This Week: Town and Country – Homelessness
1. IN THE CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT (‘CBD’)
Newspaper reporters always used to ask me how many homeless people slept each night in the CBD. It was as if they thought we had a name and address for each homeless person, who inevitably never gave their real names when asked and had no address. Homeless people are often ‘houseless’, then live in squats, ‘couch surf’, sleep in cars, caves or derelict buildings.
To find the answer to that question we started getting staff to move around the city to all the known locations and actually count people during the night. In round figures, over all the year, the average was about 500 people who slept rough in “the starlight Hotel” – less in winter, more in summer.
Cold-weather counts in August 2008 found 354 sleeping rough; the number rose to 399 last August. It will be higher this August because of the closing of cheap boarding houses and other accommodation, and the worsening financial crisis. A significant number do not receive any welfare payments, as they will not give their names to Centrelink. Accurate numbers are impossible to know but they are increasing. Some will die this week from the cold and more next week. We do not know how many, for the official cause of death will be hypothermia not homelessness.
Most homeless people are not in good health to begin with due to their lifestyle so that the cold makes them become breathless and their bodies begin not functioning well. With homeless people sleeping in doorways, waste bins, parks and car-parks, the CBD is not much different now to what it was one hundred years ago.
2.ON THE CENTRAL COAST
Rural and regional Australia have increasing numbers of the homeless. The region that has the greatest number of homeless is the Central Coast. There has been a 65% increase in the past year. A census of the homeless in 2008 found 1,200 individuals. By 2010 that had increased to over 2000 individuals, an increase of 110%. Several Christian organizations do a wonderful job of helping them.
When a young woman bushwalking in the Blue Mountains early this month was attacked by a homeless man who lived in a cave, newspaper reporters ventured into the thousands of acres of wilderness and National Parks around Gosford, Woy Woy, Wyong and other parts of the Central Coast. Over 100 homeless men were found to be living in the caves in these parks.
Some have basic furniture, mattresses, lounge chairs, and cupboards scrounged from Council pickups by the footpaths. Most have flattened cardboard boxes for a mattress and old milk crates for a lounge chair. Running water is plentiful from the rocks when it rains. Toilets are only four or five metres away. These people have an addiction – to sleeping in all kinds of weather. They hate rooms (reminds them of prison cells). Most do not receive any welfare payments. Most get food from bins and from behind shops. Most have mental illness. Most fight off the cold by drinking fortified cheap wine.
Regardless of why they are there and the reasons they do not accept the alternatives society proffers, is beside the point. They are vulnerable and Christians must help them. They are the only ones who do care. Neither the Atheist Society nor the Humanist Society offer such helping services.
Rev The Hon Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.