Call this a home? campaign for safe rooming houses

In 2009, 40 organisations in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, launched the Call this a home? Campaign for safe rooming houses in Victoria, to seek reform of the private rooming house market.

Rooming house is a term used to describe accommodation in Victoria, Australia where residents pay for the use of a room, sharing facilities like the kitchen and bathroom. In some cases, residents share rooms. Boarding house is an equivalent term used in many other jurisdictions.

Calls for regulation

The Campaign claimed there was poor regulation of the rooming house market, no minimum rooming housing standards and that some rooming house operators were able to operate for maximum profit and pay little attention to safety and security of their residents. The Campaign claimed the growth of this problem was due in part to a lack of affordable housing options for low income households.

Call this a home? called on the Victorian Government to introduce:

A set of comprehensive minimum standards to ensure the basic needs of all rooming house residents are met
More effective registration, monitoring and enforcement to bring hundreds of unregistered rooming houses into the system and ensure compliance with standards
A licensing system to regulate the management of private rooming houses to PReVENT exploitative practices.

Results so far

Since the Call this a home? campaign started, the following ProgresS has been made:

The Victorian Premier, John Brumby established a six week task force to make recommendations on reforms for rooming houses.
Consumer Affairs launched a hotline 1300 365 814 and an online forum.
The Victorian Coroner recommended changes to rooming house licensing and regulation after an inquest into the deaths of a man and a woman in a rooming house fire in 2006.<ref name=Victorian Coroner's recommendations 2006>
The Victorian Premier announced that the Victorian government will adopt all 32 recommendations of Martin Foley’s Rooming House Standards Taskforce.
The campaign received wide-spread government and community support.

Statistics

The latest Census (2006) recorded approximately 4,500 people living in Victorian rooming houses, mostly in suburban Melbourne. This figure is likely to be under-reported.