Housing for inclusive cities: Housing First and the Common Ground housing model

Homelessness has been increasing in Australia and is becoming more concentrated in major cities. At the time of the 2016 Census, two thirds of the total Australian homeless population lived in Melbourne and Sydney.

Traditional forms of accommodation provided for people experiencing homelessness include transitional housing and emergency accommodation or shelters. These types of dwellings provide only temporary accommodation and, while they serve a necessary function in any city—both as places of refuge for people who become homeless (including young people, households who have lost their homes, and women escaping family violence) and as shelter from adverse weather for people who are sleeping rough—they do little to address the actual problem of homelessness, either by reducing it or addressing its underlying causes.

Australia uses a definition of homelessness that includes a range of experiences, from rough sleeping and living in temporary or inadequate accommodation, through to living in overcrowded dwellings or staying temporarily with friends or relatives—also referred to as ‘couch surfing’. Most categories of homelessness increased between 2011 and 2016, especially the numbers of people who were sleeping rough or living in overcrowded dwellings (see Figure 1). Although people who are sleeping rough represent only a small proportion of all people experiencing homelessness (less than 10%), their number has been growing at a faster rate than the overall homeless population.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, several Australian states have made substantial efforts and considerable investment to house people who have experienced chronic homelessness, and to provide wrap-around supports that assist them to sustain their tenancies. Many of the people being assisted in this way had been housed in otherwise vacant hotel rooms during the lockdowns of 2020. The new programs are based on Housing First principles, which also have informed the Common Ground housing model. This model provides housing and support services for people who have been sleeping rough, often in purpose-built facilities, and was the focus of our Practice Manual, published by the Office of Suburban Development in 2022.

Supportive housing - Common Ground best practice

What we learnt

As the name suggests, Housing First is a homelessness response that provides people with security of housing tenure first, to create a safe place from which they can begin to address health or other issues that might be contributing to a cycle of homelessness and exclusion from the housing market. Housing is provided in either a dispersed or a congregate setting, along with support services designed to assist people to sustain their tenancies. Tenancy management (by the housing provider) and case management (by support providers) are kept distinct but also need to coordinate to give tenants the best opportunity for success.

Common Ground facilities are a type of congregate supportive housing based on Housing First principles but may also include some ‘regular’ social housing (i.e., without wrap-around supports or facilities for congregate living) and even affordable market housing. Often, this is to help offset the cost of the supportive housing and to make a project more financially viable overall, but it can also create potential future housing pathways for Common Ground residents.

Although emphasis is on the design of the service model, the Housing First approach acknowledges the strong connection between the physical environment and people’s overall health and wellbeing. It places particular emphasis on providing an environment which supports tenants as they transition from homelessness to housing. To do this, and to facilitate meaningful outcomes for tenants, a balance between competing factors is often required of the building design:

• Common Ground is both a home for residents and a workplace for people providing on-site support and concierge services. In addition to balancing different functional requirements, the building design needs to empower both the tenants and the support staff.
• Designing a ‘home’ for people with a history of rough sleeping or other forms of homelessness requires careful attention. Catering for the basic physical needs of residents in a congregate setting can lead to the facilities—which also function as a workplace—having an ‘institutional’ feel. It therefore becomes important to ensure that home-like characteristics in the design are not neglected, and that ample opportunity exists for residents to ‘make a home’ there.

What needs to happen

To achieve best practice design outcomes for Common Ground housing facilities requires consideration of the interaction between the different parameters of scale:

• the neighbourhood and the street
• the building or ‘site’
• the individual residence

and those of performance:

• providing or controlling access and security
• facilitating connection and positive identity
• supporting wellbeing
• achieving sustainability

For example, identity and wellbeing can be supported by homely rooms that residents can personalise, by easily accessible communal spaces that allow for safe interaction with other residents and staff, and by buildings that have a welcoming presence on the street, yet also offer refuge from it.

Common Ground combines the provision of a secure home with the provision of the services that support people to sustain their tenancy in that home. A concierge service is particularly fundamental to this as this is the point where the management of the physical building intersects with the coordination of service supports. Locating the concierge prominently and close to the building entrance, provides surveillance of the entrance and common spaces, helping to control access and ensure safety.

Lobbies and common areas at the main street entrance to the building provide a welcoming environment for residents but also enhance safety and identity in the public realm by activating the ground plane. A sense of meaningful identity can be assisted by supporting connection to community, both within and outside the building.

Purposeful design of common spaces, whether on the ground floor or communally accessible upper levels, can support people by being geared towards improving life skills through active and social programmed activities. These might include commercial kitchens for cooking classes, garden beds, quiet study or library spaces, TV rooms for socialising, and an area to entertain guests.

Clear differentiation between public, communal and more private spaces—for instance, through use of different material palettes, maximising both daylight and sunlight access, and providing outlook onto green spaces, all contribute to resident wellbeing. This is true of any residential environment but is especially important for housing that operates alongside a service model based on trauma-informed and person-centred models of care, such as Common Ground.

In addition to purpose-built facilities that cater to the housing and support needs of people who have been sleeping rough for a long time, our cities also need to provide a range of solutions that address the growing prevalence of homelessness in its various manifestations. The objective should be both to reduce homelessness and to prevent it.

Previous AHURI research has demonstrated a strong relationship between the prevalence of homelessness in a location and local area supply (or rather, the lack) of affordable rental housing [1]. With almost no affordable rental housing available to low- and very low-income households through the housing market [2], more social and other subsidised housing must be provided to prevent and reduce homelessness.

For low- and very low-income households, people experiencing crisis or trauma, people with complex needs or in a period of life transition, housing markets can be profoundly unaffordable, inaccessible, discriminatory, and offer only insecure or unstable housing options, if any. For this reason, governments have seen the need for intervention in the market, providing financial assistance for housing, and supplying public housing directly. As well as addressing manifest housing need, this is also an opportunity to provide diverse and innovative housing outcomes.

In stark contrast to market provided housing, public and other forms of social housing have been able to deliver a diverse range of dwelling types and are much more likely to have been designed by an architect. In Melbourne at the time of 2016 Census, for example, about 41% of social housing was higher density, compared to only 7% of owner-occupied housing. The last time there was significant public investment in housing, following the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2008, this also resulted in a flowering of innovation in higher density housing design [3].

Providing more social and affordable housing in our cities will not only address the needs of the many households excluded from housing markets, helping to reduce and prevent homelessness, it also makes our cities better places—more inclusive and more diverse. This requires a range of responses and different typologies to cater to different types of needs, from the Common Ground or similar facilities that provide the supportive housing accommodation discussed here, to social and affordable housing for a diversity of household types.

AHURI Common Ground Housing Model