It has reached that time of year when Christian churches commemorate the birth of a child in a stable to homeless parents because "there was no room at the inn". It is also a time of year when there is increased demand on homelessness services because of, among other reasons, family relationship breakdowns, domestic violence and mental illness.
More recently, housing has become dearer, unemployment has gone up and the global financial crisis has led to more mortgage defaults and evictions.
As in the biblical story of the family turned away from the inn, for many people, it is harder than ever to access crisis housing services. Homelessness is on the rise.
The federal government's white paper on homelessness, The Road Home, was released in December, 2008. It said: "The Supported Accommodation Assistance Program (SAAP) data confirms that family homelessness has increased.
"The number of families with children who seek assistance from specialist homelessness services has increased by 33% over the last five years. Families seeking accommodation are more likely to be turned away from SAAP than single people and are more likely to stay in crisis accommodation for longer than six months.
"Of all SAAP support periods, 22% were provided to single-parent families headed by a woman and 1% to single-parent families headed by a man."
The report said the biggest reason (55%) why women with children sought crisis accommodation services was domestic violence.
However, these survey figures do not fully reflect the extent to which families have also become homeless through personal financial crises or job losses. This is because there is a lack of crisis housing for families when domestic violence is not a factor.
In Australia, about 70% of households own or are paying off their home. Twenty-one percent are in private rental, 1% live in community housing, and 4% in public housing. Homelessness Australia said 105,000 people were homeless on any given night.
Of those who are housed, the peak non-profit housing organisation National Shelter estimated in June that 10% of Australian families, or about 1.1 million people, are considered to be in housing stress — that is, they spend more than 30% of their total income on housing costs.
Of those suffering housing stress, 61% are private renters, 26% homebuyers, 5% public housing tenants, and 5% homeowners.
This social crisis is a result of inadequate incomes combined with increased housing costs, and a lack of affordable housing.
Over the past 40 years, house prices have risen at a far greater rate than household incomes, creating barriers to home ownership and putting greater pressure on rental accommodation.
At the same time, the availability of public and private rental properties has declined. Private owners have tended to buy and sell houses for speculative purposes, while the public housing sector has shrunk under the neoliberal agenda of ALP and Liberal governments.
Capital funding for public housing under the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement has been in absolute decline for decades and has barely been enough to replace old stock, let alone meet growing need.
From the late 1960s, public housing has been sold-off. The government's policy shifted from providing low-income earners with a genuine alternative to private rental and home ownership, towards welfare housing instead. Since then, the decline in public housing has intensified.
In response, state housing authorities have tightened eligibility criteria for public housing and eliminated security of tenure.
But, even with the far-tighter eligibility criteria, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimated in January that more than 200,000 people remained on public housing waiting lists.
A further 600,000 private renters are in housing stress, but ineligible for public housing. It is estimated that there are 400,000 units of affordable housing Australia-wide.
The National Housing Supply Council said in 2006 there was a shortfall of 250,000 affordable rental properties for low to moderate income earners on $643 to $771 a week.
For those on less than $256 a week, there was a shortfall of 110,000 rental properties. The council recognised a shortfall of 202,000 for those earning between $257 and $385 a week.
In its Policy Platform "Housing Australia Affordably" released on November 24, National Shelter said it welcomed the federal government's The Road Home white paper.
In particular it said it approved of the government's "commitment to halving the number of people experiencing homelessness by 2020 and ensuring that all rough sleepers who need it are offered crisis accommodation by 2020."
"Achieving these targets will require a range of safe, secure, affordable, well-located housing linked to appropriate supports that promote well-being and social inclusion."
The Rudd government has made a number of key changes to government programs to deal with the housing affordability crisis. The Road Home is meant to provide a framework to address homelessness.
The old Commonwealth State Housing Agreement has been replaced by the National Affordable Housing Agreement (NAHA), which commenced on January 1. It provided $6.2 billion over five years — an increase of $1billion from the old scheme.
NAHA is part of a suite of government programs to fund infrastructure, provide investment incentives and award tax breaks to private developers, and increase funds to not-for-profit social housing providers.
These include the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, worth $1.1 billion over five years; the National Partnership on Social Housing, worth $400 million over two years; and the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, which provides $5.5 billion over 10 years.
The National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) is a federal government program to increase the number of new affordable rental dwellings by up to 50,000 by mid 2012.
It is essentially an investment incentive scheme (which can be accessed together with other funding sources) for private and not-for-profit developers.
The scheme is meant to encourage partnerships between the two sectors. The NRAS gives annual incentives for 10 years for each approved dwelling rented to eligible households at 20% below market rates.
However, how affordable the privately-owned properties will be after the 10 years is questionable. The NRAS is supposed to provide affordable rental properties for key workers in service industries (such as nurses, teachers, police, cleaners etc.) in locations close to work, which would otherwise be unaffordable.
However, the flaw in this scheme is that it is a market-based solution to a crisis — a crisis that has been brought on by the failure of the private rental market to meet the needs of workers.
At the sixth National Housing Conference, held in Melbourne over November 24-27, the mood was electric. Housing was now, after decades of neglect, back on the national political agenda.
The Australian government had taken some steps at what could be an overhaul of the system with what seemed like a massive injection of funds.
However, there are good reasons to greet the government's housing policy with caution. At the conference, housing minister Tanya Plibersek reeled off the list of government initiatives, but warned that this "was not going to come again any time soon".
The implication was that this was a one-off funding boost, rather than a commitment for future growth and planning to meet human needs for the long term.
Speakers from major social housing providers welcomed the national housing reform agenda, but said that a system of multiple private providers of housing for low incomes earners should not come at the expense of public housing.
The point was made that the public housing system had real problems. After years of budget cuts, public housing infrastructure also needs to be significantly improved. Housing reform will require more resources than have been allocated in the recent packages.
Meeting the housing needs of the homeless and those in housing stress requires more resources now, and it needs to be provided on an ongoing basis. Shelter is a basic human right and should not be reduced to a commodity, available at the whim of the market.