A Bendigo-based disability service provider says it is at the forefront of innovative solutions for a housing shortage across Australia.  

Not-for-profit community service provider Amicus will sell off a 1.8 hectare parcel of land in North Bendigo which used to be its centre of operations and invest the proceeds into new housing stock for people with disabilities. 

Executive officer Ann-Maree Davis said 102 people with disabilities were registered as having a critical and urgent need for housing support in Bendigo in February.  

But she warned the pressure for housing was set to increase if nothing was done. 

“Those people are living at home with families and some in quite dire situations,” Ms Davis said. 

“But of those, 38 people were identified as having an ageing carer – and that’s a big concern.

“That means their carer is 65 or older, which raises the question: happens to those people as their carer ages?” 

As part of the answer to that question, Ms Davis said Amicus was partnering with other organisations to to deliver six new two-bedroom units for people with disabilities. 

To help fund it, the organisation has an application to subdivide its former headquarters at Cecil Street into 26 lots before the City of Greater Bendigo’s planning department. 

The proposed $1.25 million development on the Long Gully Creek would include the removal of some native vegetation propagated and planted by Amicus in 2001. 

Ms Davis said over recent years Amicus had shifted from a centre where people with disabilities spent their days to a place which helped them become active members of the community.

She said a similar shift would be required in housing.

“No one model suits everybody,” she said. “It may be a person living by themselves, a person sharing a home with another person with a disability, it might be a share home with a co-resident who doesn’t have a disability. 

“But that old model of housing in which people with disabilities are living with five or six unrelated strangers is not the best model of support and doesn’t give people good lives.”