I was listening to Conversations with Richard Fidler on ABC Radio today.

The lady interviewd designed "STREETSWAG" for homeless (see below for details)
She mentioned the affects of the GFC increasing Families in stress.
The homeless figures have increased on those a year ago.
She mentioned one centre turns away 80 families a night !!

So much talk about Australia is out of the woods but it turns a blind eye on the bigger picture.
I looked up some info.

http://www.streetswags.org/
Street Swags was founded in 2005 by a Brisbane school teacher, Jean Madden. She came up with the idea of Street Swags while watching a documentary on homelessness that highlighted the negative effects lack of sleep and sleeping on cement had on physical and mental health.

From:
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au/site/index.php

"105,000 Australians are homeless on any given night."

From:
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au ... e%20lr.pdf
People live in poverty when they do not have enough resources to reliably
meet their basic needs: food, housing, heating and health care among them.

Housing and poverty
The cost of housing has a significant impact on poverty. If we factor housing costs into our estimation of poverty
(using the 50 per cent of average income formula), Australia’s poverty rate increases to 15-16 per cent.
This is one reason why people who rent are more vulnerable to poverty. More than one in four people who
rent their house live in poverty after their housing costs are factored in. NATSEM and the HIA estimate one in
two rental households will experience housing stress (spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent)
by 2010. The Australian and State Governments provide assistance for people on low incomes to access affordable
housing through the National Affordable Housing Agreement, which includes public housing, programs
through the Homelessness White Paper and the National Rental Affordability Scheme. The 2009 Economic
Stimulus Package invested more than $5 billion for social housing construction and $400 million for repairs
by 2012, a record single investment. However, this historic investment takes place against the background
of an almost 20 percent real term decrease in public housing funding over the last decade. Nationally,
rental costs continue to increase dramatically. Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) is a supplementary
Government payment designed to make private rental more affordable for people on low incomes. Government
expenditure on the CRA has increased by almost 10 percent in the last decade. One in three people who
receive CRA still pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent and are defined as being in housing stress.

Extracted from:
http://www.homelessnessaustralia.org.au ... %20web.pdf
(The following figures are for Australians and are approximates)

1 in 200 is homeless each day;

1 in 154 seek help from Homeless assistance service;

1 in 42 children under 4 sleep in Homeless assistance service;

23% of Homeless are children;

1 in 4 homeles is under 18;

1/2 of the people who reqest accommodation each day are turned away;

80% of families who request support are turned away.

I have to be realistic and state that I consider that there will always be a degree of homelessness. But only a very, very few chose to be in that situation. For others, the causes are many. Family violence, marriage breakdown, mental and general health issues, lack of job prospects. It's awful. I've seen this tragedy. Just sitting in the mall as it is the only place that protects them from the weather. It's not difficult to give a few $$ to the Salvos every so often. They don't judge; they just help.

Maybe part of the problem is lack of public housing, high private rents and lack of tenure for tenants - 12 month leases is way too short. At this stage of my "life" development, I see no reason to own more than one house and that being the one you live in but, then, if I had tenure for 20-25 years with rent being reasonably based, say as a proportion of income, I would give consideration to renting. That could remove the short-term views, ie the capital gainers, of most investment property buyers.

However, to paraphrase The Castle "Tell him he's dreaming."

This is a c rap country in some aspects.

stonelover wrote:
...
She mentioned one centre turns away 80 families a night !!

...

23% of Homeless are children;

1 in 4 homeles is under 18;

1/2 of the people who reqest accommodation each day are turned away;

80% of families who request support are turned away.

Sorry to latch on small part of your post, but my bone is why in a meantime we accept boat a week or is it now 2 boats a week.

I know Christmas Island is quite a distance away so accommodation there might not be acceptable to the needy ones, but funds could be used where needed!

We will not solve all the misery in the World even if Government turns red.

What we need is a better system of public housing instead of the current situation of private rentals.

If you apply even the simplest of logic to it, there is no way that owning a rental house and leasing it to a family who can't afford a home can make a commercial return. If the tenants could afford to pay enough rent for the landlord to get a decent return on capital, then the tenant could afford their own mortgage and could buy a house. To get a decent return on a house worth even $300k, you would need to charge at least $25k a year to allow for costs and maintenence and still get a return better than a term deposit. For any family earning a below average wage, or for someone on a pension, this amount of rent would be impossible to find, even with the Centrelink rental subsidy.

Currently most investors only make money by artificial set ups involving negative gearing and constantly increasing house prices with tax advantaged capital gains. If you eliminate spiralling house prices, concessional capital gains and negative gearing, then there would be a lot less housing investors because there would be no money to be made. Investors by their very nature are not operating a charity for the homeless.

My view is that private rentals would work for accomodating families between houses, eg waiting for a house to be built or working away from their usual home city. These families could afford to pay the real cost of capital for a short term rental. There may also be families or singles who just simply don't want to own, in the same way there are businesses that lease their offices rather than buying them.

To make rental housing affordable to low income earners, then it has to be run much more efficiently than individuals owning a few rental houses, managed by their local estate agent and it has to be subsidised to a significant degree. If the govt or even charitable organisations owned groups of houses, then maintenance and management would be more efficient, tenants would have a lot more security, and rents could be set to reflect what tenants could afford, rather than what landlords required to make a commercial return.

Having large numbers of people living in privately owned rental accomodation with individual investors owning just a few houses has to be the most inefficient way possible to house people, from both a commercial and a social aspect.

Just my view.

Cheers

LJ

Bankruptcies rise by one third for architects, engineers
STATISTICS REVEAL IMPACT OF GFC ON SMALL PRACTICES
BY GEMMA BATTENBOUGH
http://www.architectureanddesign.com.au ... 2_2010.pdf

extract with my bold & font colour
"Statistics from the federal government’s
Insolvency and
Trustee Service can reveal
the impact of the global financial
crisis upon architectural sole practitioners
and small studios....."

- 29 per cent more bankruptcies in the year 2008-09 when compared with data from 2006-07.

"...Associate professionals in the
science, building and engineering
group, which includes architectural
associates such as draftpersons,
fared worse still, facing a 475 per
cent increase in the number of
bankruptcies over the same time
period.
Pracitioners cited economic
conditions, credit restrictions, lack
of business potential and underquoting,
among the reasons for
going bust...."
“...It just shows that a lot of companies
are financially vulnerable
and testifies to the intensity of the
shock that saw the end of them,”
he said...."

LJ said" To make rental housing affordable to low income earners, then it has to be run much more efficiently than individuals owning a few rental houses, managed by their local estate agent and it has to be subsidised to a significant degree. If the govt or even charitable organisations owned groups of houses, then maintenance and management would be more efficient, tenants would have a lot more security, and rents could be set to reflect what tenants could afford, rather than what landlords required to make a commercial return.

Sounds a bit like the SAHT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Aust ... sing_Trust

This, as I remember was gradually dismantled by the Fed's, and Housing SA is now a "Houser of last resort"

Worth a read:

http://www.cpsu.asn.au/PH_18th_MayJS.pdf

ABS Measure of Australia's Progress: Is life in Australia getting better?

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf ... 0page%20(1)

some of the ABS points for the last DECADE:

- Children born in 2009 are expected to live two or three years longer than those born in 1999;
- The proportion of people with vocational or higher education qualifications rose from 49 per cent to 63 per cent;
- The unemployment rate in 1999 was 6.9 per cent compared with last year’s 5.6 per cent (and never mind today’s 5.1 per cent);
- Per capita real net national disposable income grew by 2.6 per cent a year over the decade – that’s the money in our collective wallets and purses;
- Our national per capita wealth (the national balance sheet, what Australia is worth divided by the number of people) increased by about 0.9 per cent a year;
- And, the real clincher against the whinging class, real average household income of low-income Australians grew by 41 per cent. The poor have become substantially better off, if the word “richer” doesn’t quite fit. Middle-income folk saw their after-inflation household income rise by a whopping 46 per cent.