Tasmania knows what ends homelessness. It's time we backed it.

By Ewan Higgs

Every day, Tasmanians watch the same cycle play out. Someone sleeping rough is picked up by an ambulance or police, spends a few nights in a shelter bed, and is back on the street within weeks. Services strain to keep pace, staff burn out trying to patch people through one more crisis, and they cry out for something to be done. Meanwhile, the number of people without a home keeps climbing.

We already know some of the solutions that actually end homelessness. One is called Housing First, and the evidence for it is compelling. The opportunity is now for us to work together to make it a reality in Tasmania.

What Housing First actually is

Housing First was developed in New York in the early 1990s, in response to a health crisis, by the organization Pathways to Housing. Its premise was radical at the time and remains simple: instead of demanding that people prove they are "housing ready" — sober, medicated, compliant — before they're offered a home, give them a stable, permanent home first, then wrap intensive, flexible support around them for as long as they need it.

There are no preconditions beyond a genuine desire for a tenancy. No sobriety tests, no behavioral contracts. Support for mental health, trauma, substance use or simply navigating daily life is built around the person, not forced on them as the price of a roof.

The model has since become central to national homelessness strategies in Canada, Denmark, Finland and France, and has been adopted widely across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. It is regarded internationally as the gold-standard response to chronic homelessness, with a substantial evidence base showing it keeps people housed and improves their health and wellbeing — not sometimes, but reliably, when it is delivered with fidelity to the model.

Why it works: it treats the whole person, not just the tenancy

Frontline workers in Tasmania see daily why housing alone, offered without genuine choice or support, so often fails. Trauma is one of the most common threads running through the lives of people experiencing homelessness in this state. Trauma reshapes how people manage relationships, process information and regulate their own behavior. It is frequently bound up with substance use and mental illness, and it erodes exactly the connections  to housing support, to health services and to family that someone needs to climb out of homelessness in the first place.

Layer economic reality on top of that: a severe shortage of affordable housing, rents rising faster than wages, overcrowding and family breakdown becoming more common as the crisis deepens. It's a vicious cycle, and it's one that a shelter bed or a transitional program, however well-intentioned, was never designed to break. Housing First works precisely because it doesn't try to solve trauma and instability as a precondition for housing,  it treats stable housing as the foundation those other things get solved from.

The flow-on effects are significant and well documented elsewhere: when people are housed and supported, the pressure on hospitals, police and the justice system ease substantially, and the savings to the broader system and community are considerable. But the deeper point is one of dignity. Currently, people are too often offered a house with no real investment and no real choice — which only disempowers an already vulnerable group further. Give people genuine choice and support to find the right home for them, and the evidence shows they don't just get by; they can move from surviving to stabilising, and eventually to thriving.

What Tasmania actually needs to do

The next step is to work together to create the conditions that allow Housing First to succeed. That means ensuring access to appropriate housing, investing in wraparound supports that make the model effective and building strong partnerships across government and community services.

Housing Providers have an important role to play as partners in this model, opening up their properties to the cohort Housing First is designed for, we need to stop treating chronically homeless applicants as a risk to be managed.

We need to change how we see people and how we grant access to housing in the first place. Housing is a human right. It should not come with conditions of entry beyond the financial cost of a tenancy.

And, we need a shared commitment across this state — government, community housing, health and justice services, and the public — to get behind Housing First and make it work, rather than treating it as one program among many competing for resources.

The evidence is clear. Now is the opportunity to build on it together.

Successive governments and the community services industry have invested significant effort in responding to homelessness, often in the face of growing demand and limited housing supply. As the crisis deepens, there is an opportunity to build on that work by investing in approaches with the strongest evidence of long-term success.

What Housing First demands of us is a solutions focus: real investment in scale, real investment in the staff and programs that keep the model faithful to what actually works, not a watered-down version that saves money in the short term and fails people in the long term. The alternative, continuing to fund short-term band-aids that keep people cycling in and out of homelessness,  it’s not cheaper. It is simply a slower, more expensive, more painful way of not solving the problem.

Housing First is not a silver bullet, but it is one of the strongest evidence-based approaches available. Hobart City Mission is committed to working alongside government, community housing providers and other partners to help deliver it well. Together, we have an opportunity to create a homelessness system that is more effective, more compassionate and focused on helping people achieve lasting housing outcomes.