Margaret Lewis was working for community services when she damaged her spine lifting a box full of invalid pension pamphlets. Confined to a wheelchair after failed operations, she now relies on a disability pension herself.

Still, the 60-year-old considers herself lucky; she has somewhere to live.

"I feel that I am still in control of my life," Ms Lewis said. "And I wouldn't have that if I didn't have this affordable housing."

Discussion of the housing affordability crisis often centres on young people priced out of the market, not on the surge in the number of older Australians left homeless as rents and house prices keep climbing.

But almost 15,000 people – one in seven of the nation's homeless – are aged 55 and over, with census data showing a 19 per cent increase in the number of older Australians left homeless between 2006 and 2011. Older women are particularly at risk of becoming homeless.

After her injury Ms Lewis got divorced and had to sell her home in Blaxland. When her ex-husband later took his own life, she was saddled with debts and struggled when her landlords increased the rent. "I was on a fixed income and I just couldn't manage the rents they put on," she said

Now she lives in a unit in Cambridge Park owned by Mission Australia Housing, which provides more than 1000 long-term social and affordable rental properties in western Sydney to people on low to moderate incomes.

"I'm lucky," she said. "I'm getting support. But people out there aren't getting support and they need it."

Mission Australia's CEO Catherine Yeomans warned that with Australia's ageing population expected to double by 2050, the number of older women without secure housing would only rise unless governments moved to address housing affordability.

The organisation is calling for the federal, state and territory governments to facilitate funding of at least 200,000 affordable new social homes by 2025 and for leveraging of private investment to build more affordable housing.

Ms Yeomans said older women, especially those on their own, were particularly vulnerable to rental stress and at risk of becoming homeless.

"We know that women tend to have less superannuation than men due to time out of the labour market for caring [for families] and lower average earnings," she said. "When that dries up, they then fall into unstable, unsuitable accommodation such as refuges, hostels or onto the streets."

Most women facing a housing crisis for the first time in later life had a stable housing history but even small changes in their financial circumstances – a rise in rent or utility bills or unexpected health costs – could propel them into homelessness, she said.

The chair of Homelessness Australia, Jenny Smith, said the housing shortage was particularly acute at the low-cost end, yet there was no national plan to address it. A petition calling on political leaders to tackle the housing crisis has gained more than 40,000 signatures.

Australia needed ongoing government investment in social housing, tax settings that maximised private investment in affordable housing and planning guidelines that included low-cost housing in future developments, she said.

"Nationally, only 5 per cent of our housing is social housing," Ms Smith said. "We're slipping backwards all the time as our population grows. As the cost of rent goes up and the value of the pension goes down, older people generally are much less well off. People who are experiencing disadvantage are in an absolutely appalling situation trying to access basic shelter."

Ms Smith said young, middle-class people saving for home deposits and high mortgages were renting cheaper properties, leaving even fewer options for people on lower incomes. Current policies on negative gearing and capital gains tax were part of "a recipe that is only going to see an increase in homelessness," she said.

By Kim Arlington, The Sydney Morning Herald , 3 October 2016

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