Why criminalising homelessness is not only cruel, but economically irresponsible

By Deborah Di Natale

When the council worker taps on Sarah’s* car window she’s asleep inside with her two young children. 

She feels embarrassed after being encouraged to move on from yet another public parking spot in Melbourne. Her bigger problem, however, is she has nowhere safe to move on to. 

She’s on the waitlist for housing. But that wait is expected to take almost 20 months – if she’s lucky. So instead she’s stuck in fight or flight mode, with the toll on her physical and mental health, and the risk to her safety, increasing by the day. 

Sarah’s story is sadly unexceptional. In fact, she’s pretty typical of women who are increasingly sleeping with their kids in their cars, or in parks. Women who live in a constant state of anxiety about the next knock on their window, because they don’t have secure housing. 

What Sarah desperately needs is a home so she can catch her breath and get her family’s life back on track. What people like Sarah will be getting instead, if new by-laws of the kind currently being considered by the City of Port Phillip and some other Victorian councils – is criminalised. 

As Port Phillip Council investigates changing local laws to prohibit people from sleeping rough, Mayor Louise Crawford said “We want the community to feel safe”. It’s a sentiment everyone would agree with, but applying it to this situation ignores the evidence. We know criminalising homelessness does not improve community safety in the long-term, and often in fact makes things worse. It also ignores the fact people experiencing homelessness are also members of our community. 

The latest census data shows more than 122,000 people are homeless in Australia. Today, we are seeing the worst rates of persistent homelessness in this country’s history. 

For those experiencing it, more than just a roof over their head is needed. They need connections to their community. They may need mental health support to get their lives back on track. For some, they have been on the waitlist for many months or even years, have then been matched with a property that isn’t near their employment, or they aren’t given the right social support to adapt and thrive. It’s not as simple as giving someone a set of keys. 

Certainly, homelessness is uncomfortable to see. It can be much easier to pretend a problem doesn’t exist than to have to witness it. But aside from the moral question, there is a hard cost to simply sweeping people under the rug, or in this case, pulling it out from underneath them. 

The fact is that moving people on, and slapping them with fines if they refuse, not only hurts those in the toughest possible situations – it hurts the community too. 

We know this because Port Phillip Council is not the first jurisdiction to adopt this approach. In the United States local governments have tried it over the years. 

In 2006, social commentator Malcolm Gladwell wrote a famous piece examining the experience of two Nevada officers who spent much of their working days interacting with people experiencing homelessness, including a towering former marine named Murray.

When sober, Murray was charming and potentially productive. Yet Nevada police spent years ferrying him between hospital emergency wards, drying-out clinics, mental health facilities, and custody.

When Murray eventually died of intestinal bleeding it was calculated his homelessness had cost US$1 million over a decade. He became known as Million Dollar Murray. 

In the years since Gladwell’s piece, myriad studies have reinforced the notion that homelessness costs taxpayers more than ending it would.

For example, the University of Queensland found the average person experiencing recurrent homelessness used $48,000 worth of state government-funded services over just one year. But it would cost just $34,000 to provide that person with permanent supportive housing – including access to the care they needed.

Our councils are in an unenviable position. They do not control the levers to end homelessness, but they are responsible for managing many of its impacts. And for this very reason, they are vital partners in the work to end this crisis. Indeed, many Victorian councils are doing fantastic work partnering with the homelessness sector and the people in their community living without a home. Those success stories should be the model for every council. The way forward is not to punish people for their suffering. It’s to meet them where they’re at, and to help get them the immediate support. We need councils to join the call for the Victorian Government to take the decisive actions needed to end our homelessness crisis. 

The problem may be complex but the solution is simple: more houses. Infrastructure Victoria, our state’s top infrastructure experts, just this week recommended the government build 60,000 new homes. A state parliamentary inquiry into this issue also recommended the same thing. Our government can and needs to build more homes. We know housing someone sleeping rough is better for them, and better for our communities both socially and economically. 

We won’t be better off moving rough sleepers along. We’ll be worse off economically, and probably feeling pretty awful about ourselves too.