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The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System made recommendations about housing for Victorians living with mental illness. These include more than 2,000 new supported housing homes. Homes Victoria is working closely with the Department of Health to implement these recommendations.
More homes for Victorians living with mental illness
As part of its work, the Royal Commission into Victoria's Mental Health System looked at how housing can influence a person's mental health. A stable home can bring a sense of safety, security and belonging. These are all central to a person's mental health.
The Big Housing Build is investing in 2,000 new homes for Victorians living with mental illness. This will ensure more people living with mental illness have access to safe, secure and stable social housing.
These new homes will be delivered as supported housing, which means providing people with individually tailored mental health and well-being supports as well as a home.
You can learn more about this work in this fact sheet:
Mental Health Supported Housing — Fact Sheet
Read more about the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.
Supported housing co-design
Work to deliver co-designed supported housing for adults living with mental illness as part of the Big Housing Build is under-way. Homes Victoria partnered with Mental Health Victoria to recruit people to participate in a co-design process including people with lived experience of mental illness and families, carers and supporters. The co-design process ran over several months from late 2021 to early 2022.
Participants included:
- Aboriginal Victorians
- people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds
- LGBTIQ+ community members
- people from regional areas of Victoria
- people from different age groups.
The co-design process also engaged with key stakeholders and sought input from community housing providers and mental health and well-being service providers.
Read the Mental Health Supported Housing Codesign Final Report.
Project updates
Regular mental health supported housing project updates will be shared below.
Please contact MHco-design@homes.vic.gov.au if you would like more information.
Prioritising people living with mental illness
More work will be done in the coming months to better support people who are living with mental illness and experiencing unstable housing or homelessness.
This will include:
- running a dedicated co-design process with young people aged 18–25 on the design of 500 new medium-term supported housing places
- revising the Victorian Housing Register to include people living with mental illness as a priority category
- ensuring people living with mental illness are allocated an increased amount of social and affordable housing over the next 10 years.
