Caring about the state of housing and homelessness in Australia is not easy; it means confronting harsh realities and asking big questions about our society. The harsh reality is that housing is far less affordable to buy or rent than ever: about twice as much as ordinary working families can afford. They are priced out of owned or rented housing unless they put as much as fifty per cent of their household income to meet the cost, which leaves many to choose between food or housing. This restricts the natural aspirations and life choices of millions of Australians and it is causing suffering and hardship on a massive scale.
Homelessness affects over 120,000 people in this land of plenty. Every announcement of one positive housing initiative by government is followed by news of things only getting worse in the system as a whole. Housing cost stress, lack of affordable housing and even homelessness are within the lived experience, directly or indirectly, of virtually everybody. It’s time we acknowledged the cost of housing is a major cause of the high cost of living in Australia.
Particular groups in society are, of course, more affected by this situation than others, and in more complex ways: women fleeing domestic violence, older people living on fixed incomes with few housing choices, people living with mental illness, people discharged from institutions like prisons and hospitals without a place to go, and, more than any other group, First Peoples experiencing the continuing injustices of colonisation.
What we’re seeing is not the kind of society in which most Australians grew up, but it is the one in which we now live. The question we need to ask is: is this the kind of society we want? For us baby-boomers, is it morally right that our children and grandchildren should find accessing housing so much harder and more costly than we did? I grew up in a working poor family in public housing, for which a family like ours would now be ineligible.
An anxious national conversation is occurring about these questions, but this conversation tends to be dominated by a monotony of language that betrays a poverty of understanding, coupled with a want of ambition. The housing problem is so deeply embedded in society that we unwittingly reproduce it in our thoughts and talk. Perhaps most obviously, housing is usually discussed in terms of supply and demand when it should