Homelessness in Australia is increasingly affecting working families, older women and people who never fitted the old stereotype, as housing costs, insecure work and inadequate social housing widen the risk.

For most of the last century, homelessness in Australia had a face, and it was a narrow one. It was the older man on a park bench, the person with a visible mental illness, the ‘rough sleeper’ glimpsed at the edge of the CBD.

Homelessness was significantly less visible, geographically concentrated, and understood almost entirely as a symptom of individual disadvantage: addiction, mental illness, family breakdown, or a life gone wrong. It was something that happened to other people, in other circumstances, usually after a long slide.

That picture is now badly out of date. Homelessness has not disappeared into the margins, it has spread into the mainstream. It shows up in outer-suburban share houses, in cars parked outside primary schools, in caravan parks holding families who commute to full-time jobs, in the guest bedrooms of relatives who quietly absorb people the housing market has spat out. The single mother juggling two jobs, the tradesperson between contracts, the pensioner priced out of a rental they held for 15 years, the young person ageing out of care with nowhere to land, none of them fit the old picture, and all of them are now part of the homelessness population.

The old framing treated homelessness as a problem of people. The emerging reality is that homelessness is........

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