To be homeless would be one of our worst nightmares. To have to ask ourselves where we would sleep tonight, to have nothing on which to cook, no postal address, no answer to give to people who ask us where we live, nowhere to keep our bodies and our possessions safe, no confidence that we can keep our family together — we just don’t want to go there.
So Homeless Persons' Week, celebrated this week, creeps up on us like a cane toad. We don’t want to know about it, nor even think about it.
Yet many people in our society are homeless, and the threat of having nowhere to live hangs over even more people. Over forty percent of prisoners can expect to be homeless when they leave jail, for example. And many vulnerable young people have no stable home life, live in abusive situations, are isolated or suffer from mental illness. So it is decent to keep homeless people in mind.
Homeless Persons' Week is even more topical this year because the young people in risk of homelessness are precisely those who under new government proposals will lose benefits, will be constrained to make forty applications each month to seek work and will be obliged to do community work. Charity groups are already reporting an increase in young people living on the streets. These restrictions on support mean that more young people will join them. Although there may be arguments for this punitive regime in the case of the relatively small group of people who simply do not want to work, its application to include vulnerable young people will be harmful. It is easy to see why this should be so.
If you are young, living precariously on the edge of homelessness you have little space to reflect on your life. You must focus on survival. Nor do you have the stability you need in order to benefit from education or work. The things that you need to keep you connected with society – work, a bank account, a driving license – are beyond your reach. You are never far from losing your health, your self-confidence and your self-esteem.
It will not help if you are burdened with filling in forms to apply for jobs that do not exist and required to meet obligations you are not capable of, and then are stigmatised as work-shy, bludgers, leaners and not lifters, and the other rhetorical tropes that so often serve in the place of a properly thought-out policy.
Homelessness does not affect only individuals. It also touches society. The costs of homelessness will be paid in devastated lives and more hospital wards, police cells and gaol beds. Governments neglect their responsibility to people and to society if they do not enable housing for those who need it, encourage people to make connections with society, and help them find work. The economic logic that seeks to cut spending on the unemployed and on job creation will in the longer term lead to increased Government spending to deal with the consequences that are measured in damaged lives.
Homelessness reminds us that people who matter are treated as if they do not matter. That is why it makes us shudder. The Budget and changes to welfare suggest that people do not matter, defining them by only one aspect of their lives. Their worth is defined by their economic contribution. As a result not only the few who choose not to seek work or education are stigmatised, but also the vast majority who cannot do so because of disadvantage or because there is no work. Those fortunate enough to be able to work are praised cheaply as if their employment were a mark of virtue, not of good fortune.
There is much more to people than their ability to work. When we come to know disadvantaged people well we are often impressed as much by their resilience as by their great need and their fragility. Despite all the difficulties in their lives they keep on desiring something more. When they find people to stay with them and governments that values them for who they are, and not simply for their social usefulness, they may be able to learn and to find employment. Ensuring that people have homes is a government’s duty. Homelessness is a failure of the social imagination.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.