A system in crisis.
On any given night, more than 116,000 people in Australia don’t have a place to call home.
The Mission Australia 2020 Inquiry into Homelessness found that almost 300,000 people sought support from homelessness services in 2018-19, but more than 90,000 requests for help were unmet. That means that every single day, around 253 people in urgent need of help were turned away.
While the homeless are at the sharpest end of the housing crisis, there are many thousands more who are just a job loss or health crisis away from joining their ranks. In Australia, around 900,000 households live in rental stress, and there is a dire lack of affordable rental properties available for those on low incomes.
There seems little chance of this changing in a system that treats properties as investments rather than homes, and which protects investors’ financial returns at the expense of the human right to a home.
Is there a better way?
Housing affordability is an entrenched crisis with a staggering human cost, and it requires a radical solution. But it can be hard to think outside the box from inside the system, especially when potential solutions are so often framed by ideology rather than human outcomes.
University of Adelaide politics and history graduate, Caelan Linke, has looked at the evidence and proposes a surprising solution, that’s been tried and tested both here and overseas.
📷 © Caelan Linke 2019
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