 Thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak today and Thank you for the introduction. We'll just get the PowerPoint slide up So I was good coming back to Canberra. I lived here for nine years and if you scratch me I still bleed lime green and if my pulse always goes up that tiny fraction when I hear the word Canberra raided So it's always good to be back here, even though I think the last few seasons haven't been the best, but Ricky will turn it around Okay, in this presentation I'm going to talk about some work I've done with some colleagues Relatively recently, so this was work we did in 2011-2012 Emma and myself were listed here, but also we had colleagues such as Rebecca Bentley and Laurence Lester involved in this project. Hopefully I'll get this to work What I want to do in this presentation is provide a context and summary of what we know about housing and disability in Australia and how we need to understand housing and disability. Then I want to talk about the housing characteristics of Australian adults I want to talk about housing careers and then I want to talk about estimating the risk of homelessness for both the general population but also for the population of persons with various forms of disability and I want to talk about in particular about why Intellectual developmental disabilities are a particular focus here then I want to finish off with some discussion around issues around dwelling design and I guess what I think of is the broader social context of Provision of accommodation for persons with intellectual disability and why it's so important So I guess what we all know is that housing affordability is a major problem in Australia We know that 1.2 million households in Australia roughly face difficult housing circumstances And this isn't a cyclical problem. This is a problem. That's been evident probably since about the year 2000 Rent and mortgage costs to increase significantly for many Australians by almost 50% And we also see that there's a serious housing shortage the National Housing Supply Council in their 2012 report Estimated that the shortfall was around 30,000 dwellings across Australia whereas in They're forecasting by 2030 it might be as many as 200,000 dwellings significant shortfall Of course, many of that much of that shortfall is really a shortfall in terms of distribution rather than absolute numbers Because there are many people who own second or even third homes for various reasons About 106,000 people homeless At census night in 2011 according to the new modified methodology interestingly that number is very similar to the 2001 method Enumeration of the homeless population since it's not and so a new method and new sets of policies hadn't really shifted the number of people Enumerated as homelessness. I know In South Australia, there's really no evidence that despite probably a decade of very Focused work on homelessness. There's no much evidence that the homeless population is actually small getting smaller The ran government when it came to power in 2002 you've made homelessness a major focus of its social inclusion initiatives huge review and huge Refocusing of efforts the homelessness remains a major problem in South Australia and something that they Continue to give priority to in terms of social policy development Is up to 30% of low-income families across Australia Particularly renter families go without meals or are forced to pawn possessions in order to pay rent and I think that was one of the major findings of Some work done by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute particularly Peter Phibbs and Terry Burke Indicating just the level of extent to which people go without food in order to pay rent and keep a roof over the head So first of all I want to talk about some some of the outcomes of our research and this research is actually published on the I can never remember. It's the National Homelessness Clearinghouse the Australian Homelessness Clearinghouse But if you look there and go looking for our research report on homelessness and disability or non psychiatric disability You'll find the research what you find is that if you look at the population without Disabilities, which is the diagram to your immediate left. You'll find that as expected Home purchase and outright home ownership remains the dominant tenure across all of Australia's population If you then look across each of those other sets of bar charts what you find is firstly Persons with a disability or households that include persons with a disability to be more precise Actually have a different tenure pattern. There must be much less likely to be Person there must much less likely to be in home purchase Some groups are more likely to be outright homeowners and that's an important point and They're also much more likely to be private renters and in particular public renters and I draw your attention to the fact that Don't know if I've got a pointer on this one person to the intellectual disability are much more reliant on the population on Public rental housing than any other group that we identify there and they're also much less likely to be In home purchase than the other group that we identify there about 27% compared to almost 60% for the Australian population overall so key message here is that firstly Persons with a disability in their households Occupied different forms of tenure compared to the rest of the Australian population Secondly that persons with a disability Aren't one group that if you even break them down into four broad categories You find their significant differences and as I'll discuss later it even if you're looking only at persons with intellectual disability Of course, it's wrong to suggest that all persons with intellectual disability are the same the nature severity and impacts of cognitive disability or intellectual disability of course very considerably So this is a complex issue with a complex set of challenges in a policy setting and if you look at the distribution of Persons or households with disabilities physical disabilities dominate Psychological important century and speech are important in intellectual disabilities are forth a very important group overall The other point I'd make and it's probably evident to everyone here is that Psychological disability is the group most likely to experience homelessness So if you look at the homeless population estimates are the 80% of the homeless population Have some form of a psychological disability or psychiatric disability I've no reason to doubt that one of the key issues is that of course people with a psychiatric disability Often have co-morbidities in terms of disabilities and one of the issues that emerges from our research is that often people with intellectual disabilities acquire Psychological disabilities after becoming homeless. So a very unfortunate but fairly typical story can be Someone a young person growing up with intellectual disabilities gets larger reaches adulthood becomes difficult in the home family home Parents or caregivers don't really know what to do. What do they do? They don't really do much. They don't address the problem. There's not support available for them The person become Behavior in the home becomes more challenging. They leave home Somehow they end up either on the street or they end up in a shelter. They don't deal with it And they acquire psychiatric disabilities that process. It might be exposure to Substances it might be exposure to violence It might be exposure to poor living conditions But they acquire a psychological disability on top of the intellectual disability and partly that bit can be because people working in the homeless and shelters stroke service provision Are used to Diagnosing people with psychiatric disabilities when it may not truly be a psychiatric disability So co-morbidity is a major issue. You're not just looking at neat Barriers in terms of what person having presenting with one issue rather than a suite of issues One of the key issues is that people with a disability in Australia tend not to be particularly mobile through the housing market Now what you can say is that that's actually a good thing because in fact they're stable They have stable housing arrangements for them But of course it's also a bad thing because it means that when we move through the housing market We tend to move for fairly good reasons. We're adjusting our housing to meet our needs And if we're not adjusting our housing to meet our needs It means it may not be occupying the housing that best suits our need to that point in time so people with disabilities Overall tend to have a mismatch if you like between Their housing and their current set of needs and some work we did for a hurry on 21st century housing careers Persons with a disability clearly identify that as major a major issue Persons with a disability in the households were much more likely to want to move from the population overall And of course once again, we see some variation and of course cycle persons with a psychological disability much more much more likely to have moved in the last 12 months partly because Homelessness is a process of moving from place to place Well, so I draw your attention to fact that for many people Your health condition your your disability is a major cause of why you move through the housing market Compared to persons without disability is being or reporting a disability as a reason for moving through the housing market and then if you look at Low-income households what we find and this can be it's no surprise to anyone in this room Persons with disability are much poorer and they have much greater difficulties in terms of paying their rent and mortgages And we see once again a gradient psychological persons with a psychological disability at the top and then persons with the intellectual disability Second highest proportion of households on low incomes struggling to pay Relatively high mortgages or rent and also reporting relatively low rates of Struggling to pay rent overall Now one of the things that I my colleagues worked on over the years is housing careers So we've looked at housing careers mainly an important producer who had called 21st century housing careers in Australia's housing futures And one of the things that we did is we talked about first of all The traditional approach of a housing ladder where young households start off at the bottom And they work their way up until they move from living with parents private rental public rental all the way to outright ownership The the great Australian dream realized in many respects and we suggested that that's not always the case and in fact for many people In fact your housing through the life course is in fact a series of transitions And in fact it's really a game of snakes and ladders sometimes you're going up and sometimes you're going down If you've ever been divorced separated, you know what the downside looks like, you know divorce is really bad for your housing career I just don't recommend it to anyone as part of their housing strategy over the life Honestly, I don't and if you then look over here, you see something we talk about the life course over periods Life ending at age 82 most of us in the room actually get more than 82 if you're a woman age 16 South Australia at the moment We get to 90 It's your life expectancy, but you see a period where you move from various ten years And then you get serious period of both incomes and expenditure and various times your income is greater than your expenditure Which is good and various times your expenditure is greater than your income Which is not good and we then talk about the impact of inheritance or show the impact of inheritance Being cared for providing care to others which is increasingly an important part of people's life experiences in Australia And of course a really bad thing of divorce Which has a direct impact on tenure for many people but if you talk about people with The housing careers of people with a disability what we're talking about is something different We're talking about a number of things. We're talking about low incomes. We're talking about high housing costs We're talking about limited options within the housing market limited capacity to find paid work Which is really important and the cost associated with the disability as well So if we look at the four disability types that we examined we find a different pattern So we find persons with a disability developmental disability or intellectual disability find a flat housing career Often got relatively few options available to them Particularly if the disability means they can't find pay work or they need care And in this example we were talking about households that were living essentially in independent living units Which is the term they used in Victoria Over here mobility impairment through injury going through the anticipated life course and housing trajectory typical Australians And then you come off your motorbike acquire a brain injury or become paraplegic and all of a sudden your housing career becomes somewhat limited and then you move mobility impairment from birth sensory disability and psychiatric disability including significant periods of homelessness and very low incomes alone comes an excessive expense below expenditure Well one of the things that you want to do is you want to talk about the risk of homelessness And so in the 2011 2012 piece of work We actually did some work where we looked at the factors that can lead to persons becoming at risk of homeless homelessness and So I would develop an index of the risk of homelessness So it's not necessarily homeless per se. These aren't people reporting their homeless But they had the characteristics of people who were homeless if you can understand and appreciate that difference and What we looked at IR HR standard stands for index of relative housing risk and there the that's the risk of becoming homeless So oops one extreme If I can go back, which I don't think I can I'll just show you on this side One extreme what you see is you have a population overall. It's the black line That's the general risk of homelessness for the Australian population and it's roughly a normal distribution On the other hand, you've got the bar charts which show you what's the relative risk of homelessness for the population affected by Different types of development with different types of disability. So the physical disability for sensory disability for Intellectual disability and psychological disability Now what you find is that in fact for some forms of disability the risk of homelessness, which is 789 high risk of homelessness But so for sensory disability, it's actually lower than the general population as we calculated it for the psychological persons the psychological or psychiatric disability is higher than the general population that's exactly what we would expect so it's sort of Ground-truthing of providing face evidence that the index is measuring something that we would expect But what we found to our somewhat surprise is that in fact very few people with intellectual disabilities had low risk of homelessness Very few but more people had a high risk of homelessness we expected and there was a significant middle cohort so persons with intellectual disability were our Unexpected finding in this piece of research because what we found is that they were at high risk of homelessness And we didn't actually anticipate that when we started this piece of work We expected this we didn't expect this and we probably didn't expect this Why the difference between sensory and intellectual? Because I think we have better policies programs and procedures for dealing with sensory disability than we have for intellectual disability Intellectual disabilities are much more complex policy tasks than sensory disability. Royal society for the blind We have a specialist pension for persons who lose their sight There are well-developed communities of deaf people. There are well-developed communities of persons with vision impairment You don't necessarily find that in the intellectual disability field Onset of disability might also have an impact as well Thank you very much. So differential risk of homelessness Highlights groups extreme risk of homelessness and within our population with Intellectual disabilities what we find is schooling employment restrictions intellectual disabilities are Major challenges in terms of your risk of homelessness so exposure is not evenly distributed and These two groups here psychological disabilities and mental illness as reported in the general social survey Are actually as expected, but the fact that schooling employment restrictions intellectual disabilities are actually a major problem I Guess the key message I want to give to you is that one of the things that we found is that somewhat to our surprise Having a mild intellectual disability was actually a major challenge We would have assumed that there was a gradient a greater your disability the Greater your risk in terms of intellectual disability But of course if you've got a considerable disability There are government support. It's when you're just just off the pace that you're really at risk And if you'll have schooling difficulties learning difficulties mild intellectual disabilities You're not going to be competitive in Australia's labour market in 2012 2006 2002 and That puts you at risk and often you behave Interact and do everything in a way that people understand people accept within the general community But you're at risk because you're making poor decisions. You're at risk because you're not able to get into the labour market, etc. I Just want to make a couple of points about design I think there's actually very little work in Australia on dwelling design In terms of persons with intellectual disability, but I'll give you what I've been able to glean over time First of all building code of Australia doesn't actually make any mention of intellectual disability And that's something we're thinking about and that's something that could probably be addressed in various ways There are twice as many intellectually disabled Australians that are vision impaired. So that's a significant gap One of the key issues with persons for intellectual disability in terms of dwelling design itself is issue about wayfinding You need to have dwellings which allow easy wayfinding. How do you find your way through? How do you walk into a building and immediately know where you should be going? I walked into this building and I had to ask where I was going So, you know, I don't think I've got an intellectual disability if I did have an intellectual disability with a problem Wayfinding is important Dwelling design needs to assist the process of wayfinding and these power points are provided to our organisers So I go through them, but essentially you need things to be clear. You need to be concise You need to have signage, which is consistent, which is legible, which uses culturally accepted Culturally accepted colours for various forms of signage You need to have clear line of sight. I walk into a building I see the table I want to go to, I see the building I need to go to and that is where I go to straight away That's the sort of design we need I'll just move on because I've got some conclusions to make and I'm almost out of time I guess there are a couple of things to consider. One is, yes, there are things to say about building design But building design in terms of need involves consultation with persons with intellectual disability It involves wayfinding, it involves eligibility But really, we need to be thinking more broadly about the building design or the design of housing for persons with intellectual disability Working with non-government organisations in South Australia, one of the things they emphasise is the broader social context And the literature does this as well. The broader social context of accommodation provided So it's about not providing concentrations of persons with a disability There's a program recently on the ABC called Dream Home where three or four adults with Down syndrome are moved into an independent living away from their parents and they track them through that process It's been critiqued in the disability community because they put all people with intellectual disability in one dwelling In fact, the preferred model is you mix them up with persons with a disability and persons without a disability And we need to be thinking about that broader social context We need to acknowledge that there is a risk of homelessness for this group We need to acknowledge that this risk is greater than this for other persons with a disability in many instances And that we need to consider how persons with relatively mild disability is going to be affected by this process So it's about supply, it's about good design, it's about social setting Thank you very much