Metro Community Housing is a small Community Housing provider located in Newtown in the inner west of Sydney. Our primary purpose is to provide long term, subsidised accommodation to people on low incomes who meet Housing Pathways (NSW Housing Register) eligibility criteria.

We also provide transitional housing for people referred through support partnership nominations from our community support partners (see the Partnerships section on our website for a full list of partners organisations). Metro partners with these services through a formal Service Level Agreement offering them nomination rights to a specific number of leasehold properties, or through a formal arrangement with DCJ whereby specific properties owned by the NSW government are allocated to Specialist Homelessness Services.

Transitional tenants require assistance to exit primary homelessness or unsafe accommodation, or to prevent those exiting in-patient psychiatric services, crisis refuges, drug and alcohol programs, or the criminal justice system, from falling into homelessness or being required to live in unsafe/insecure accommodation.

Transitional tenancy terms range from 6-18 months for people who are not priority approved on Housing Pathways. This can be extended up to a maximum term 30 months if they are engaged in full time vocational/tertiary study or they have dependent child 16-21 years completing years 11/12 of secondary school/ or engaged in full time tertiary studies.

For tenants that are priority approved on Housing Pathways the person can remain in transitional housing for two years or until the person is made a (reasonable) offer of permanent social housing, or exits voluntarily. 

Metro has also been involved for many years in providing housing and contracting specialist support services for “Housing First” programs such as Connect 100, the STEP program and the Together Home aimed at assisting people to exit street sleeping. These special purpose programs have generally been time limited and designed to provide transitional housing for a term of 2 or 3 years. However Metro and our peer organisations in Sydney District have committed to providing long term housing for these program participants.

Metro has housed an additional 100 people through The Together Home and STEP programs over the last 4 years.

We manage properties across 18 Local Government areas of metropolitan Sydney with the vast majority located in the Canterbury-Bankstown, City of Sydney and Inner West Local Government areas.

We manage 110 properties owned by the state government (through the NSW Land and Housing Corporation) where we retain the rent paid by tenants but are responsible for meeting all property and asset management costs.

We also receive funding from the NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) to head-lease a minimum of 261 properties from the private rental market through the Community Housing Leasing Program, and for specialist programs such as STEP and Together Home.

Metro is registered by the independent Registrar of Community Services under the provisions of the National Regulatory Scheme for Community Housing Providers.

This requires us to undertake an annual compliance assessment which focus strongly on our financial management and governance systems.

We also provide extensive data about our tenancy and property management functions and compliance with benchmarks in relation to our operations on an annual and quarterly basis to the Department of Communities and Justice.

Metro is a registered charity which is required to provide annual reports to, and is overseen by, the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission.

As a Co-operative we are also required to provide annual reports to the Registry of Co-operatives based within the NSW Department of Fair Trading.

Metro is audited by independent external auditors on an annual basis. Our audited financial accounts can be downloaded HERE