So many needy, so little room

You can see Jacob is a little hyper when he enters the interview room on the 10th floor at the Department of Housing office in central Sydney. It is not his bipolar disorder on display. Jacob has good reason to be jumpy. He is seeking quick access to one of the scarcest resources in the state - public housing.

In this pristine little office, with its bare white walls and four lime green chairs around a table, Jacob will try to convince a housing officer why he needs to be given priority. Most people who apply for public housing wait years before they get lucky, if they ever do. But if you are deemed a priority case because you are, for example, destitute and ill, you may be in a flat or house within four months.

The job of deciding Jacob's fate falls largely to a trim man in blue jeans, a checked shirt and a corduroy jacket, whose laid-back appearance is reinforced by elastic-sided boots.

Jeff, 37, who did not want his surname used, is one of the department's front-line troops. He is known as a client service officer, a term that attained notoriety this month. One of his fellow officers, Douglas Norris, who worked in a different branch, is being investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption for accepting bribes to allow people to jump the public housing queue.

In gripping testimony, Norris rolled over and admitted he had taken cash in return for favours; some of those he helped into housing were allegedly drug dealers who used the premises to ply their business. Norris mostly moved people into bedsits in the Miller estate in south-west Sydney, and moved others into better accommodation. The joke around Housing goes that no one wants to live in bedsits in Miller so no bribes were necessary.

But the case is an embarrassment to the department coming on top of a similar scandal five years ago when another client service officer, Steven Klimoski, was also investigated by the commission and found to have accepted a bribe. Like Jeff, he too, was working with applicants for priority housing.

It is one of the toughest jobs in the public service, sharing a falling number of housing vacancies between a growing number of people in desperate circumstances. Applicants for priority housing who traipse into the department's interview rooms may be homeless and mentally ill; or in a crisis shelter and pregnant. Simple "homelessness," even with children involved, may not be enough to qualify for fast-tracked treatment these days.

"I don't believe corruption is endemic in the department," says Mary Perkins, an executive officer of Shelter NSW, "but it's what can happen when you have such a scarce resource and so many people needing it."

After the first commission inquiry, the department instituted recommended measures to prevent bribery, including more checks on applicants' bona fides, and more internal audits, the department's director-general, Mike Allen, says. Norris was in an atypical arrangement, in charge of a special project - the bedsits - and exercised more independent control over both assessments and allocation than is typical of a client service officer today.

"We literally have hundreds of thousands of transactions with clients in a year," Allen says, "and it's impractical to have a system with absolute guarantees."

Jeff joined the department in 1996, and has seen it all. He has found his calling "helping people resolve one of their primary needs" after stints washing cars, selling whitegoods, helping autistic children, and working as a residential carer in a home for the intellectually disabled. He has embarked in mid-life on an arts degree at the University of Sydney but shows no signs of the middle-class social worker. His manner is a curious mix of the bureaucratic and empathetic with a tendency to institutional speech. He is probably the perfect man for the job.

"If you took it too personally, you'd burn out," he says. "Still I struggle with their circumstances, how best to resolve it with what we have available. Sometimes I agonise and I take it home with me. But I take comfort in knowing there's an appeal process."

Housing affordability is a hot political issue in the undeclared election. The focus is mainly on distressed home-owners and would-be owners. However, at the bottom of the housing pile, the struggle is more desperate than ever. There is a critical lack of low-rent housing. As well, in NSW you have to be poorer than ever to qualify for the public housing waiting list.

Public housing fell out of favour years ago despite the Productivity Commission having found it, after a 1993 inquiry, to be a cost-effective solution. The Federal Government has stripped $1 billion from NSW under three successive federal-state housing agreements, the equivalent of 5000 new houses. And the money it poured instead into rental assistance, to subsidise the poor in the private rental market, is barely useful for renters here. Single people receive maximum help of $52 a week (couples with children $61) regardless of whether they rent in Sydney or Devonport.

In NSW about 40,000 people are waiting for public housing - a number that has fallen by almost half since 2001. The dramatic reduction is attributed partly to recent culling of those who no longer want public housing. But on the other hand, income eligibility requirements have barely changed in 15 years despite a 46 per cent rise in the cost of living in that time.

To be eligible to go on the waiting list, a single person's maximum gross income must not exceed $410 a week, only $15 higher than in 1992; if the limit had increased with inflation, the qualifying income would be $578.

Despite fewer people being eligible to go on the official list, the waiting time for a property has not fallen appreciably, Allen says, due to lower vacancy rates. Except for bedsits in Miller, the wait is years, rather than months.

For those given priority access, it is another story. About 10,500 additional people in the most desperate circumstances apply each year to be fast-tracked, and only 2600 get a property. The pressure is bound to increase as rents rise, and with the elderly, says the department, now the fastest growing group of applicants, on top of all the others.

JEFF'S first appointment is a no-show, a not unusual occurrence when homeless people are involved. But Jacob, a boyish 31, is punctual and keen. He is staying at Foster House, a men's crisis refuge, and his three-month time limit is fast running out. He is terrified of the street. He receives the Newstart Allowance of $214 a week. He tells Jeff he has recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder after 10 years of terrible mood swings, and a recent suicide attempt. His mental illness makes sharing impractical.

Though Jeff gravitated to this line of work because he is a "people person", it is apparent that being proficient at paperwork is possibly more important. On the table is a huge dossier of forms, documents, and letters from doctors, psychologists and support workers that Jacob has had to assemble and Jeff painstakingly examines.

"We do this because it's a scarce resource and we have to make sure it goes to the right people," Jeff says after questioning Jacob closely about his financial situation.

Jeff first has to determine that Jacob is eligible for public housing, a straightforward assessment. Then Jacob must pass the trickier test for priority housing. It is the next hurdle that trips applicants up - whether they are "unable to resolve [their] housing need in the private rental market". Most, it turns out, are deemed able to rent privately with some help.

The department has calculated Jacob would be able to spend $158 a week on rent (after rental assistance). But he has made a strong case for living in the Sutherland Shire where he grew up. He is in a government program there to help him get a job and it is where his only close relative, an ailing grandfather, lives. "I don't know what I'll do if I don't live in the shire," he says, getting agitated. "I don't want a unit overlooking Cronulla beach or anything …"

As the department has discovered for him, there are only two properties in the shire (in Bundeena) renting for $158 or less, and they have probably gone. Jeff could urge him to look further afield. But he says later that a person with mental illness in a support program, with one close relative, has a good case for priority housing in his requested area. His recommendation will go to a team leader.

Jacob's case, which took over an hour, is relatively easy compared with that of Belinda, a 19-year-old heavily pregnant Aborigine who troops in next with her support worker, Susan Fowler, from the Shop, a women's centre in Waterloo. Belinda had been living with her mother in a public housing flat that was leased to her brother. When the brother went to Parramatta Jail a few months ago, the Department of Housing, following procedures, changed the locks. Belinda was homeless. Now she is applying for her own place, and the massive dossier on the table has to be worked over together. "Are you OK, with reading and writing?" Jeff asks, as he does all his clients.

She says she wants her mother, "who hasn't had a drink since she knew the baby was coming" to be added to the application. It was a major complication with the mother's bank records, and Centrelink statements, and other details now to be checked - and the baby due in a fortnight. Almost two hours later, after the interview ended, Jeff says, "There were too many unknown factors about the mother" for him to make a recommendation yet. The priority was to help Belinda and her mother into temporary accommodation.

The fusty air in the interview room, the paperwork, and the intense personal interactions had left Jeff desperate to get out for lunch. Did it distress him - all these tales of woe? "You'd become ineffective if you thought like that," he says. "There are policies and there are the individuals, and you have to somehow merge the two."

www.smh.com.au/news/national/so-many-needy-so-little-room/2007/09/21/1189881777252.html