If you are currently homeless or need immediate support, please call Link 2 Home on 1800 152 152.

At The Northern Centre we offer services to assist clients to achieve housing stability across the Northern Sydney District. Our aim is to work with individuals and families to remain within their current home or to help them seek and secure new accommodation. We work with single men and women, young people and families as a non-accommodation outreach service.

We understand the emotional stress losing your home can cause and we offer a wrap-around case management service to enable the client to seek housing options.

The local government areas we cover for Housing services include Ryde, Hunters Hill, Epping, Lane Cove, Willoughby, North Sydney, Mosman and Ku-Ring-Gai.

If we are unable to assist you, we will discuss other referral options.

What is homelessness?

The ABS statistical definition states that when a person does not have suitable accommodation alternatives they are considered homeless if their current living arrangement:

• is in a dwelling that is inadequate; or
• has no tenure, or if their initial tenure is short and not extendable; or
• does not allow them to have control of, and access to space for social relations.

The ABS definition of homelessness is informed by an understanding of homelessness as ‘home’lessness, not ‘roof’lessness. It emphasises the core elements of ‘home’ in Anglo American and European interpretations of the meaning of home as identified in research evidence (Mallett, 2004). These elements may include: a sense of security, stability, privacy, safety, and the ability to control living space. Homelessness is therefore a lack of one or more of the elements that represent ‘home’.

The definition has been constructed from a conceptual framework centred around the following elements:

• Adequacy of the dwelling;
• Security of tenure in the dwelling; and
• control of, and access to space for social relations.