It used to be rare to see people waiting outside the Crisis centre in the heart of Newcastle, but now a queue of people snakes around the building most days before it opens its doors.

It is a constant stream of rough sleepers, workers sleeping in their car or sofa-surfing, families reeling from an eviction notice, people fleeing domestic violence or recently arrived refugees with nowhere to go filing in desperate for help.

The north-east city used to be considered among the country’s most affordable places to live, but in recent years it has been engulfed in a housing crisis that has pushed the city closer to London with its soaring rents and long waiting lists for social housing.

“Five or six years ago, I’d say to colleagues here: ‘You’ve got it easy compared with Brent, this is no problem compared with Croydon.’ The pressure in London is definitely worse, but we’re seeing similar situations in the north-east now,” said specialist housing adviser, Mark Reynolds. **“**That’s for the first time in my career, and I’ve worked on Tyneside for 25 years.”

Mark Reynolds says the housing situation is as worse as he has seen it in more than two decades. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

It has left staff at the centre – known as a Skylight – at a loss when trying to find people homes. A board in the office shows the current wait times for a social home in the city range from three months for the most urgent cases, to between two and three years for those in the lowest priority band.

All while private rents have risen rapidly: it now costs on average £500-550 a month for a room in the city centre, money that would have got you a one-bedroom flat a few years ago.

“People are still shocked when I say that we don’t have any housing,” said Crystal Hicks, the director of Skylight. “I’ll go and speak at conferences in London, and I’m trying to explain that the gap between local housing allowance and private sector rents is the highest in Newcastle than any of our nine locations. That’s what has changed. That would have been London without a doubt in the past. It’s not any more.”

Michael*, who fled to the city to escape an abusive relationship, is stuck in a homeless hostel and facing an almost two-year wait for a home.

“I’m not on the streets any more. But the thing is, you don’t want to be in a hostel for 90 weeks because it’s literally a box. And you’ve only got a microwave and a fridge,” he said. “You’ve got no freedom. Mentally, it’s not good, being stuck somewhere like that.”

A board inside Skylight details the typical waiting times for public housing in Newcastle. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

It’s one of the reasons why Newcastle, along with London, will be one of the first locations where Crisis starts buying its own housing stock in a first of its kind project for the charity.

“Crisis has always said ‘we’re not landlords’, because we’ve never needed to be,” said Hicks. “But I think now we’re at the point where there’s not enough players in the market, not enough stock in the mix, so we do need to come in. It’s exciting.”

It may also help ease the burden on their staff who, without their own housing, are often faced with having to tell frantic people that there is nowhere for them to go.

Most of the face-to-face services in the city shut their doors during the Covid pandemic and some never reopened. Around the corner from the Crisis centre sits the city council’s former Housing Advice Centre, boarded up and covered in graffiti, with services now in the city library by appointment only or over the phone.

“People have legal rights, but you can hide behind a telephone, you don’t have to look somebody in the eyes,” said Hicks. “We have people sat in our reception at 4pm on a Friday and, whatever your computer says, they need help. Can you come and tell them to their face that tonight they have to go and sleep on the streets?”

A Newcastle city council spokesperson said: “We have a strong track record of preventing and responding to homelessness by working closely with individuals to understand their unique circumstances and provide tailored support.

“We are also acutely aware of the wider housing pressures in our city. With almost 8,500 households on our social housing register, and many more struggling to find affordable homes, waiting times for permanent housing are longer than we would wish. This is a deeply frustrating reality for many residents and we share their concerns.”

The council said it relocated its housing advice centre to the library in 2021 as most people were contacting them on the phone or online and it is developing plans to reintroduce face-to-face provision in the future.

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity.