Last Home Partners: housing for single pensioners. There are many people concerned about our housing crisis, many talking about what needs to be done, some who have formed or joined committees–but who is actually doing something about it?
Locally, two aged pensioners who share a rental property, Josie Emery and Clif Edwards, have registered a charity with the aim of raising $3.5 million dollars to build long-term rental houses with secure tenure for aged pensioners facing homelessness. Josie says, “Our aim is not to provide short-term emergency housing but to get to people who are living precariously and put them into a nice, secure place they can call home for the rest of their lives–before they become homeless.”
Josie was on the Board of the Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre in central Sydney in the early 2000s and witnessed first-hand the spiral of destitution that follows from losing your home to sleeping rough. Following the Covid years the escalation of house prices and the turning of long-term rental houses into short-term B&Bs, Josie and Clif saw how desperately the district needed to find ways to house struggling people.
And so Last Home Partners was born, an organisation aimed solely at addressing the situation of aged pensioners unable to buy a unit or put up the money to get into Aged Care but whose pension would pay a minimal ongoing rent. Clif says, “We are working very closely with Mount Alexander Shire Council and, with their assistance, have developed a scheme that will put modular rental housing on Rural Residential blocks. The State Government has already changed rental tenancy laws to allow us to write long-term rental contracts. We’re now finalising designs and costings with modular house builders for single and two-person houses–not granny-flats or tiny homes–real homes at a lower price than what’s being charged for emergency housing modules and other short-term fixes.”
The next step is finding the land on which to put the houses. Clif has his eye on a Maldon site that could take four homes as a ‘proof of concept’ build to demonstrate the project’s viability–as well as provide housing for eight locals in need. He’s in discussion with a potential land-supplier in Daylesford and there are other individual landholders interested in sharing their land.
In the meantime, Clif and Josie are getting ready to go public with their appeal for funds–starting with a lottery of over $2,000 premium wines. “That’s just the beginning,” Clif says. “To pay for our ongoing legals, drafting, website and computing. We don’t need all the $3.5 million to get started. Once we can afford to build one house, we’ll start work. Josie and I are sick of the meetings and the talk and the symbolic actions. We’re people who do things!”
This article appeared in the Tarrangower Times, 18 August 2023.
