Congratulations! Such a font of knowledge for all of us. 👏🥳

...knowing that even if they experienced mental health crisis – even if they were hospitalised – their tenancy would be waiting for them when they stabilised. Extraordinarily powerful: hail.ie

I was particularly struck by the way their tenants strongly and proudly identified as HAIL tenants. They had a clear sense of belonging to a supported and supportive community...

And on that note, my favourite presentation of today was an incredible panel of tenants and staff at HAIL here in Dublin. HAIL provides lifelong tenancies *and* specialised mental health tenancy sustainment support. They have ~700 tenants and a 99% tenancy sustainment rate.

...tenancy managers in our social housing sector are engaged in supporting their tenants every day anyway – and that they want to be, but they just aren’t funded to be.

And we’re not doing any other part of Housing First anyway, so why do we stick so vehemently to this part?!

...housing not being contingent on support. It doesn’t mean housing providers should receive no funding to provide any of the support their tenants need and must instead only refer to external support services!

My own research certainly showed that...

It also feels clearer to me that the way we’ve separated housing and support was a serious policy blunder. Again, we’ve implemented it in a way it doesn’t appear to ever have been intended.

As a Housing First principle, the ‘separation of housing and support’ is really about...

...they don't mean “we house people straight out of homelessness next to private renters and blindly hope for some ‘neighbourhood effects’”.

They mean “half the people in this city live in social housing so ofc lots of them live next to private renters and we invest in maintaining those levels”.

Supported housing seems often to be considered under a separate Housing First policy (and funding bucket) and isn’t part of the tenure mix conversation.

So when Europeans say “tenure mix works”...

What’s more, many of these social housing systems are not as residualised as ours is, so what they call ‘tenure mix’ refers to a mix of private tenants and high-capacity social tenants, all of whom are holding down their tenancies without support.

What Vienna means by ‘mixed tenure’ is not “we’re demolishing a public housing estate and what we build over it will have a 50/50 social/private tenure mix”. It’s “two thirds of any and all new construction will be social housing”.

...which has led to the dominance of mixed tenure as a default for new social housing in Australia.

But by the end of Day 1 a couple of things have become clear: mixed tenure in Europe ‘works’ because of the scale of construction.

It’s humbling – almost embarrassing! – to realise how truly unambitious a housing policy agenda we have come to accept.

One thing I came here keen to learn more about is the oft-proclaimed success of a mixed tenure approach to social and affordable housing provision in Europe...

I'm presenting my paper 'We help each other: How care ethics support tenancy sustainment in social housing' on the Thursday 5th at 2:45pm.

If you're interested, come along and feel free to reach out ahead of time - see you there! :)