Community leaders, organisations come together to tackle housing crisis

That's the question 80 people from across the region tackled at the South West Housing Solutions Forum last week.

The forum was an initiative of Thriving South West Victoria, a coalition of organisations committed to addressing social disadvantage and fostering community development through cross-sector collaboration and partnership.

Thriving South West partnership lead Lisa McLeod said there was a desire for change and a willingness to partner across sectors to share resources and find innovative solutions to disadvantage in the region.

Representatives from all sectors, including not-for-profit and for-profit developers, builders and real estate agents, community housing services, employers, banking, and all levels of government were represented at the forum.

"We need to break down the barriers. The system is broken; we can't progress with planning," she said.

"It's really tricky times with housing. Everywhere you turn, there is a reason why you can't get traction at the moment. We are reaching the tipping point. People are starting to say that no homelessness is acceptable. And it's becoming far more visible.

"We aimed to find things that we could do ourselves that might give us advocacy, evidence and change hearts and minds. If this were a bushfire crisis, we would be putting caravans in our backyards or modular homes at the footy oval.

"We should think bigger and more as a community than as individuals."

Mrs McLeod said the forum allowed all sectors to collaborate and work on cross-sector initiatives to break down some of the barriers to building more housing in the south-west and to improve understanding of the housing challenges from different perspectives.

The forum participants identified on four project ideas that could start to solve the problem. Next month, they will collaborate to start turning these ideas into actions.

The projects identified included:

"People say it takes so long, but you have to start somewhere," Mrs McLeod said.

"The four projects were scoped by an advisory group that represented all the sectors that were at the forum.

"We explored what the problems were and what the biggest barriers are to getting change in supply.

"The value from the day was incredible because we had people saying they met others from sectors they can now work together with and differently, which is a win no matter what - whether it's a housing solution or a community solution.

"We will all pull together to do this; we won't wait for the cavalry as it isn't coming."

Mrs McLeod said perceptions around housing needed to change.

"We need to break down perceptions and stereotypes about the type of house itself or whether it's key worker housing," she said.

"These things aren't inherently bad. The outcome is worse if we can't get aged care workers a house or nurses or doctors to work at our hospital. As a community, we need to look at these things differently. We need to break down the subconscious bias about disadvantage and vulnerability."

Forum participant Bernadette Northeast said it was clear there was a housing problem and community members were rallying together to come up with solutions.

"That's why we're here," she said.

"We believe it's a problem that we can fix and that, collectively, we can solve it. If we move forward with the projects identified, be brave and address the challenges, we can have an impact."