Allowing homelessness to continue is a choice. Ending it must become one too.

When we talk about homelessness, we tend to reach for the language of systems: service demand, housing markets, rough sleeping counts, vacancy rates, cost-of-living pressures, workforce shortages. All of these things are real, and all of them help explain the shape and scale of the crisis. But they can also obscure something simpler and far less comfortable. Homelessness is, at its core, unfair.

It is unfair that in a wealthy country, people are sleeping in cars, tents, parks and crisis shelters, or staying in overcrowded houses and unsafe relationships, because a secure home is out of reach. It is unfair that a person’s chance of having somewhere safe to live can turn on circumstances they never chose. These may be that they were born into poverty, experienced violence, left care without support, live with mental illness or disability, are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, cannot navigate a maze of forms and waiting lists or happen to live in a region where the rental market has tightened beyond reach.

And it is unfair that we have built systems in which people must often demonstrate the depth of their suffering before help arrives; systems in which homelessness is still treated, too often, as a personal failure rather than a failure of policy, planning, investment and shared responsibility.

Understood this way, homelessness is a social justice issue before it is anything else. It is a question of who gets safety and who does not; who gets privacy; who gets the chance to recover, work,........

© Pearls and Irritations