Financial and housing security challenges faced by older Australians may mean an increase in the number of older people who need help to maintain their housing situation or help with finding stable accommodation. This section explores key issues and characteristics of older Australians seeking support from Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS) from 2013–14 to 2017–18. It focuses on the differences based on the age, sex and state/territory of older people, as well as reasons for seeking assistance, country group of birth, living conditions, service use and additional vulnerabilities of older Australians. The section also considers the various housing situations of older people who received assistance, namely those who at the start of support were:
- experiencing homelessness, living in no shelter/improvised dwelling, short term accommodation, and couch surfer/no tenure, and
- at risk of homelessness, living in public/community housing, private/other housing, and an institutional setting.
In 2017–18, around 24,100 people aged 55 and over received assistance from SHS agencies, equating to around 36 older clients per 10,000 persons in Australia (aged 55 and over) (Figure 5). This was an increase from around 17,300 SHS clients in 2013–14, or 29 per 10,000 population.
Of the older SHS clients in 2017–18, more were female (13,800) than male (10,300). The proportion of older SHS clients who were female increased from 54% in 2013–14 to 57% in 2017–18 (Supplementary table 1).