Cold comfort hotel: the Melbourne Commonwealth Games sparked a debate about the strategy of using hotels to accommodate homeless people. But what does 'hotels for the homeless' really mean.

Homelessness is largely hidden in the big Australian cities. We don't have the cardboard villages of London and Tokyo. We don't have a visible population of 'shelterless psychotics' causing trouble for ordinary folk. In many ways, we have decent services to help people, or at least keep them from view.

In spite of these services, the last census estimated there were 100,000 people homeless on any given night. Even more disappointing, after ten years of sustained economic growth, is to find another 590,000 households nudging against the ranks of the homeless. According to the Real Estate Institute of Australia, these households were under 'housing stress' in late 2004. Housing stress is here defined as being in the bottom 40 per cent of income distributions and paying more than 30 per cent of it on rent. Other research suggests it could be as many as one in seven households.

There are different ways to define homelessness, ranging from the simple 'without shelter' to a subjective assessment by the person of the adequacy of their accommodation. In the early 90s, Chris Chamberlain and David MacKenzie came up with a definition based on a minimum community standard. In a society that aspires to widespread home ownership, a single person or a couple can expect to be able to live in a small rental flat with a room to sleep in, a room to live in, their own kitchen and bathroom facilities, and some security of tenure (no evictions without due process). Homelessness, by their definition, is the experience of being unable to access this minimum benchmark. This has the advantage of providing an objective standard that is nonetheless linked to social norms. Called the 'cultural definition,' it is used by the ABS, and will again be the cornerstone of their efforts to count the homeless in the 2006 Census.

Compared to the community norm, homelessness is a range of experiences: literally sleeping in parks, under bridges and in the crevices of city buildings; staying in emergency accommodation; moving from friend to friend ('couch surfing'); renting a room in a rooming house without private access to kitchen or bathroom facilities. All these forms of housing are below the minimum we expect to call home. The given definition also recognises that long-term homelessness is most commonly an experience of moving between these forms of shelter. Not many belongings or official documents survive this kind of process.

There is now no doubt that Australia is facing an affordable housing crisis. Since the first National Summit on Housing Affordability in 2004, the crisis is increasingly being recognised by all levels of government. Addressing the shortage of affordable housing for low-income earners, particularly, is essential to reducing the numbers of people at risk of homelessness, and to provide 'housing exits' for the people already caught in the labyrinth.

Leaving that aside, what does homelessness assistance say about the way we value people? During two years as a frontline emergency housing worker, I discovered the details of a world I hadn't known existed. Not the world of homelessness, as such, but a world of 'housing options', 'crisis response' and 'material aid.'

A well-known effect of sports events (the Melbourne Grand Prix does it every year) is to dry up the supply of low-cost private hotel accommodation. The well-established social service response is to pre-purchase private rooms to be used as emergency accommodation for people who have nowhere to stay that night and for whom government-funded crisis accommodation or refuge is either inappropriate or (more likely) unavailable. During the Commonwealth Games the Victorian Government allocated extra funds to do this. The scheme was dubbed 'Hotels for the Homeless', and it was this money that became the focus of public debate.

Before the Games, newspaper vox pops decried the use of hotels to accommodate homeless people. The government should be doing something about homelessness, people said, not just shoving people out of sight. It's hard to disagree with this moral high ground. Other comments conveyed a feeling that paying for people to stay in hotels was not fair: Why do homeless people get hotels? What about us? No-one pays our rent or our mortgage! What about 'mutual obligation', to use the language of our Federal Government. Isn't this just encouraging welfare dependency? Welfare, it seems these days, is like a drug: dangerous and possibly addictive. (From my perspective, welfare creates dependency because it doesn't ever give a person quite enough--you're always chasing, as a drug user might say.)

Maybe, as another worker tells me, the spectre of homelessness keeps the middle and working classes in line. Does fear explain both the stigmatisation and the habitual blaming of people for their homelessness? If capitalism needs homelessness, then isn't the quick-fix of much homelessness assistance exactly the bandaid it is meant to be? As the mortgage belt trembles, and all of us refuse to look down at the cheap imports keeping Australia lucky, 'hotels for the homeless' represent what you get if you do not have.

In practice, 'hotels for the homeless' is only the bottom tier of homelessness assistance, but it makes up the bulk of the response. Demand exceeds supply for homelessness services, all across Australia, and purchased private hotel accommodation is a way to try and fill the gap. However, getting someone 'off the streets' and into a 'hotel for the homeless' isn't much more than a quick-fix solution. Workers know this. The general public knows this. Homeless people definitely know it.

What do you get if you are homeless? Purchased emergency accommodation means rooming houses, hotels and caravan parks that are 'affordable' (defined as less than 55 per cent of a person's income). The affordability rule is based on the idea that a person needs to be able to maintain their accommodation. What is the point of putting someone up for a few days or a week if they end up back on the streets?

Rooming houses are group residences with shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. A rooming house will usually have single rooms, but sometimes the only vacancy is a dormitory bed. This might mean sharing a room with five other homeless people you do not know. One young guy told me about having his cigarettes stolen from under his pillow in a dorm. A safer bet, he said, was keeping them in his socks.

Rooming houses can be scary and dangerous places. People usually end up there because they can't get anything better. Some people prefer to sleep rough instead. While legally you have rights as a resident, and can't be evicted without due process, in reality intimidation works a treat. There is a small and shrinking group of rooming houses that will take people from housing services. While baseball bat evictions are not the norm, they do happen.

These 'emergency' rooming houses are also expensive. Try $140 for a week in a small room with no lock, dirty linen (if at all), cockroaches, and certainly no mini-bar. The shared kitchen facilities are minimal or non-existent and the bathrooms are dirty. People know when they are valued, and they especially know when they are not. Giving someone a bed that lacks linen, a door lock or access to clean cooking facilities is letting them know what they are worth. If you're unemployed and stay long enough to get Centrelink rent assistance, you'll have $110 left each week after you pay your rent. Sleeping rough intermittently is a budgeting strategy.

When responding to homelessness, the funds used to purchase accommodation are sometimes called a 'tool of engagement'. Not an answer in itself, but a way to build trust, demonstrate some usefulness, and encourage the person to keep working with you on a longer-term solution. In service-provider jargon, an emergency housing worker helps someone by offering them housing options. When you 'go through the options' with someone, you engage in a rapid balancing of what is available, what the person needs and what you think they can survive. Private rental is not an option for most people in the homelessness loop. Apart from the out-and-out discrimination and the shortage of affordable properties, there's the difficulty of house-hunting in the cheaper outer suburbs without a car or childcare.

So emergency housing workers also help people get priority access to public housing. Allocations policy asks people to spell out why they cannot get or maintain housing without assistance. Humiliation is an unintended consequence of this process, designed with the best of intentions by a bureaucracy trying to distribute limited public funds in an equitable and conscionable manner. Currently, priority access secured in this way for a single person will mean one to three years' waiting time.

Regulating the private accommodation providers is certainly a step worth taking, though there is a fear that it will drive private operators out of an already shrinking market. An alternative exists in New York City, where an organisation called Common Ground Community has been successfully providing permanent supportive housing to homeless adults for over fifteen years. Rosanne Haggerty is the founder of Common Ground and she was recently hosted by South Australia as a Thinker in Residence. On her day off, she visited Melbourne and shared some insights from what she calls 'the emerging science of solving homelessness.'

Providing a cost-effective alternative to emergency shelter, the Common Ground model has four key features: attractive, functional, well-designed buildings; attentive but non-compulsory on-site support services; a demographic and economic mix of tenants, generally 50 per cent formerly homeless and 50 per cent low-income earners; and strong, hands-on management presence in the buildings to provide safety and security for all tenants. The model works. When asked about neighbourhood opposition, Haggerty commented that people actually forget that Common Ground buildings are housing for homeless people.

Evidence shows that good quality housing located near community amenities is the essential starting point for solving homelessness. To solve homelessness, give a person permanent, well-managed housing they can afford, where they can be sure of privacy, security and safety. Provide appropriate support services to help people manage health issues and relearn living skills. Give people a choice of attractive, well-designed housing they can be proud of, and you save money in the long run.

Cost-benefit studies in the US and Australia have consistently shown that permanently housing homeless people produces a net gain for public spending. The cost of housing is balanced or exceeded by the savings in support services (emergency shelter, physical and mental health, and criminal justice amongst others). Emergency housing, whether in 'hotels for the homeless' or state run shelters, is merely a way of managing homelessness. It is time we committed to solving it.

See http://www.homeground.org.au/ For more information on New York's Common Ground Community: http://www.commonground.org/

Hellene Gronda is Research Coordinator for HomeGround Services. HomeGround is a Melbourne organisation working in the areas of homelessness, housing, community development and social change.