Homeless People in Australia living in Cheap Motels

The Sunday Telegraph July 04, 2010 12:00AM

THIS is home for desperate families in overcrowded western Sydney - a tiny room in a budget motel with no kitchen, no laundry and little hope.

Faced with a chronic shortage of public housing and the tightest rental market in history, desperate parents have been forced to raise their children in the motor-inns scattered along the busy Hume Highway.

Some have spent nearly two years there as "guests".

The Sunday Telegraph last week visited four motels - the Pop-In at Casula, the Fontainebleau Motor Inn and Liverpool City Motel at Liverpool, and the Grandstand Motel at Warwick Farm - and found a dozen families who had taken up residence because they could not find a unit or a house.

Families eat, sleep and play in the same tiny space. In one case, five people were sleeping in a single room no larger than 20s qm - their possessions stuffed in garbage bags in one corner.


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A tiny bar fridge stocked with milk, bread and butter, rows of shoes lined along the floor since there is no cupboard, and children's toys strewn across threadbare carpets are the only signs of normal family life.

Casula couple Jasmine Wortmann and Kevin Hussell have been bouncing from motel to motel for the past 14 months with their two daughters, Kaitlin, aged 3, and Emily, 1.

They bear the brunt of the crisis that new Prime Minister Julia Gillard alluded to last week when she announced she was putting the brakes on the nation's population growth.

"If you spoke to the people of western Sydney, for example, about a 'big Australia', they would laugh at you and ask you a very simple question: 'Where will these 40 million people go?'," Ms Gillard said.

Mr Hussell and his partner, who are on the waiting list for emergency public housing, file at least 10 private rental applications each week to no avail.

"They keep knocking us back because we have kids," Mr Hussell said. "There are stacks of people in the same boat but they just push us aside.

"Nobody wants to look at us. You try so hard, but you keep getting kicked in the teeth and you get so depressed, you don't want to try anymore."

Their meagre finances are chewed up in a vicious cycle.

Mr Hassell, who is unemployed, says the couple pay $350 a week for their motel room and, since it doesn't have a kitchenette, the family must eat out every day - an expensive option that chews up their $1300 fortnightly Centrelink payment.

"It's very hard and you have to take [each] day as it comes. We make sure the kids eat before we eat. Some days, we go without so the kids can eat," he said.

Their experience is shared by single mother Haleigh Crotty, who has also set up home at the same Casula motel, the Pop-In.

The 23-year-old and daughters Taleah, 6, and Mylea, 1, have been on the NSW Housing Commission waiting list since last November. "I don't want to live here but I have no other choice," Ms Crotty said.

"You don't even want to apply for a house because you don't want that rejection. It makes you think, 'What's wrong with you, and why don't they accept you?', but it all comes down to money." The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates almost 50,000 people in NSW are on waiting lists for public housing accommodation.

Its latest Public Rental Housing report showed that NSW had the highest rates of overcrowding and under-utilisation.

More than 1500 applicants had waited more than two years for a home, the report found.

The Salvation Army last week released research showing the numbers of homeless people seeking help had surged 65 per cent in the past two years.

In western Sydney alone, there was an 80 per cent jump. Real Estate Institute of NSW president Wayne Stewart said the average waiting time for families seeking public housing was now four years, while poor government policies, rising rents and interest-rate rises had hit the private market.

The vacancy rate has now dropped to 1.2 per cent (3 per cent is when supply and demand are in balance), leading to rental auctions and long lines of disappointed applicants.

Mr Stewart said some people lived rough in their cars or moved back in with elderly parents.

"It's amazing how many families are one pay packet away from homelessness," he said.