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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.

Article Excerpt
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...

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