In this episode of The Invisible Woman Podcast, Jeanette Large, CEO of the Women’s Property Initiatives talks to us about homelessness and women as well as solutions to the housing problem such as Shared Equity, social housing and philanthropy.
00:00:02:07
Grace
This is a Just Gold podcast.
Recorded on the lands of the peoples of the Eastern Kulin nation. We pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging.
00:00:36:00
Carley
In this episode of The Invisible Woman, Jeanette Large, CEO of Women's Property Initiatives, talks to us about homelessness and women, as well as solutions to the housing problem, such as shared equity, social housing and philanthropy.
00:00:51:13
Jeanette Large
If we're talking if we're talking about older women, there's a group of older women who in research that we undertook and it was back in 2013, and that's because we were having a number of older women approaching our organisation, which we hadn't seen before.
00:01:06:03
Jeanette Large
So we decided to undertake some research into what was happening out there. It became evident absolutely we needed to be providing more social housing for those who are really, really disadvantaged. But there was a group of older women who we were not familiar with in our organisation, and that was a group of older women who actually had some money behind them. And they had that money behind them, maybe because they had been through a divorce and had half of the sale of the house, or because, as I mentioned before, that, you know, the partner had passed away, but they couldn't afford to maintain the mortgage.
00:01:41:12
Jeanette Large
So they had sold the house and had some money left over. But what they were finding was because of the age and I'm talking about women who are 55 years of age and over what they had was not enough to be able to get into home ownership. The banks were saying to them, You're too old. We're not going to be giving you a 30 year loan. So the amount that they could borrow from a bank still wasn't enough to add to them being able to get into home ownership.
00:02:06:19
Jeanette Large
So they were living in the private rental market. They were depleting the money that they had their savings. These women were feeling really insecure. They were feeling insecure because they were fairly sure that the landlord would not adapt the house for them to age in place.
00:02:23:00
Jeanette Large
They often found that the homes were not energy efficient, sustainable in that way, so they were paying higher utility costs. They're often having to make decisions of, Do I pay the rent? Do I by reasonable food? Do I pay my electricity bill? Those sorts of things. It was having a huge impact. You could just see the impact that was having on these women's emotional health, but also the physical health. So we, our organisation, Women's Property Initiatives, thought there must be some way that these women who have saved this mistake throughout their life could invest this in into their housing and having safe, secure, affordable housing. So the first model that we thought of was shared equity, that they could put that in and then our organisation could put in the rest of the shared equity. And I think that's still a good model.
00:03:11:13
Jeanette Large
And I think it's something at last because of our discussions with government that government is starting to look at that might be possible for older women. But for our organisation, we ended up going down with a model for a few reasons where the women actually lend a certain amount to our organisation and that amount for the pilot that we just launched yesterday. Actually, we were out there yesterday launching it, which is fantastic. So that pilot is where the women provide $150,000. So it's a reasonable amount of money that they're putting into their housing. Our organisation provides the rest and they at the end of the tenancy, so they still pay an affordable rent along the way.
00:03:59:01
Jeanette Large
We own the properties, we pay the rates, we do all the maintenance. But when they need to or want to leave the property, they get the full amount that they've put in, plus Reserve Bank interest rate plus 25 basis points to try and say, well, at least you preserve the money that you've put in. They haven't got the capital gain that they might have got through shared equity, but they have preserved that money that they've they've put in that they can then put to aged care facility or a live in a will to their kids, whatever they choose to do that they've saved during their life.
00:04:28:14
Jeanette Large
So this pilot that we've launched was launched fully through philanthropic funding, through various corporate organisations contributing. We had an organisation, Brickworks contributed all of the bricks for free. We had landscapers coming in, doing full on landscaping, the design and then the delivery of it.
00:04:50:01
Jeanette Large
So a real combination of how we delivered this project. It is a pilot project. We have funding to do a good evaluation as well, which has started already, obviously in the hope that other funders, particularly government, might see it as a project, an option for rolling out its preventative, some financial advice or advice.
00:05:13:12
Jeanette Large
I suppose we got that. We linked the women into determined that if they had left the $150,000 in superannuation for ten years and continued to pay the rent that they they were paying and the other costs that they would have depleted that $150,000 to about $35,000 to become eligible for social housing.
00:05:36:09
Jeanette Large
So the preventative mechanism putting that argument to government to say this is going to save you money in the long run because the delivery of social housing is so much more expensive than this than this project. So that's one option that.
00:05:50:22
Jeanette Large
We'd like to deliver more of. But, you know, in this case, it was philanthropic funding. We'd really like government to look at that. We'd really like government to adapt their shared equity model that they've got at the moment.
00:06:02:01
Jeanette Large
So that's where they actually put in a percentage. For younger people. It still means they need to access a mortgage from the bank. They're working. That's fine, and that shared equity model should work for them. The situation for older women is they have more money to put in upfront, but then what they can contribute on an ongoing basis is much less because they're on the aged pension. But they still can if they can, you know, if the equity that the state government put in maybe was increased slightly, they could still access a mortgage, a lower mortgage and be able to pay that.
00:06:34:18
Jeanette Large
So it's not more than 30% of their household income on a on a a mortgage through the bank. There's also a project that we've been working on which is a co-housing project with for older women as well. And this is where there's some women who can who are quite well off and can afford to enter into this co-housing project. They wanted to make sure that it also included social housing because they're socially just minded as well as we refer to them, which I don't think we should necessarily, but to as the middle women, the women who have got some money but not enough.
00:07:08:04
Jeanette Large
By the development happening through a community housing organisation, it means that the profits can go to delivering social housing instead of the profits going to a developer. As such, we still have the issue of trying to find out how we can fund the middle women so that they can move in.
00:07:27:19
Jeanette Large
And we have been doing an enormous amount of work and continue to do an enormous amount of work. I was just talking to Bank Australia today about how can we get a product happening for this, this middle group of women who it's just it's preventative, it's sensible to move that forward.
00:07:50:06
Kyriakos Gold
You can connect with us on social media are just called women or on our website a just gold dot net. The Invisible One project is a social partnership with the City of Melbourne and in this space we will be hosting consultations for women from across Victoria, but in particular from our city. So you can connect, you can share your stories, you can be on video if you want. Or you can just make friends on our pages. You can subscribe to our podcast and docu-series that's coming up over the next few months.
00:08:35:03
Kyriakos Gold
This was a Just Gold podcast. Find out more about our social enterprise at JustGold.Net.