FAMILIES SWELL THE RANKS OF HOMELESS

Homelessness is reaching further into the nation’s suburban heartland, with emergency accommodation services reporting unprecedented demand from everyday families unable to pay mortgages and rent. The need for beds is so great that some welfare groups are giving away sleeping bags. In the NSW city of Newcastle, three destitute families have pitched tents in friends’ backyards, and a mother and her two children were reportedly living under canvas in a park. Hostel and emergency shelter providers routinely turn away people seeking help due to a lack of facilities.

At Newcastle’s Wesley City Mission, client services manager Tony Scully is handing out three sleeping bags a week because he cannot place any more people in its 94 bed-sitter style units. The waiting list stretches to at least three months. Increasingly, the calls for help are coming from what Mr Scully calls “everyday families”. In most cases, they had been unable to pay the mortgage or rent, and had nowhere else to go. Last week it was a couple and their four children, who had been living in a car after the father lost his job, fell behind with home repayments and the bank foreclosed. “People who have been working, driving a car and doing pretty well for themselves are now knocking on our door,” Mr Scully said.

He is still trying to trace the homeless woman he heard about last week, who had pitched a tent in a park in nearby Lake Macquarie with her two young children. Mr Scully said three other families were living in wretched circumstances in the backyards of friends in Newcastle. Nearly half of the 70 people who attended the mission’s drop-in centre were sleeping rough in parks or squats, and for many all he could offer was a sleeping bag.

St Vincent de Paul Society chief executive John Falzon said homeless services were turning away half the people seeking assistance, many of them parents with young children. “Unless we do something to address the crisis of the shortage of affordable and adequate housing, we will never stem the tide of people who are being pushed into homelessness,” he said.

Phil Maxwell, spokesman for the Salvation Army in NSW, Queensland and the ACT, said services were under pressure from family groups which were the “emerging homeless”. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has declared a 10-year effort to tackle homelessness, warning that the problem is getting worse despite the nation’s soaring wealth. He said the Government’s first white paper will be a policy document canvassing long-term options to reduce the growing number of homeless. About 100,000 people a night are homeless, including 10,000 children under age 12 who are forced to sleep outside or in crisis accommodation, boarding houses or with family and friends. “We don’t believe it is something which a country as wealthy as ours in the 21st century can just ignore,” Mr Rudd said.

“It is dead wrong that … on any given night some 14,000 people are sleeping rough. We should not be allowing this to happen.” Mr Rudd said his Government would fulfil its election pledge to spend $150 million on new places in crisis shelters and will use the white paper to fund further policies aimed at prevention, such as tackling mental health and education problems. It will be overseen by one of the country’s most experienced welfare advocates, Tony Nicholson, and is to be completed by August.

Source: Compiled by APN from media reports

30 January 2008