'Magnificent obsessions' series

I was out with friends on Saturday but stayed home all day Sun giving me time and space to dream. 

Because I’d flattened out a whole lot of watercolours I had given them a second life and resurrected possibilities. The confluence of events led me to making a bunch of standalone paintings into a series I titled ‘Magnificent obsessions’ in honour of Sydneysiders’ penchant for food and real estate. The title is similar to my old boss’ film title, what she made after she left the company we worked at. 

Like my collage I’m not really stealing the film title, it’s more like payment because I made some graphics for the credits, and anyway her film title is not precisely the same. I repurpose magazines to make collage so why not repurpose a pair of words?

There is something unwieldy about our obsession with real estate, more recently paired with an interest in food – see all the cooking shows about farm-to-fork etc – and it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “magnificent” though we have nationally a much higher mobility rate than other countries apart from those in Scandinavia, so evidently the use of dwellings to improve one’s material wellbeing isn’t all bad. 

We’re yet to see if the state and federal governments can do something about homelessness, which is still too high. We know what to do about homelessness it’s just a matter of authorities biting the bullet and taking the necessary actions to make sure people are housed. The measures required imply an all-of-government response. I wonder if siloing – which is inevitable where you have organisations responding – isn’t going to throw a spanner in the works.

Lanz Priestley commemoration

 It had rained for a week and it would rain for a week more and I’d spent the morning shopping and having yum cha in Campsie with friends. I’d bought box cutters and gardening gloves – I planned to plant things so they could grow and feed me – but caught the bus and tram into town for the event. I left home for Lanz's event at 1pm and got back after five o’clock, so it was a full day for me, one in which I met an old friend. 

I’d once travelled to South American to be with Austin but Martin Place was the only place that the commemoration ceremony could possibly have been held in, the crowd relatively thin – there were probably a few hundred people all told – due to Huey, the weather god. A camera crew roved around among the mourners, others wielded their cameras, and the boys in blue stood off to one side, under the eaves of a commercial building and of the Reserve bank of Australia, which, four years before, had stood sentinel over the Tent City, of which Lanz was unofficial Mayor.

“Barak bukbuk baraken warangumuraj rajita nunga,” the almost-naked man chanted as people came up to the stack of burning gum leaves, giving off their cleansing smoke. The man had a stick through his nose and he talked about meeting Lanz on the Northern Beaches, and of surfing. 

“You’ve gotta help other people in need,” sang Peter Blanch with his guitar. Big city life. 

Later, there was a video shown on a large truck that someone had parked on the pedestrian mall. It wasn’t all about the city. Ethan Pinnar, a truck driver who used the word “tremendously” at least three times, talked about a convoy to Bourke for NSW Bushfire Cleanup. Mary spoke about who she thought Australians were: “We are people that look after each other.” 

Lanz was a Kiwi, but never mind. 

Others spoke about what Lanz had meant to them. There was Glenda and Roy Butler, an MP who illustrated the freewheeling network Lanz could marshal like a crazy general. Then Freya spoke movingly about what she’d lost.

Nicky said, “English is my fourth language.” Carol, Sandra, Melanie, Nicole, Lee Rhiannon. Everyone had been touched in some way by Lanz and it was a real shame that the mainstream media didn’t turn up to report on his death. It would be left to the people who knew him as a man, as a giver, as a motivator, as a mentor, as a friend, as family, as an organiser, a man so contrary and ambitious for the wellbeing of others that he’d go without if it meant someone else could have what they needed. 

Lanz was a man of ideas who inspired by his example and by his words. He was unique, one-off, “iconic” (as someone said). He was the best of who we are.

Austin had to meet a friend at Stanmore but we decided to head to Central to have a coffee. When we got there the café on the Grand Concourse was closed however so I caught the bus home.

Homelessness: “Managing towards a shared result”

This is an interview with Roseanne Haggerty, who founded the Common Ground organisation in the US some time ago and is now involved with a different organisation named Community Solutions. She is also on the advisory group of the Institute of Global Homelessness. Her focus is very much on eliminating homelessness. I was kindly introduced to Haggerty by Felicity Reynolds, an Australian I interviewed at around the same time (the beginning of 2018).  The following interview was conducted on 2 March of that year. This post contains about 4000 words.

MdS: Okay. [I’m] recording. So, I spoke with Felicity Reynolds. I think you know her.

RH: Yeah, very well.

MdS: Yeah. So, she told me a little bit about how Common Ground got set up in Australia. I think at that time you were staying in Adelaide for – you had some sort of scholarship there, is that right?

RH: My first visit to Australia was as an Adelaide Thinker in Residence. The South Australian government had, at the time – and this was in 2005 and 2006 – a programme where they would invite – it wouldn’t have to be international but it typically was – international “experts” who had some relevant experience around topics of priority within the South Australian strategic plan. So, that was how I got to South Australia, by invitation of the government as part of this Thinkers in Residence programme.

MdS: Right, and how did you find that? What was that like for you?

RH: It was fascinating on many levels. I had never been to Australia before, and it was very different to – you know, understanding how the different forms and levels of government were in that context. But what was equally interesting, Matthew, was how similar it was, because homelessness, at least in the US context – and this is true if you look in Canada, and I’ve had many relationships and involvement with Australia over what is going on 13 years now, plus in parts of western Europe – what’s striking is how similar this issue is. The way that communities had attempted to respond to homelessness tended to mirror each other, and what was actually effective tended to, as we found, be effective in one context as well as another.

So, I have really treasured relationships and opportunities to work with Australian leaders in this space, and I’m struck by how much we can learn from each other, because the contexts are far more similar than they may appear on the surface.

MdS: Right. So, at that time, you were working with Common Ground in New York. Is that right?

RH: Right. I founded that organisation back in 1990, and at that time our focus was principally – not exclusively – but I’d say 95 per cent of our efforts was on building and operating permanent supported housing, which is the “Common Ground” model, which is distinguished by really very thoughtful, high-quality design, very intentional property management that is oriented at tenant success. The integration of health, mental health, employment services right in the building. And, importantly, a mix of tenancies. So, people coming from homelessness as well as what we would call in the States workforce housing.

So, those were the features of our model, and that was of great interest to folks in Australia. I’ll just say, the other five per cent of Common Ground’s work at that time was actually what’s become to be the Community Solutions work. We’d begun to – we’re building all this housing. It works amazingly well and efficiently for the people within it, and it contributes to the community, but we’re not actually ending homelessness. What else do we have to do? So, it’s the “what else” that Community Solutions has been pursuing. We became – we spun off from Common Ground and became a national organisation about seven years ago.

MdS: Okay, so do you want to talk to me a little bit about what you’re doing now?

RH: Sure. Well, Community Solutions has really evolved this insight that to end homelessness and be able to have (now) 10 US communities end long-term homelessness or inveterate homelessness, and many who are showing steady reductions. It’s because we’ve come to understand that this is an issue that is – it’s more like a hurricane. I guess in Australia it would be like a typhoon or something like that, whatever tropical storm or natural disaster. It’s not a static problem. It’s shifting all the time. You need lots of different people with capacity to respond, to be working together as a team, and just managing towards a shared result which is, “We’re going to solve this problem,” as opposed to having a lot of very well-intentioned and often very important programmes stood up that aren’t that dynamic and that don’t relate to each other. You can understand the difference.

So, Community Solutions has been really in the work of helping communities put a different kind of system in place, one that’s heavily data-driven. It’s about building that ongoing response capacity, which looks like a well-performing public health response that really gets to an end state of eliminating homelessness, beyond the important work of creating more housing. You just need a whole other parallel effort, we’ve found, and that’s what we need in the United States to help communities actually put the right problem-solving teams and behaviours in place.

MdS: Right. One of the things that I’ve come across is that the government in Australia every five years does a census, and they count the people using different categories to count them. One of the categories that they use is to count whether they’re homeless or not, and they’ve got five different definitions which define homelessness. But the number in 2011 was 105,000, and [...] the number for 2016, which is the most recent census, will be 120,000. So, the number of homelessness has actually increased. The other thing that’s striking about the Australian situation right now is that we’ve just come out of a sustained period of rising house prices that started in about 2013 and went up until about the end of last year. So, I think those two things are working together. It’s just so expensive to afford housing in the big cities where the jobs are.

RH: That’s absolutely true, and this is real, but what we have also found is that individuals and families who can’t – because of financial reasons or disability reasons, or other challenges – can’t negotiate the private housing market and need support from charitable organisations or government to secure and maintain stable housing, that those programmes and those resources are very disaggregated.

I could not tell you specifically how things are set up in New South Wales. It’s been too long since I was immersed in the detail, but to give you a flavour, like in New York City – which is a disaster – there are about 11 different housing production programmes with different government grants and loans, four different rent subsidy programmes, probably about – well beyond – 30,000 subsidised tax credit units, 170,000 public housing units – and that’s just the city. That doesn’t include what state and federal government[s] are doing. Many additional resources tied up in the homelessness shelter system. Everybody’s off doing their own thing, and New York is now spending something like $2.3 billion a year to run its shelter system alone.

So, even in a place where you have housing costs that are really off the charts in the city, you also just see this complete disorganised mess of different housing programmes, and one of the great opportunities we see, and many of these communities that are making real progress, they’ve realised that they’ve got to actually get organised, you know, make these programmes work together, make the intentions of actually ending homelessness or dealing with some very urgent housing priorities for certain targeted groups, make that a shared priority that is really owned by local government, state government, not-for-profit and developer communities that use these resources.

So, some of [unclear] just like, you know, what would Toyota do if they were trying to build a car that worked? They would make sure that all the parts connected, that things were optimised, that quality and efficiency and the experience of the user were positive, and that – there are many opportunities, even in very high-cost markets, to actually take a very different lens to this issue and see, like, are we actually – have we designed a housing system that works for people that really need to fall back on it in times of financial or personal or family crisis? That’s the opportunity.

MdS: Yeah. I guess in New South Wales the state government is mostly responsible for providing housing for people who can’t afford it, but we’ve been getting mixed signals from the state minister, and it’s not clear whether he’s making affordable housing, or even such things as inclusionary zoning, a priority. One day he says that he wants to have more policemen and firemen living close to the city, and the next day he’s saying things like, if we put – if we control the rent on these apartments, then it’s going to push up the cost of other apartments in the same building. So, you know, even one person can’t get their message straight, it seems. The developers, it seems, don’t really want to provide affordable housing.

RH: I think you’re perfectly illustrating the conundrum which is: there are a lot of different competing agendas. There are these – some can be anticipated but not all – unintended consequences. Trying to do one good thing could cause something else to go out of alignment. So, this is where we’ve found that we really need to have a community approach with all of the interest groups – not so much the interest groups, but the people with the resources – at the table, and to have a common agenda and measure it. Like, because otherwise things just get bogged down in chaos, and nothing gets targeted and nothing gets accomplished.

MdS: Yeah.

RH: [Inaudible] figure this out. That’s the cool thing. It’s not like we can be wishful about this. It’s like: look at the construction industry. They manage to get buildings up that don’t fall down and get the plumbers and the steam fitters and the sheetrock crews all coordinated. That’s the kind of model for what communities who are gaining ground on homelessness are doing. They’re using project management tools and data the way other industries do to say, “Are we actually getting where we want to go?” “And are we course-correcting every day if we need to?” “If what we do on Tuesday has some unintended effect by Thursday, we’re going to regroup Friday and try to rebalance things.”

MdS: So, that’s what you’re trying to do at the moment. You’re trying to take a more holistic approach?

RH: Precisely, and use tools that have been proven out in other industries to actually get more reliable, optimal, high-quality results from the point of view of the user. Homelessness? There are a couple of different users. One is the homeless individual or family itself. The other is the organisations who are trying to be effective. Then there’s the community that wants to see the problem solved for vulnerable people, and that their public dollars are going in an effective direction.

MdS: Yeah. I think most people do at least wonder, when they see the person on the street corner with the cup in their hand and their head on the pavement, “Why can’t we do something?”

RH: Yeah. The crazy thing is, you know, while without a doubt communities need more affordable housing, that alone won’t solve the problem. Conversely, communities that we’re working with – we’re working with about 75 communities around the United States – they’re discovering that they have a lot more resources than they thought once they start actually being very accountable for results. Like, “Why are we spending money on this?” “It’s getting no result.” “Let’s pull it back in.” “Why are we holding these units off the market?” “Who’s responsible for it?” “Okay, there’s a waiting list, we can’t find the people who are moving in.” “Actually, why do we have a waiting list when we’re trying to do something urgent?” And, “We have to use different decision-making guidelines.”

So, these kinds of things, they don’t get you all the way to an end to homelessness, but they sure get you far down the road. What we’re finding in communities that are actually working in this disciplined way, you see new people stepping forward with new resources to help fill gaps. I was talking with this businessman in Denver just at the beginning of the year, and he was like – his group is investing their social impact fund in buying additional units that are on the open market to basically make them more affordable, and to keep them in the [unclear] of affordability. I was saying, “You know, awesome that you’re doing this. What got you interested in being part of this project?” He said, “Well, here in Denver, we smell a win.”

This is someone who never, until Denver started making really strong progress on ending chronic inveterate homelessness and was able to show its results and show where it stood, and where the gaps were in the housing market, these new folks stepped in with resources. We see that beginning to happen in other cities too. We were just meeting with a group in Atlanta of property developers who were like, “Hey, okay, this looks like a solvable problem.” It’s not raging out of control. People know what they’re doing. So, that’s the promise. If you get your arms around the kind of problem it is – that it’s a dynamic, complex, shifting problem – and realise that those communities are completely disorganised when it comes to how they’re lining up their housing resources, you’ve got a lot of opportunity to make progress.

MdS: Sure, that’s right. There was a really weird talk that the state government minister here went to, he opened up this organisation called the Housing Supply Association, which is some sort of front group for developers they’ve put together so they can build more affordable housing. He talked to them for hours, just down the road here where I live in Pyrmont, and everyone seemed to be on the same page, but then once they’ve launched this association and they start getting developers to register their interest in being part of these projects, nothing seemed to happen. The business of developing apartments or housing is all about making as much money as possible, and the other problem in Australia – I don't know if you’ve had the same problem in America, I think you have – is that even though unemployment is going down, wages are not rising even though cost of living is rising.

So, you’ve got these twin problems of high rents and high housing prices and stagnant wages, which is putting people out of [their homes]. So, the government says, “Well, we’ve got to step in and do something.” But like you said, they just can’t get organised to take the next logical step. We know that governments can do this. We know that they’ve got the ability if they’ve got the will-power, but it’s getting that force – and it’s great to see that you’ve got people stepping up, developers stepping up in America, and saying we want to do this, because we think it’s the right thing to do. Because I think that, in the end, that’s really the only way that these problems are going to get solved.

RH: Totally agree with you, Matthew. It’s the private landlords and developers that control most of the housing. They need to be part of this, and they can’t be naming their own terms. These are community-level problems, and what makes a difference in Denver, in Atlanta, these two places I mentioned, and a couple of other places where we’ve seen, is real leadership from developers. People with a conscience saying, “Hey, we’re the people in this community with the properties, with the expertise. How do we participate?” What seems very – there are a couple of things that have been important, I think, in these areas where we see that kind of leadership.

One is, the community has its act together, and they know how many units they need. They’re like, “We need 325 units more than we have in Denver to end inveterate homelessness.” To that extent, they can be concrete, as opposed to just, “We need more.” Having a target is very mobilising. Second thing is that these developers know that they’re not out there alone, that there is a not-for-profit or a reliable government agency, that if there’s a problem with the rent or a health or behavioural issue, that they can call a reliable trusted partner who will jump in to help problem-solve, that makes a big difference.

The other thing is, “Don’t tie me up in paperwork!” If I’m going to help you out here, don’t make me sit here for six weeks sending me one fat envelope of forms after another to fill out. Just make it easy. If you can do that, we’ve found that in communities all over this company that are part of this Built for Zero private landlords are stepping up, and in some cases landlord groups like in Denver and Atlanta are just coming together to say, “Just tell us what you need us to do.”

MdS: Built for Zero, that’s the new movement that you’re leading, is that right?

RH: Correct, yeah, the organisation is Community Solutions, but this is our principal focus, driving this behaviour change and this different – and this vision that this is a solvable problem, but we have to change the way we’re working.

MdS: Okay. Alright. Well, it’s been really interesting talking with you. I’m just writing a series of blogposts because I’m interested in the problem. I walk around the city a lot and I see a lot of young people, especially, on the street, and begging for money. So, that’s how I started to get into these blogposts, and I found that there’s a lot of demand out there for them. People enjoy reading about these types of things, because I think that there is this shared feeling that we should do something about this, especially in wealthy countries like the OECD. It seems like some countries – I’ve heard that Finland has done particularly well in eliminating homelessness. Is that right?

RH: Yeah, exactly. They’ve done the best in Europe. They haven’t eliminated it altogether, but they’re much further along than everyone else, and they’ve measurably reduced it. The key thing they did differently, Matthew, was that they used to have, like, 6000 shelter beds. They were like, “Wait a minute.” If housing is the answer, what are we doing keeping people in this suspended animation? So, they went through and they basically renovated these buildings, and I guess acquired other ones, and really just committed full-on to creating affordable housing for people who’ve been experiencing homelessness, and to really gearing their system to getting people quickly back into housing and not in this endless emergency state.

I think they only just have one very small shelter that’s really about a genuine emergency and triage place left in Helsinki, and all of their investment now goes to housing.

MdS: I think inclusionary zoning is probably – thinking about the Australian situation, and scattershot – what do you call it? Scatter site housing?

RH: Scatter site, yeah.

MdS: This  is the term Felicity used. So, you have people who have, for example, mental health issues or some other personal issue who can’t afford normal housing on the commercial rental market, who are housed along with other people, just like in the Common Ground that we’ve already got. I think that type of model is probably going to be the one that gets most support from the government in Australia, because they don’t like having these dysfunctional developments that you used to find back in the ‘80s in Europe, especially in England and places like that. But you’ve got to get the developers to come on board and commit to locking rents on some of those apartments.

Some of the municipal councils, who are the ones who approve developments in Australia, have set up a system where they’ll give the developer the ability to build extra units in a development if the developer will make some of those units, say for a period of 10 years, affordable housing at an affordable rent. So, there are some things like that coming through.

RH: That’s such an important strategy. One of the things, I think, after working on this issue for many years I can say with confidence is, there’s no one solution. You basically have to have the intention, we’re going to solve this problem, and look at every opportunity, from inclusionary zoning to looking at occupancies and housing, looking at, you know, can you look at zoning and the incentives and construction practices, and can you think – you know, your local employers to helping to be problem solvers if [unclear] or seasonal work is part of the challenge, your mental health system. Everybody has to feel that it’s everybody’s responsibility to help to contribute to solutions and have a sense of what role they can play.

But yeah, inclusionary zoning, very smart. There are a lot of other, in that vein, things that we see people doing that increase the range of housing options that are available without building something entirely new, but just embedding part of the solution to this within some other development, or using buildings differently and making it easier for people to get building permits. Every bit of function in the system is worth looking at.

The person that – I haven’t checked their website, but I know that they’ve got a good one. I was just at what’s called the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, last week, on a panel, and they had this terrific exhibit up called Making Room. It’s a few rooms full of displays on innovative things happening in housing in the United States. A lot of this would be under the radar. It’s just like, here’s a co-housing project, here’s a design and construction project, here’s an inclusionary zoning project. Just, you could step back and say, if we did all this at scale, we would solve this problem. You might find it interesting, because they did a good job in this exhibit of highlighting, you know, like what’s different about it, and why it’s promising as far as expanding housing opportunities.

MdS: I’ll have a look online, and I’ll see if I can find anything about it. Thank you.

RH: Yeah, it’s really good. Sure.

MdS: Okay. Is there anything else that you think that I should [know]– I don’t presume to call myself anything like an expert. That’s why I’m talking to people who I think know more about this than me. But I’m just wondering if there’s anything else that you’d like to add before we finish up.

RH: Maybe just to highlight that point, that it’s not just the housing system, and it’s not just more housing. I think it’s also – one of the things we’ve learned is – more types of housing options. Ways that we see some of the communities making progress here is that they have really re-thought what shared housing could look like. They re-thought the interior arrangement of certain buildings. It’s a certain area for innovation, not just how do we build more housing, but more types of housing options as part of that strategy that each city needs to develop. 

Book review: The Rip, Mark Brandi (2019)

This curious novel is focalised entirely though the character of a young woman, whose name we are not told, and who lives in a park with a man named Anton. The two are friends. Anton had been in prison but now they survive by squeegeeing the windscreens of cars and begging and Centrelink. The primary character is a heroin user and one day Anton and she meet with a man named Steve who invites them to return to his apartment. He gives the narrator a deal of the drug and she shoots up and she and Anton stay the night.

Anton and Steve start burgling properties and stealing things that they take to a fence who doesn’t require an ID. The narrator is still staying at Steve’s place with her dog Sunny but she gets curious about the lock on Steve’s bedroom door and gets a knife from the kitchen and tries to remove the screws that are holding the latch in place. Then Steve comes home.

There is a disturbing feeling of dread underlying much of the drama in this book, and the police form a regular element of the rhythm of life. From time to time the narrator talks with a police officer she calls Dirty Doug who might give her ten dollars if she is begging when they meet. Doug warns her about Steve. She also goes to the Salvos for a meal. There are other places that she and Anton go to for supplies but once they are involved with Steve things start to go from bad to worse. People are trying to get in touch with the girl who rents the apartment Steve and the two friends are staying in and the narrator starts to wonder about two large containers she can see in Steve’s bedroom from outside the window down the side of the house.

This is the first novel about a homeless person I have read. In real life, only a small proportion of the people who are homeless on any given night sleep rough like Anton and the girl in Brandi’s interesting book. Most homeless people are couch surfing or living in casual accommodation, but when people think of homelessness they automatically think of the people they see on city street corners begging, or sleeping in sleeping bags in parks. Most people will not know how such people came to find themselves in this type of situation. It might be because they were always living in foster homes when they were growing up and never got a proper education, like Brandi’s hero. Or they might have been in jail, like Anton, and had not been able to find a place to rent or a job to pay a wage to pay the rent with.

As Brandi’s narrator knows, many people who sleep rough have multiple problems; with substance abuse, with mental illness, or a combination of the two. They may have suffered abuse as a child and have never been able to get their act together for long enough to secure employment or an education. This is why she gives money to people she meets in the parks around Melbourne after she has been out begging. Because she knows the truth.

As a character she is fully realised, and you are provided with a sort of stream-of-consciousness as she goes about her business during the day. Popular culture furnishes a fair number of the referents that she uses in these monologues with different people she conducts in her head. Often it is with Anton, who she has a special connection to that is characterised by a fierce loyalty. She has a rich interior life, which is something that might surprise most people, who if they think about homeless people and junkies only ever think about how unsightly or inconvenient they are.

At the core of this novel, which keeps you turning the pages impatiently, is a crime the nature of which you are given only the slightest clues at the outset. Certainly the narrator’s safety is often uppermost in the reader’s mind. Things are not even perfectly clear by the time you reach the denouement. What is clear is that there is often a strong current against which people are forced to fight for much of their lives, just so that they can survive. Just to be able to get enough money to eat, to keep a roof over their heads, to make a relationship work. The forces that impede many people are often unseen but no less real for that. Brandi has given the community another way to frame the world of the homeless person. Instead of asking a rough sleeper to move on, it is possible instead to put out a container of water for their dog.

Cardboard sign on Union Street in Pyrmont

Someone give this guy a job! Ad agencies looking for originality and flair should pay attention to this homeless guy who had "cardboard sign" painted in pink on his cardboard sign on Friday morning as he slept on the pavement near the casino. His meta-narrative critiquing the dominant genre of sob-stories you see around the traps demonstrates the essential uselessness of conventional approaches to begging. I snapped this photo on the way to an appointment and on the way back home when I passed him he was sitting with his back against the wall, and I gave him the change I had received when I had paid for my breakfast.

Homeless man, Cross City Tunnel exit

Today on my way to lunch in Darlinghurst I saw a tent set up in the concrete space next to the ramp leaving the Western Distributor where the Cross City Tunnel exits underground in an easterly direction. The eastbound exit to Bathurst Street and Harbour Street is located here as well. The homeless man in this picture is the one wearing the hoodie, I think. Soon after taking this photo I saw the same group of men walking north across the mouth of Bathurst Street toward a white van parked on Day Street where the Park Royal Hotel is located.

Talking about the social housing model, Common Ground

This is the latest in a series of blogposts on this blog about homelessness. This time, I spoke with Felicity Reynolds, who is CEO at the Mercy Foundation in Sydney. About 10 years ago, Reynolds was involved in bringing the Common Ground system of social housing to Australia from the US, where it had been developed initially in New York City. In this interview, Reynolds mentions another interview which appeared on this blog at the end of October, that I did with Housing First founder Sam Tsemberis. 

This interview took place at the beginning of January, but I held off publishing because it contains information about the number of homeless deriving from the 2016 Census that had not been finalised at the time by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. I told the ABS I would wait until their final numbers were published, which happened yesterday.

MdS: Alright, so [the voice recorder is] running. I wanted to ask you about the Common Ground system in Australia. My understanding is that you were involved with this from the very beginnings. Can you give me some background about your involvement?

Yes, sure. In 2007 – and I’d been managing homelessness services at the City of Sydney for some time at that point – I actually got a Churchill Fellowship because rough sleepers and solutions to people who have been experienced chronic street homelessness had become quite a passion. I got a Churchill Fellowship to specifically look at that issue right across the world, to see what were the most effective programs and practices etcetera. And so I had been in touch with Roseanne Haggerty – and by the way Sam Tsemberis as well in relation to Housing First and whatnot – and so as part of my Churchill Fellowship I visited a number of places that were doing good work, that were getting people who were chronically homeless into permanent housing. And obviously a couple of places I went to included Common Ground in New York and included Pathways to Housing that Sam runs (and you know a bit about that because you’ve already interviewed him).

So I guess my interest in trying to create new forms of permanent supportive housing for people who will need that in order to have their homelessness ended, began quite some time ago when I was first at the City of Sydney and realised that we did not have adequate supply of permanent supportive housing for the relatively small group of people experiencing homelessness who will need that – not everyone who is homeless requires support to sustain their housing, it’s a really quite a small group of people – but we certainly didn’t have enough stock for that group of people.

We’ve had programs in NSW for a long time – like, my background’s in mental health – called HASI, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that. It’s the housing and support initiative, and that’s been going I think since the late 80s and that provides permanent housing and ongoing support for people with a mental illness. But it wasn’t necessarily an easy program to access for people who had multiple problems and who had experienced chronic homelessness. I’m not saying they didn’t access it at all, just that we needed some other options.

So I know when I came back from my Churchill Fellowship I very much wanted to make sure that we were able to create some additional supply of permanent supportive housing in Australia for the relatively small group of people who will need it to sustain housing. I’m in favour of all types of models, scatter-site and high-density, and I got involved with a group called the Australian Common Ground Alliance and I was the person in Sydney and there was someone in Melbourne – it was Stephen Nash at Home Ground at that point, in Melbourne – and Karyn Walsh from Micah Projects up in Brisbane. There had already been a Common Ground in Australia in Adelaide which Roseanne had been involved in establishing when she was the South Australian thinker-in-residence, I think that was around 2003 or 2004 that she was thinker-in-residence down in South Australia, and so I’d taken the opportunity to meet her when she was in Australia probably around about 2005 or 2006. So I already had a connection with her. There was a woman from Tasmania who was also interested as well.

And so the Australian Common Ground Alliance kind of came together in 2008 and by then I’d moved to this [current] role at the Mercy Foundation where we fully focus on supporting projects that end people’s experience of homelessness. And so as well as having the national link I established a Common Ground Sydney working group to see if we could ensure that Sydney had at least one Common Ground. And the reason for that is that we need more supply of affordable and social housing. Housing First is wonderful but if you’ve got now housing you can’t do it. And so I still think that we need probably maybe one or two more in Sydney, not that many more.

MdS: Common Grounds, you mean?

Yeah. It seemed to take forever at the time. But now looking back on it, it was probably relatively quick and we had a bit of luck in Sydney in that there [were] the stimulus funds that the Rudd government was able to release, and there was also a Commonwealth-state program called A Place to Call Home that was funding the development of new public housing, plus the states provided the support services. So the Common Ground in Sydney ultimately happened.

MdS: That’s at Camperdown is it?

Yes, that’s right. And it actually opened in 2011, so it wasn’t too bad starting a working group in 2008 and launching a concept to make it happen. Really, when I look back upon it, it was relatively [quick]. At the time it seemed to be taking forever. But we wanted to ensure with the Melbourne one and with the Sydney one and the Brisbane one that the people who were the most vulnerable got into that housing.

I’m not sure if you know about the Common Ground model. It is a mixed-tenancy model, so it’s about ensuring that you don’t fill up a building with a whole lot of people that do have a range of problems, that you ensure that there are people who simply need affordable housing plus people who have experienced chronic homelessness and may have some additional issues. And it has a fairly – what I would hope in most instances – is fairly invisible onsite support to ensure that people sustain their housing.

MdS: No, I don’t know anything about it. I’m open to listening to any description that you want to give about it because I’m coming from a point of complete ignorance.

Well, just in relation to the Common Ground model, it is really about ensuring that people who’ve experienced long-term homelessness do have high-quality housing in which to live. It’s quality, it’s permanent and it’s affordable. It ensures there’s a diverse social mix, so not everyone comes from the same background, there’s also housing there for people who are maybe key workers or something like that, or studying, that need affordable housing close to the city. It has onsite tenancy management and support services for people who might need that. It provides a safe and secure environment and that’s often through ensuring there’s a concierge service in the building – I mean, it’s the sort of thing that really wealthy people in the city have in their buildings, so you know it works – and I think that’s an important part of ensuring that the building is very community-spirited and is able to be a really positive place where people can live.

The other crucial thing about the model is ensuring that there is a separation of the tenancy management and the support services, so just as you and I wouldn’t want our landlord to know a range of personal things about us or tell us when we should be taking medication or anything like that, that’s exactly the case [with Common Ground]. It’s really normalising to ensure that the tenancy management is quite separate [from] the support services management. So they’re kind of the five key principles of the Common Ground model.

And of course it’s permanent, to me that’s one of the most crucial aspects – I’m not a fan at all of transitional housing models. I don’t think they help people to gain stability because, you know, I don’t know about you but if you’re told you can live somewhere for six months or for a year you’re unlikely to put down roots, get connected with the community, all that kind of thing.

And it’s done with the Housing First methodology, so people don’t have to prove that they’re capable of living in a house or anything like that, they are simply offered housing based on the fact that they require permanent supportive housing and have experienced long periods of homelessness or unsuccessful tenancies in the past. So it’s important that a resource that provides that level of support and high-quality housing goes to the people who need it most.

MdS: Who owns the title of the Camperdown property? Who is the actual owner?

You’ll have to talk to Mission Australia about that. My involvement stopped once we had the state government committed to it and running with it. They obviously paid for the building. [And] we had that great relationship with the Australian Common Ground Alliance. Grocon made a commitment to build Common Grounds in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane at cost, so there was significant savings in the building by Grocon making that commitment at that time. And so, once it was established and the state government was funding it they put out to tender for the building, needless to say because Grocon built it at cost they got the tender, and then of course they put out to tender the tenancy management and the support services and Mission Australia Housing run the tenancy management in Sydney and a collaboration of four services initially got the support services management for the one in Camperdown.

Right across Australia, it’s all a bit different, as it should be. For example, in Melbourne it was Home Ground that provide the support services, that’s now become an organisation called Launch Housing. It merged with another organisation a couple of years ago. And Yarra Community Housing, which is now called Unison Community Housing, is the tenancy provider. Up in Brisbane it’s Micah Projects, the support providers, and Common Ground Queensland is the tenancy provider. They actually established a new organisation for that purpose up there. It was something we considered doing down here but decided in the end that we really don’t need to establish a new organisation, there’s plenty of community housing providers that would be able to do that tenancy management without creating a new organisation.

The important thing is that the principles of ensuring that people are supported in their housing as they see fit. It’s important that it doesn’t infantilise adult human beings as some short-term crisis services can sometimes do with their list of rules and curfews and things like that. It very much is about supporting people as they go and ensuring that they are assisted to meet their tenancy obligations.

So it’s simply permanent housing that also has that support attached for those people who want it and need it. I continue to facilitate, and have for the last – it’s probably been about four years – what’s called the Common Ground Community of Practice, and so once a month we have a national telephone hook-up between the support and tenancy managers at Common Ground and I simply facilitate that because they’re obviously busy people. That’s a great support nationally because in all of the cities except for Adelaide they’re loan services, we haven’t had any further Common Grounds built since – I think the last one opened, it must have been Brisbane – and that was in 2012 or 2013.

And every capital city now has one except for Perth and they’re obviously looking at the possibilities over there because I maintain that we do have to create some additional sources of permanent housing in order to get people who don’t need to continue to be homeless on the streets into permanent housing. I firmly believe in housing as the solution to people who are homeless, and some people need support, but not everyone.

MdS: The statistics from the 2016 Census – I’ve been in touch with the Bureau of Statistics – and they’re coming out early this year, in February I think, so it’ll be interesting to see how homelessness has changed. It’s only been since about 2008 that the ABS has been counting homeless people. It’s quite a new thing, really.

No, I think they were definitely counting them before then.

MdS: Were they?

Yeah. They’ve probably got better at it but they’re certainly had a number of counts with each five-year Census. And then they reviewed the methodology for the one before the 2016 one. So that was what, 2011? That was the time at which they reviewed the methodology. Because what they had been picking up – and that’s why I agreed with their need to review that methodology – they were picking up people like, say, some of those folks out in country areas where they’re bought a block of land and they’re slowly building a house but they’re living in a tent or a caravan while they’re building that house. So I can see why one needs to tighten up the methodology to ensure – because those people wouldn’t necessarily self-identify as homeless, but they might be counted as homeless given the nature of the dwelling in which they were temporarily living – but they’re on their own piece of land slowly building a house. And of course it’s a tricky thing to do.

I guess it’s now 10 years old – my Churchill Fellowship report – it might be worth you having a google and having a look at some of the things that I explored in relation to programs that are successful with people who’ve experienced chronic street homelessness.

It’s a difficult thing to do, to enumerate people experiencing homelessness. And it’s important that we do actually understand if what we’re doing is – and it’s one of the reason I introduced an enumeration strategy at the City of Sydney – because otherwise you don’t know how effective what you’re doing is, if you don’t actually understand what the base number is, and then is it going up? Is it going down? What I think we’ve learned over the years – and I’m not sure how deep you want to go on this, because we have a better strategy nowadays – we’re working with communities to do registry weeks, which I can tell you about on another occasion, because it takes a little bit of explaining but it’s quite a good methodology.

What I’ve come to realise over the years is that we know exactly how to end people’s homelessness because everyone who’s homeless requires permanent, affordable housing. And some people – a relatively small group of people – may require ongoing support to sustain that housing because they may have some additional issues as well as their experience of poverty and homelessness. So we know how to end people’s homelessness and what Australia is not yet very good at is actually turning off the tap. There are some big taps that are creating newly-homeless people as you and I talk, and those taps include things like Newstart. It’s literally impossible to live in Sydney if you’ve lost your job and you’re living for any period on Newstart. You live in Sydney, don’t you Matthew?

MdS: Yes.

Yeah, you completely get that, I’m sure. It’s a completely inadequate amount to actually house and feed yourself and whatever else you need to do. And certainly the other Centrelink benefits aren’t that much better.

We’ve been doing some work in more recent years around older women experiencing homelessness and the key reason for that is simply poverty, there’s no other problems involved. We’re talking about women who’ve raised families and given back to the community and done a range of things but they’ve ended up in older age living in poverty simply because they’ve spent time out of the workforce raising children or caring for other family members, and the particular cohort of older women at this point in time – it will change, obviously, in the future – but at this point in time had some fairly systemic discrimination throughout their lives. Like, for instance, back in the 60s when you got married you had to resign your job. And when you became pregnant you couldn’t continue your work. You know, and there was an expectation that women stayed at home and cared for children.

So, if there’s been a woman who’s ended up single for whatever reason, either lifelong or maybe there’s been a late divorce or there’s been a death or something like that, they’re much more likely to be living in poverty and as a result – because of our housing costs right across Australia but probably quite specifically Sydney and Melbourne – are in great housing stress. And they’re a very invisible group because they don’t necessarily self-identify as homeless.

They may self-identify as having a housing crisis, but they don’t necessarily self-identify as homeless because there is this big myth in the community that people who are homeless are those people living on the streets. And you and I both know because we’ve looked at the Census statistics, that it represents around about six percent of the total number of people experiencing homelessness. And that is an incredibly solvable problem.

It’s a very solvable problem. We know how to end it, it’s either with scatter-site Housing First permanent-supportive projects, or with high-density permanent-supportive housing projects like Common Ground. I might just add for the group of older women I’ve just told you about, obviously they’re not the type of people who are necessarily targeted with a model like Common Ground. Older women who are simply living in poverty and don’t necessarily have any additional issues, just simply need access to affordable, secure, long-term housing. That’s the simple answer to that. And then of course just as they grow older will need the same kinds of things as anyone in the community needs to support them as they age in place.

MdS: Do you think that the 2016 figures are going to show an increase over 2011? What’s your anticipation?

Well, I actually know they have. My understanding – I don’t know what the ABS told you – is that the overall count is around about 120,000 and that the number of rough sleepers has gone up to about 8000 or 9000And so I think – I’m not sure because I haven’t actually seen them yet – it’s only what I’ve heard, I think it represents a similar percentage of the total. .

[NOTE: The number deriving from the 2011 Census was around 105,000. The final number published by the ABS in March deriving from the 2016 Census was 116,427.]

And I think we can largely put a lot of that increase down to the fact that we’ve got huge housing costs in places where a lot of people live – Sydney and Melbourne – and we’ve got ridiculously-paltry amounts of Commonwealth benefits for those people who may not be able to work for whatever reason, either they’re simply unemployed or perhaps they’re unwell and on – I guess it used to be called sickness benefit, I’m not sure what’s it’s called now – but the equivalent of Newstart when you’re sick. And then disability support pension, which is the same as the age pension, we already know from the age pension that it’s really tricky for people living on government benefits to be able to maintain private rental housing in places like Sydney and Melbourne.

So we’re talking simply about inadequate supply of affordable housing. And you know about the disinvestment in public housing that’s been happening over the past few decades. I’m not sure how old you are?

MdS: I’m 55.

Oh, we’re exactly the same age! Are you 1962?

MdS: Yes.

Yeah, me too. Anyway, you would recall as I recall growing up and, you know, there was in my mind this pretty major commitment to ensuring that everyone had access to housing in Australia. It was kind of really civil. There were those, you know, the little red-brick homes, or the little fibro homes in most country towns and suburbs, great suburbs in Sydney. I’m not saying some mistakes weren’t made but on the whole, there was a commitment to ensuring that everyone had access to housing and I think Australia has sadly moved away from that. And public housing, you know, the supply has dwindled, it’s not been kept up well [but] we’re giving a lot of housing subsidies to private landlords.

And unfortunately, I don’t know if you know much about the rental tenancy legislation in NSW, it doesn’t help engender long-term housing. We’ve still got the case until it’s changed – and many of us have been arguing for it to change – we’ve still got the case that people can be given notice and [evicted for no cause]. So I certainly have heard stories of, say, older women just getting by in the private rental [market], just getting by – like having to decide whether to take a bus trip or whether to buy a loaf of bread – who are too afraid to ask their landlord to make needed repairs to the place lest they might be evicted.

MdS: The planning minister in NSW seems to be giving out mixed signals. He went to the launch of this organisation called the Housing Supply Association at which he talked about providing housing for critical job categories like police and teachers and paramedics and whatnot…

Key worker type stuff?

MdS: Yeah. But on the other hand he’s on television saying that if you do specify lower rents for some apartments in a development then you’re going to push up the cost of others in the same development. And so he’s giving out mixed signals.

Absolutely. It’s Matt Keenan, isn’t it?

MdS: No, it’s Anthony Roberts.

That’s right. Yeah, because we were involved in some of the public meetings the Sydney Alliance has had last year in trying to get inclusionary zoning as part of the planning regulations in NSW. Because really, that is one of the long-term answers. I think the other part of that jigsaw puzzle is ensuring that we have a reinvestment in public housing because we need to ensure as a civil society that we all have access to housing. I find it disgraceful that this relatively-solvable number of people [are still homeless], because, like, as a general rule, most people experience homelessness fairly briefly.

We have got a better safety net that’s for sure than America where they actually have people who can work full-time and still not afford to be in housing, you know, they’re being paid [a] ridiculous $7 an hour or something and working a 40-hour week and can’t house themselves. But here we’ve got a few better safety nets. I’m not saying it’s marvellous but it’s slightly better and people don’t necessarily experience homelessness for long periods.

But there is that group that I’ve now been really interested in for the past 15 years or so that do stay homeless for long periods. There’s been this increasing tendency – I’m not sure if you’ve noticed it, I certainly have – to pathologise anyone who becomes homeless. Like, “They’re homeless, there must be something wrong with them.” And that’s just not the case. There’s a small group where, yes, that is the case, but it’s absolutely not the majority. And I think that’s about demonising people living in poverty, people who are poor.

And what it also serves to do when you pathologise anyone who becomes homeless, is [that] instead of it being a problem with our society, like we haven’t ensured there’s enough housing for everyone to go around, it then becomes a personal problem. “Oh, look at them, it’s their fault that they’re homeless.” Instead of, “Oh, we haven’t as a community made sure that everyone has access to housing.” Which is what I would argue a perfectly reasonable and basic human right.

MdS: With as you say the problem of rental affordability in Sydney especially but also in Melbourne and other cities, inclusionary zoning has got to be part of the toolkit that government brings to [bear]. I just don’t understand when the minister says on TV that it’s a bad thing but on the other hand he’s talking to the developers telling them to do it. It’s just so strange.

I don’t know what that’s about either. I suspect there’s politics going on there. We know who gets in their ears and it’s often not people experiencing homelessness or abject poverty. And so it looks to me like the developers don’t want it and so that’s why it hasn’t happened yet. But it’s a really basic and obvious thing that can be done.

I feel fortunate, I live in a local government area, the Inner West Council, that has passed what I think is quite a good inclusionary zoning policy. I know [at] the Mercy Foundation, our policy is 15 percent [affordable rental housing] on formally privately-owned land and 30 percent on formally publicly-owned land. I think [at the] Inner West [Council it] is something like 10 and 25 percent. And that was just passed last year. But, yeah. It’s the only way to ensure that over a long period of time we do much better at creating affordable housing.

MdS: One of the problems though is that once a development gets over a certain value then the planning [approval] for that development [is] taken away from the council and given to the state government.

Exactly.

MdS: So [developers] can do what they want, really.

And it’s why we need the state government to commit to it as well. And I believe that the Opposition in NSW have in fact made that commitment, but they’re unlikely to be in government any time soon. I actually think it’s a disgrace that on formally publicly-owned land some kind of percentage is not yet mandatory. I mean, that’s a no-brainer. Don’t you reckon?

MdS: Yeah! I think that inclusionary zoning is the only way to go and you hear stories all the time now and it’s framed in the media as this sort of battle between the Boomers and the Millennials. Every debate comes down to the previous generation getting all the breaks and this generation having to pay much more. The debate is framed in these terms and I really don’t know if it’s very useful. It’s really about proper regulation.

And as a civil community. I mean, I just find it insane that we actually have people who are experiencing such enormous amounts of housing stress while [with] the policies – the federal policies like negative gearing and the discount on the capital gains tax – there are people who find it easier to buy second, third, fourth, tenth homes where people can’t even get rental housing, let alone purchase their own home. It’s just not civil. There are people who are quite wealthy who are getting tax breaks. It’s not right. It doesn’t even strike me as ethical.

And the fact that it’s a completely solvable problem in Australia. I mean, this is a wealthy nation. At times I get terribly frustrated at the lack of progress we’ve made. Common Ground is just one model. We need a range of models. Like, not everyone needs support, they just simply need the housing. Some people might need some temporary support because it can be really traumatising to experience homelessness, so there may be just a period of support that people need along with their housing.

But the answer in every single case is housing. We clearly don’t have the right types of supply. And we need a whole lot of different supply. Some will be public housing. There are certainly some models like – I don’t know where you live in Sydney – but there’s some pretty nasty old boarding houses that you really wouldn’t want to live in but which some people sadly have to live in. But I know there are some newer models now called new generation boarding houses where, for those people who don’t necessarily want to live completely on their own – because that’s not what everyone wants to do, especially those that don’t necessarily have families, or they’re estranged from families – they might want to live with other people but live in a quality environment, not in a horrible one. And be evicted with no notice. Because you know tenancy rights for people in boarding houses have been a problem for a long time. People can be evicted at fairly short notice.

We just don’t do well in Australia for people who haven’t been able to afford to purchase a home. We do really bad for everyone who can’t afford to purchase a home. Because the rental options are so short-term. I know, I rented a long time in Sydney, for many years. I lived in – I can name all the suburbs I lived in in the inner west because people either sell properties or they want to come and live in them again. You know? And that doesn’t create a great community, when people are moving around. I can’t imagine how you’d do it with children.

MdS: They have better laws in some European countries where the tenants have a much more solid tenure especially in places like France and I think Scandinavia too where the tenancy laws are different from what they are in Australia.

Much better. In fact, we did a little bit of background research when we were first looking at the issue of older women experiencing homelessness and I think there’s one country – it might be Poland or [the Czech Republic] – you’re not allowed to evict anyone in winter. Like, no-one. You just can’t do it.

I’ve got a mate who’s German and lives in Germany and I visited his house and they’ve rented it for the last 30 years and raised their children there. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen here in Australia. I think having some institutional investors in housing could be another part of the jigsaw puzzle, could be a help, because when you think about – you hear politicians talk about it all the time – the mum-and-dad investors, when you’ve only got one investment property it’s your one investment property and so – and especially those who are speculating on capital gain – they’ve got very little vested interest in ensuring that renters are happy. What they’re doing is just holding onto it long enough to be able to sell it at a greater [price] than what they bought it [for].

And I must admit, there are people I know I have these types of conversations with, who think it’s less about negative gearing – I know negative gearing was actually invented to ensure that rental housing was more affordable, but it doesn’t appear to have done that – but it was more the issue when Howard introduced the capital gains tax discount, that a lot more property speculation started happening in places like Sydney. And that really created a market that’s made things unaffordable for everyone. Because as the actual prices of houses go up, as do the rents, as do the mortgages, and we’re giving tax benefits to people who can afford to buy more than one home. I don’t know about you it just doesn’t seem right.

MdS: No.

And we’ve got people experiencing chronic homelessness on the streets for years when we know exactly how to solve it. Be it scatter-site or be it high-density, permanent-supportive housing works for people who do have some additional problems. And it’s a relatively small group. Not a huge group at all.

I think unfortunately there’s this sense in the community – I don’t know, I could be wrong – but there’s this sense in the community that somehow everyone who experiences chronic street homelessness is really, really problematic and, you know, it’s such a complex issue and charities year after year ask people to donate money to them. So I think somehow in the public consciousness there’s grown this idea that somehow it’s a really, really tricky problem. Really hard to solve. When in fact we know – because I know there are people in each of the Common Grounds I’m familiar with – who have lived there since they moved in there after experiencing long periods of chronic homelessness. So we know exactly it can be solved.

And also the scatter-site permanent supportive housing where people are simply living in affordable public housing and the support services go to them, like the Pathways to Housing model, like Sam [Tsemberis’] model. That works as well for those people who prefer it that way. And we know exactly how to solve it, we just have not yet had the systemic commitment to making that happen.

MdS: Just before we finish up, do you think there’s going to be – we’ve got one Common Ground now in Camperdown – do you think that there’s any hope of getting another one?

I think there could be because I know Clover Moore has come out in support of the model in recent years. I don’t think it would hurt to have another one or two. We don’t need huge amounts of them. In fact, through the registry week methodology that we do with communities we can identify the numbers in each community. It’s not huge. And not everyone wants to live in high-density so we also need the option of having scatter-site public housing with support services that go to people’s homes. That works just as well, as well.

Some people fail in housing because – you can imagine it, can’t you, and I’ve seen it happen – they’ve been in the streets and there’s a sense of community, a sense of camaraderie, a sense of connection that can be quite [important]. And it’s part of survival, of being on the streets. And then people get housed in a one-bedroom studio in Campbelltown, a gazillion miles away from their social networks, and because they’re not living on a huge amount of money not necessarily able to have a car or anything like that, transport’s difficult, they’re disconnected from the community and then that housing fails because people do need connection.

So sometimes, ensuring that there is housing close to the city and ensuring that people can – that was the main thing I was really adamant about with Common Ground in Sydney, I really wanted it actually in the CBD but Camperdown was the best we could find and I’m glad that that was found because you can walk into the city from Camperdown if you need to – and certainly it’s not very far away from people’s social networks that they need to continue to have, not be disconnected from. I would have preferred it in the CBD to be honest but, look, there weren’t that many spare blocks of land in the CBD.

MdS: And I think with governments of both colours the fear they have of being labelled by the tabloid press as overly generous to people who are experiencing possibly temporary disadvantage, I’m thinking particularly of the Murdoch press and the Daily Telegraph. The columnists there are like attack dogs and if Murdoch points his finger at a politician and says, “Go!” they’ll [attack].

It’s disgraceful actually because I think it makes our society not understand. I often use the example of what happens in Australia when there’s a natural disaster like a flood or a fire. Isn’t it amazing? I mean, I’ve been amazed over the years and you watch people run up and help, you watch people get their needs met fairly immediately and then the assumption is they will as quickly as possible go back into some form of permanent housing. Yet we don’t [have] that same response for people who have their own individual disasters. No-one expected the fire victims down in Victoria – when was that, about 10 years ago? – to go and line up at the Matt Talbot in the hope they might get a bed that night. No-one expected them to do that. Why do we expect other people to do that? Why do we expect people who’ve suffered their own personal disasters to do that? It is about that deserving and undeserving stuff, which I don’t think gets analysed terribly well at all.

It’s why I also think – and this may be slightly controversial, but I’ve certainly observed it – whenever we talk to the media about older women experiencing homelessness and we talk about the fact that they’ve had long periods of systemic discrimination in their lifetimes, and the lack of super and the lack of this [and that], and they spent years raising children, and caring for other family members, the media laps it up. “Oh, these people should not be homeless,” is what I hear.

And they’re right. They absolutely shouldn’t be homeless, but nor should anyone. There’s this sense that somehow they’re slightly more deserving because they’ve raised children. But, no. Absolutely everyone is deserving of housing. It’s just that when you talk about people who are experiencing chronic street homelessness what creeps in is this notion that somehow they’ve chosen it or they’re to blame.

Yeah, and sure, there are definitely some troubled people on the streets, there’s no doubt about that. But who can help that they were born into an abusive family and were taken into foster care at the age of four and went through 16 different foster homes, and then at the age of 16 – like, we’re the same age, so you’ll remember this (they’ve changed it thank heavens) – but years ago you turned 16 and they went, “Bye now.” “Off you go.” I mean, imagine having no-one to – I mean, I spent half of my twenties phoning my parents and asking for help – you know, having no-one to turn to. And so there’s some really devastated lives that are people who have ended up on the streets for a whole range of reasons that may include drug and alcohol abuse and may include mental illness.

But, sadly, one of the things that we found from the registry week project is this thing that has flown under the radar for a long time: there’s a really high [number of people] – it always turns out to be around about 30 percent in all the communities we’ve done it – where people literally have a traumatic brain injury. And when you’ve got a traumatic brain injury no pill, nothing is going to actually change that or fix it. It does mean that you need to work with people differently. You don’t expect them to turn up next Thursday at 3 o’clock. You have to give them a call or go and pick them up, or whatever.

A lot of our homelessness response in Australia is crisis-based and that’s great if you’re in a crisis but it’s not so great if you’re no longer in a crisis and you need to get back into permanent housing. I’m sure when you spoke to Sam [Tsemberis] on the phone he explained the need that you can’t get your life back, you can’t do anything until you’ve got a stable place from which to do it. Like, housing has to come first, not last, because when you are in that small group of people that do have additional problems you’re not going to make it through our current systems. You’re just not going to get to the end of them because you may have some additional problems that mean you need to be supported differently. We’re not yet very good at doing that. We’re getting better.

And it doesn’t help by the fact that the general public (a) hardly ever think about homelessness, but (b) when they do think about homelessness they think somehow it’s some weird choice people have made, or somehow they deserve that, you know, they’ve done something terribly wrong and deserve it. But why should we expect people with a mental illness to be homeless? And that gets widely misunderstood as well.

The reason there is a lot of people who’ve experienced a mental illness who also unfortunately are homeless, has much more to do with the fact that often the very serious mental psychoses occur in later adolescence, early adulthood, just as you’re finishing your education or just as you’re starting a career. There’s not good time to get a mental illness – trust me – but that’s a particularly bad time to get one. And then, if you end up being on the disability support pension because it has stuffed up your life in that way, you’re basically living in poverty. I actually ask groups I talk to about homelessness: what’s the number-one cause of homelessness in Australia and it takes me ages sometimes to get the answer sometimes: poverty! However there’s multiple, multiple reasons for being in poverty. But poverty’s the key reason for homelessness.

We need more inclusionary zoning, not less

I don’t often write about politics these days. Twitter has become so much more highly polarised and people have such short fuses, blocking you for nothing but asking a question that is construed as violent disagreement. But this story on the Sydney Morning Herald website yesterday really annoyed me.

The story seems to take the side of the local mayor in the Northern Beaches against the Coalition state government’s Department of Planning and Environment. The mayor, along with a bunch of NIMBY snobs who are more concerned about their property prices than about the welfare of people in the broader community, doesn’t want to allow development of affordable housing despite a state government planning policy that says the council has to do so.

The state government has an entrenched interest in ensuring that affordable housing is made available. Police, paramedics, teachers, nurses, cleaners: there is a wide range of occupations where people on normal wages struggle to live close to where they work because of high rents and property prices. Or even far away from it in the property market or the private rental market. The planning minister is aware of the problem and has even spoken publicly about it. Last year he helped launch a new peak body of developers, the Housing Supply Association, who are interested in being involved in such projects. I wrote about the launch in November.

In a global context, what the state government calls “affordable housing” is referred to as inclusionary zoning. It means that instead of excluding people from communities – by putting up automated gates and hiring security guards, for example – you write regulations that give a broader cross-section of the community access to them. The state environmental planning policy (SEPP) that the SMH story talks about is an inclusionary zoning instrument.

Keeping people firmly within the social fabric who may have problems paying the high rents that properties routinely command in the private rental market is good for everyone.

This type of what’s called “scatter-site” housing is used to embed the disadvantaged within more financially functional communities because when they live there they tend to have a higher sense of self esteem, and they tend to fare better generally. It’s also where they want to live, and this is an important predictor of success in other aspects of their lives. Quarantining the disadvantaged in homogeneous communities where everyone has problems with money, drug use, or mental health issues is bad for them and it’s bad for society in general because it is more expensive to provide services for such people in such circumstances.

There have been exceptions to this rule, of course, such as the Sirius building in The Rocks, which is a block of flats constructed exclusively to be social housing by the Wran Labor government in the 1970s. It never had problems like vandalism and graffiti that beset some developments although mainly people living on welfare were housed there.

And even dedicated social housing, where a building has been constructed specifically to provide affordable housing for the homeless,, will usually also have residents, such as those whose regular wages just keep them out of poverty, and students, who need affordable housing. This is the case with the Common Ground developments that have been built in most of Australia’s capital cities over the past 15 years or so. Such projects are operated by social housing providers and collect rent from occupants but they also provide support services on a needs basis, because some people might have trouble just paying the rent on a regular cycle, for example.

The thing is that inclusionary zoning is good for society as a whole. Over the past nine months or so I have been talking with people who work with the homeless for a series of blogposts, and I have found that things are becoming worse for the financially-constrained in our cities. High rents combined with such things as low social security payments push people into homelessness and then they become even more of a drain on the public purse because of the costs involved in looking after them once they arrive on the streets or on friends’ couches.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) number of homeless deriving from the 2011 census was 105,000. I have been told the number deriving from the 2016 census will be higher but the final figure from the ABS won’t be released until later this month. The ABS uses five different categories to count homeless, which are: sleeping rough, in emergency accommodation, living in accommodation for the homeless, living in non-conventional dwellings due to lack of housing, and living temporarily with family or friends due to lack of housing.

Homelessness and affordable housing are things that as a society we can work together to solve, but the approach taken by the SMH today in their story about the Northern Beaches Council is counterproductive. And in that case it’s not even the homeless who would be offered affordable housing in the development, but rather simply people living on restricted wages! We need more inclusionary zoning, not less, in order to offset the evils deriving from high housing costs in our cities.

Homelessness "can happen to anyone"

This is the latest in a series of blogposts about homelessness. For this post, I spoke with Mekonen, who is the CEO of the Station, a drop-in centre at 82 Erskine Street, near Wynyard Station. I had found that people begging on the street in the city often go to the Station for a meal during the day, so I wanted to find out more about it.

MdS: Ok, [the voice recorder is] recording. So, I was interested the other day we talked and you told me a little bit about the history of the Station. Can you just quickly tell me a little bit how it started up and when it started up?

The Station started up in 1978 by a group of people who had an alcohol problem at that time. The centre was at that time closed so they asked the government if they could use the building for their meetings. And they were just using it as a meeting place and it just developed from there to becoming what the Station is at this moment.

MdS: So originally who was funding the Station when it was first started up? Was that the state government?

The state government, yes. The Department of Health in the first instance. But at the moment it’s funded by federal and state governments.

MdS: What type of services do you provide for homeless people?

We don’t claim to do miracle things but we are very good in crisis intervention. The basic things what our rough sleepers and complex-needs clients need, that is a place to come to have a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, breakfast, lunch, laundry facilities, showers. They just come in and rest and watch TV and meet someone. So we are very good at that kind of crisis intervention. On top of that we have a mental health counselling service, drug and alcohol counselling service, housing support workers. And on top of that we have legal advice, the St Vincent mental health team come there once a week, we have stakeholders like Centrelink they come once a week, doctors, psychiatrists. We do the whole lot, almost the whole lot at no cost to the client.

MdS: So how many clients do you see in a day or in a week?

In a day between 100 and 110, 115, it depends.

MdS: There’s about 105,000 homeless people in Australia according to the 2011 Census. The ABS uses different categories to count homelessness including sleeping rough but there are also other categories too. How important do you think it is to use all those different categories to count the homeless?

There are two things in homelessness. One is homelessness: people are homeless, they sleep in the street. And the other one is all homeless people who are sleeping in other agencies, overnight, for three nights or other homeless people who are staying in boarding houses, or there are also clients who don’t have adequate housing. So the number is, I’m not sure what the number is, but I’m just a bit sceptical about the number because it’s really hard to count the number of homeless people because [of] where they have been, where they find them, where do they sleep. There are homeless people sleeping in the train for example, moving from here to Lithgow and sleeping overnight there. People are on the move from Central to Sydney CBD. So really it’s very hard to get the homeless number right. You can’t just leave an application form, [and] say, “Where did you sleep last night?” They move, they are transient. They can move from here to Queensland tomorrow, or they can move from here to Wollongong tomorrow. They are always on the move. They are very transient, so it’s very, very hard to put a number. I would be very careful to put a number on homelessness. I would be very careful, yeah.

MdS: The figures for the 2016 Census will be released later this year, I’ve already been in touch with the Bureau of Statistics. Do you think the number is going to increase compared to 2011?

I don’t know but from what we see on the ground, it’s increasing. It’s not decreasing. I’m talking about the Station. But I wouldn’t have a clue how they put a number, they might have their own method, but from the Station’s point of view it’s increasing. We are getting more clients and younger clients now.

MdS: What are the main reasons that people give for being homeless? Are there any patterns that you can see?

Mostly it’s drug and alcohol, mental health issues, sexual assault. All those multi-issues are the cause of homelessness. Homelessness is something that can happen to anyone, no-one starts [out] to be homeless but something happens on the way and people can’t cope and they become homeless. But there is a combination of all those issues that people … The other [thing] that is very important is the affordable accommodation, also. Rent is expensive, the lack of government housing stock, the waiting list, all those kind of things, you know. Also the budget of people who are unemployed. It’s a combination of those issues.

MdS: What do you think that should be done to help alleviate the problem of homelessness? What types of policies do we need to introduce?

There is a need of more affordable housing and support with it if we are going to reduce homelessness. Affordable housing, governments, and also the outreach work because most of our clients don’t understand about budgeting, living skills and things like that. So it’s not a matter of just putting a homeless person in a house and expect them to live there for longer, or whatever. There has to be support and outreach service supporting them on their needs, whether it’s budgeting, cooking, paying their bills, just to make sure they keep that accommodation for a longer period. Without a roof over your head it’s very hard to work on their personal issues. So, as I said, housing is very important. Outreach support is also very important.

MdS: I think I’ve finished asking questions, is there anything else you think that I should know to tell my readers about homelessness? I’ve been writing about homelessness now for a couple of months on my blog and there’s a lot of interest out there in the community for these blogposts.

The public has to understand that homelessness is not a choice, it can happen to anyone. We have got electricians, plumbers, public servants, welfare workers who are homeless at the moment because something just happened. So we can never be judgemental about the homeless because it can happen to anyone. That’s what I would say to the public. Support the homeless, that’s all.

The Station is located on the corner of Clarence Street and Erskine Street, near Wynyard.