been there", the Bega Valley had only become a "high demand" area for social housing in the last three to five years.
"Prior to that we had priority housing so you could get on those lists and you did see outcomes, priority housing now is a joke," she said.
Mr Shoebridge said the Greens would also need work in conjunction with local councils to come up with solutions to the number of houses in the region that sit empty due to holiday letting or holiday housing.
"There's something deeply wrong with our policy response when we have people homeless walking down the street where 20% of the houses are empty - by choice," he said.
"We should be coming up with creative solutions to encourage more houses to go into the long-term rental market, such as by having additional local levies and rates if you choose to keep your house vacant while we ramp up to build the one million public and affordable houses over the next decade."
Councillor Cathy Griff, who has represented the Greens on BVSC since 2016, said in terms of council efforts, their Draft Housing Strategy remained under discussion, but she said it was close to getting approved.
She felt the strategy would allow more opportunity for council, state, and federal to work together to create a three-tiered approach to the housing crisis.
On a local level, she thought such a strategy was great to have but it would need impetus from councillors and the community in order to enact.
"It's very easy to have a good strategy, but there's always going to be competing interests.
"Traditionally housing hasn't been a local government issue, but we now recognise it's everyone's problem and I think as a councillors you see it everywhere, all of us have seen it, including in staff we're tried to employ who can't get housing in the area," she said.
Eden-Monaro Greens candidate Vivian Harris said she had spoken to many businesses in the electorate who were struggling to employ staff due to the low housing stock.
Mr Shoebridge said the Greens federal policy to create affordable and public housing solutions in the electorate of Eden-Monaro would be a "game changer" and he claimed it would "largely eradicate structural homelessness" in the region.