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Date created: 20 April 1999 Last modified: 20 April 1999 Maintained by: John QuigginJohn Quiggin
The growth of homelessness as a social problem in Australia is a graphic illustration of the effects of changes in economic structures and economic policies over the past twenty-five years. In the 1960s, homelessness was a relatively minor problem primarily affecting older males with drug and alcohol problems. After two decades of rising unemployment and increasing inequality both the scale of the problem and the proportion of the community affected or threatened by homelessness have increased. Homelessness is also an important metaphor for the choices facing us as a community. Those who reject the American path of low wages and minimal social welfare are motivated to a significant extent by rejection of a social order symbolised by the presence of homeless beggars on every street corner.
The links between homelessness and economic changes are not merely symbolic. Obviously unemployment contributes to homelessness directly when unemployed people are evicted from rental accommodation or lose mortgaged homes through foreclosure, or when they are simply unable to afford accommodation in the first place. As the nature of the unemployment problem has changed, so have the channels through which it contributes to homelessness. In the late 1970s, the unemployment problem was most severe for young people entering the labour market for the first time. One third of the unemployed were aged between 15 and 19. This unemployment problem, combined with a widespread expectation that young people completing school should be able to leave home and live independently contributed to the problem of youth homelessness, which emerged on a large scale in the late 1970s, after being almost non-existent during the postwar boom from 1945 to 1970. Although youth unemployment has remained high, other sections of the community bore the brunt of higher unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s ...
Widespread and chronic unemployment contributed to the emergence of low-income 'ghettos' during the 1980s. As Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter of ANU have shown, during the 1970s, geographical variation in household incomes across the suburbs of cities like Sydney was very limited. Although professionals and other upper-income earners clustered in areas like the North Shore, this segregation was far from complete and households in other areas tended to have larger numbers of income earners. By ... there was a dramatic disparity had emerged. Of particular concerns was the growth of low-income 'ghettos' where most households had no employed members. Such segregation reflects the effects of persistent high unemployment and economic insecurity. The growth of homelessness is an extreme manifestation of tendencies that are evident across the whole social structure.
The causal relationship between unemployment and homelessness is not one-way. Homelessness contributes to unemployment in many ways. At a practical level, homelessness makes it hard for people to remain in contact with potential employers. More generally, it exacerbates the stigmatisation associated with unemployment. Finally, the development and maintenance of the survival skills needed to deal with homelessness frequently conflicts with preservation of the skills needed to function in more standard environments such as the workplace. In all of these respects, the problems facing people who are homeless represent, in an extreme form, those that face the long term unemployed as a group.
Although the creation of homelessness is not an explicit objective of policy, it is implicit in the approach to policy that has dominated the 1990s, based on competition and particularly competition for employment. It is the essence of competition that, as well as winners there must be losers, and the penalty for losing must be sufficient to spur competitors on to greater efforts. Thus, there is increasing pressure to ensure that no worker can regard their employment as secure and that the unemployed should find their situation as uncomfortable as possible. The decline in the security of employment is reflected in declining rates of home-ownership which in turn increases the proportion of the population directly vulnerable to homelessness.
At the same time, the ideology of small government demands that resources to deal with social problem must be cut continuously. The effect on homelessness is sometimes direct. For example, despite the admirable goals of some of its advocates, the policy of 'deinstitutionalising' people suffering from mental illnesses has been seen by economic rationalists as an opportunity to cut costs by closing psychiatric hospitals but not providing equivalent resources for community care. The result has been a growing number of mentally ill people without access to adequate services, many of whom become homeless.
More indirect effects are also important. Most importantly, the public sector and particularly the community services sector was one of the major areas of employment growth in the 1960s and 1970s. The squeeze on employment in this area has contributed to growth in unemployment.
Homelessness is rightly viewed as a symbol of the unacceptable nature of the American path being pursued by policymakers today. In many ways, homelessness is nothing more than the extreme outcome of social and economic trends affecting every Australian, such as the growth in inequality and the loss of security in employment. A response to the problem of homelessness is unlikely to be successful except as part of a general movement away from a society based on competition and market ideology. Equally, any such movement will fail if it does not address the worst manifestations of our current economic and social order, such as homelessness.
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