Jason Toppin's group home is more than a roof over his head.
"This place means a lot to me. It's a part of me that no one can take away," said the 47-year-old, who lives with a vision impairment and intellectual disability.
"This is my happy place."
He's firm friends with the four men he's shared the house with for 12 years. They all have similar disabilities and are of similar ages.
Most evenings they settle in to watch TV together. Friday nights they get takeaway and they visit their local milk bar on the weekends.
The home is run by St John of God Accord and is funded by each resident's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan, which also pays for the support they receive to cook, get out into the community and have supervision overnight.
"It's very warming, family-like and the staff do a good job here," Jason said.
Currently, group homes like Jason's are the main accommodation option for people with disability but not every group home is as happy.
The federal government is looking to reduce the cost of the NDIS by $36 billion over the next four years and disability advocates believe it's an opportunity to consider alternative living plans.
The Disability Royal Commission heard evidence of violence, abuse and neglect in group homes. In its final report, a majority of commissioners recommended group homes be phased out.
Professor Christine Bigby of LaTrobe University, who has worked in intellectual disability research for three decades, said group homes themselves are not the problem.
"Time and time again we come back to what's the housing model … and if we get that right, everything else will follow," she told 7.30.
Within the NDIS, Supported Independent Living funding assists people with high significant needs living in accommodation settings, usually group homes.
This form of support currently costs the scheme $16.6 billion a year, around 10 per cent of which pays for overnight stays.
Advocates say alternative approaches to supported living could be cheaper and better for residents.
"There are people currently living in group homes that could be living more in the community and could be living more cost-effectively," said Jess Walker from the Summer Foundation, an advocacy body focused on alternative housing models.
A different path to independence
One of those options is a disability housing model called Individualised Living Arrangements (ILA).
It allows someone with mild to moderate support needs to achieve independence by living with a flatmate — not a carer — in a regular property in the community.
Meghan Kyne is one of nearly 500 Australians who have chosen the model. She lives with an intellectual disability, and speaks fondly of her flatmate Isabel Hankey, who she's been sharing a house with for the last three years.
"Isabel is a cool person and a wonderful person," Meghan said.
The two share the bills and chores, have long chats over dinner and look out for each other when they're unwell.
"[Meghan's] a really considerate housemate," Isabel said.
Isabel's rent is subsidised in exchange for this companionship, having someone in the house overnight and informal guidance such as prompts with daily tasks.
Meghan also has separate NDIS funding for support workers to assist her with other tasks, including preparing meals, doing laundry or grocery shopping.
The arrangement has an added informal support benefit: all the people Meghan has gotten to know in the community check in on her and help her live an independent life.
Meghan's service provider says the average annual cost of the 21 homes it oversees is just less than $170,000. One-to-three support in a group home would be more than $230,000 per person.
Housing arrangements like Meghan's are overseen by a service provider, which finds appropriate housemates using a rigorous vetting process involving police and other checks.
The provider also organises rental agreements and assigns a staff member to keep an eye on things.
Despite the cost benefit of the arrangement, the NDIS is funding fewer participants to take up what it calls "individualised living options" — down from 623 people in 2024 to 482 earlier this year.
In the first quarter of 2024-25, more than 1,600 people were given funding for the initial planning stages of the arrangement. But in the last quarter of 2025-26, funding to explore the model was given to only 338 people.
'Life-changing' flexibility
Katie Ferguson, who lives with a physical disability, has chosen to live on her own so she can manage her own schedule and decide who to have around her.
"When you live by yourself, you've got total freedom of when you work, when you come home, who you talk to," she said.
To make that possible, she uses a drop-in and on-call service run by not-for-profit Mobile Attendant Care Service (MACS).
Every evening, support workers fan out across Brisbane and the Gold Coast to around 70 clients who only need assistance for between 15 minutes and an hour.
They arrive at Ms Ferguson's home between 11pm and 1am so she can be hoisted into bed from her wheelchair.
Ms Ferguson also uses MACS in case she needs additional support during the night. All up, it costs the NDIS about $51,000 a year.
If she paid for support workers to sleep over, the cost would more than double to almost $114,000 annually.
MACS general manager Alison Herring says the flexibility is life-changing for their customers, and she would like to see the mobile service made available nationally.
"Our support model stretches the funding a lot further," Ms Herring said.
But any move towards tightening the disability housing market and directing NDIS participants to large, established housing providers would make that challenging.
Supporting a solution
The federal government is currently considering whether to adopt an approach to disability housing that could see it play a more active role in how it's planned, funded and monitored.
Disability Minister Mark Butler told 7.30 he only wants a pool of approved providers to offer services in supported living arrangements to remove poor-quality operators from the system.
But the government made no mention of any of the alternatives to group homes when it asked the disability community for their input.
Mr Butler said he thought alternative models would have been a "significant issue raised".
Under the NDIS, organisations providing support to people living in disability accommodation must be registered and undergo independent auditing.
Mr Butler said more was needed to ensure providers offering SIL services were looking after people properly.
"I don't think you can say that confidently about all SIL services."
According to Professor Bigby, having a panel of providers was an opportunity to improve the quality of supports.
"It would make for a much more organised, controlled market and a market that might meet people's needs," Professor Bigby said.
"You could have a panel where you would not be able to get on that panel unless you could demonstrate you met criteria for quality in an observable way."
The NDIS was intended to give participants choice, creating an open market for services.
Mr Butler acknowledged the SIL market was not working as effectively as it could be and said there is a "tension" between making choice and control possible while maintaining high-quality services.
"The central philosophy here is choice and control, and that as much as anything, should include living options," he said.
Professor Bigby said alternatives to group homes represent a "leap into the unknown".
As she sees it, alternatives to group homes are geared towards people with relatively low support needs and are usually overseen by resourceful relatives, which not everyone has.
"It also raises a question about actually who's exercising choice and control," she said.
