Future Directions

Future Directions is a 10-year plan to drive better outcomes for social housing tenants in NSW. By 2018, five service improvement initiatives were underway – but DCJ faced a fundamental question: where these initiatives breaking cycles of disadvantage, and if so, for whom? 

The diversity of client circumstances made this difficult to answer. People seeking housing assistance arrive with vastly different life trajectories, support needs and aspirations. DCJ needed evaluation approaches rigorous enough to attribute outcomes to specific initiatives, while remaining sensitive to this complexity. They also needed Aboriginal communities’ perspectives meaningfully incorporated – not as an add-on, but as central to understanding whether initiatives were meeting need. 

Rent Choice and Opportunity Pathways can and do assist people – but there are limits to the problems they can resolve. We were slightly disappointed at not being able to identify clear causal paths toward housing independence through the QCA analysis. But the response from one program representative reframed what rigour can offer: “We have seen qualitative analysis before, but never have we seen it so rigorous – and to have it validate to us the incredible complexity of how people respond to housing assistance was very powerful.” 

The rigorous analysis put to rest the idea that any neat demographic classification could identify those most likely to benefit. What mattered was tailoring supports to individual needs and remaining attentive to how those needs changed over time. The case studies revealed something quantitative data alone couldn’t show: participants’ lives were shaped by experiences of trauma, particularly domestic and family violence, that created ongoing instability regardless of housing status. People held genuine hope for their futures while navigating constant interruptions – violent ex-partners, housing quality issues, the impossibility of combining childcare with job-seeking. The cost-benefit analysis identified value in some initiatives that was obscured by the key performance indicators used to manage them – an important reminder that programs need valid metrics, not just reliable ones. 

ARTD partnered with Taylor Fry and SVA to deliver process, outcome and economic evaluations across all five initiatives. We used the first iteration of DCJ’s linked administrative dataset with Commonwealth data to test outcomes, employing quasi-experimental methods to identify the net effect of each initiative. We complemented this with 19 longitudinal case studies – interviewing Rent Choice and Opportunity Pathways participants up to five times over two years – and applied Qualitative Comparative Analysis to test hypotheses about what works for whom. 

Crucially, neither the quantitative nor qualitative data alone was conclusive. Answering the key evaluation questions required genuine synthesis across methods, with appropriate caveats about the diversity of circumstances people experience. An Aboriginal Reference Group, chaired by Simon Jordan (Nama Jalu), guided culturally appropriate community engagement across five locations. We consulted with 76 Aboriginal people whose perspectives shaped both interpretation and recommendations – including the need for formal partnerships, Aboriginal workforce development, and building the community-controlled sector’s capacity to deliver housing supports. 

The evaluation informed DCJ’s ongoing refinement of Future Directions and investment decisions about which initiatives to continue, modify or conclude. Opportunity Pathways was redesigned and recontracted in 2022 following findings about program design and operational performance. According to DCJ: “The evaluations used rigorous mixed-methods approaches and were ground-breaking in creating a large, linked data asset to track outcomes of clients over time. This allowed us to attribute change in a broad range of outcomes to social housing interventions.”

Despite the complexity, the evaluation produced clear findings. Recipients of Rent Choice Start Safely and Rent Choice Youth experienced large reductions in urgent requests for housing assistance and moderate reductions in presentations to homelessness services. Ninety per cent of recipients whose subsidy ended maintained a private rental tenancy in the following 12 months. Opportunity Pathways participants had fewer presentations to specialist homelessness services, reduced reliance on income support, and fewer court finalisations. The findings strengthened the evidence base for social housing reform in NSW and provided DCJ with practical recommendations for enhancing trauma-informed practice, caseworker resourcing, and partnerships with the Aboriginal community-controlled sector. 

The full evaluation report is publicly available on the NSW Department of Communities and Justice website here.