Homelessness caused by wealth, not poverty

From an article in Eureka Street on homelessness by Dr John Falzon (well worth reading!):

Late last year, Everybody’s Home, the national campaign to end homelessness, commissioned research by Equity Economics, showing that homelessness could surge by 9% this year. In marking Homelessness Week 2021, Homelessness Australia released data showing that cuts to social housing funding and homelessness services over the last ten years will soon exceed $1 billion.

At the same time house prices have gone up by 50% and rents by 31%.

Homelessness is caused, not by poverty, but by wealth, especially speculative wealth, concentrated in the hands of the few, to the detriment of the many. It is not just an effect of a disastrously structured housing market that makes of housing a speculative sport rather than a human right. Homelessness is the cumulative effect of those structures that are designed to degrade, designed to disempower, designed to constrain the democratisation of life, especially colonisation, patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism. If we want to address homelessness we need to begin to carve out a space for social and economic security in the midst of the current uncertainty. This, of course, means a massive boost to social housing, but it also means a reimagining of what really matters in our lives.

Right now, in the midst not only of a pandemic but of a climate emergency of catastrophic proportions, the one thing we can be certain about is uncertainty. The French poet, Paul Valery once quipped that ‘the trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.’ But perhaps this is also not just the trouble but the one real hope that is hidden in the still raw wound of our times. The pandemic shows us both the horror of leaving things as they are and the urgent hope of shaping a radically different horizon.