Homelessness and the west
Homelessness and the west
Michael Darcy, Liesl Laker and their colleagues at the Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre of the University of Western Sydney make the special role and contribution of a university of the west very clear. For some years now they have studied an issue that defies normal desk based planning and research: homelessness.
If you have no address, then your characteristics, profile, reasons for being, habits and interests are not likely to be recorded in any census data. If you move about from place to place then it is hard for any one area to have developed a profile of your needs. The only way to really understand homelessness is to go down to street level and understand the patterns of homelessness over a long period of time. That is what Michael and Liesl have done.
By tracking calls to the City of Sydney's Homeless Persons Information Centre over four years, Darcy and Laker's thesis is that many homeless people call 'western sydney' home, but seek refuge where most of the services are situated, in the inner city. A number chose to stay in western Sydney despite the lack of any emergency accommodation for them there. They had an attachment to place that went beyond their need for services.
Following their thesis our two intrepid researchers conducted interviews with people accessing emergency services in the inner city and at Parramatta. The rationales for staying in a particular place ranged from access to services, employment to familiarity of place and sense of community and safety. But Darcy and Laker found that "many people will forego emergency accommodation in order to stay in an area they feel connected".
The conclusion that Darcy and Laker make is that "local communities must learn to own their own homeless people". A great contrast to the kind of strategy that we have seen developed in many US cities, and that is to hide the problem by moving the problems of homelessness out of sight of major centres.
But there are some peculiarly Australian inflections to the work that Darcy and Laker have done. Isn't it appropriate that the more affluent inner suburbs should be the location for emergency services, and this despite the dislocation for homeless people themselves? In a city like Sydney is it better to locate emergency services at the hub of all transport systems in the inner city? Should, given the location of much moderately priced housing and public housing in western Sydney, we set up services to deal with a large homeless population as well?
There is no doubt that Darcy and Laker make a powerful case for developing more services for homeless people in western Sydney, but much more than that, they argue we need to find ways for local communities to work together to develop their own unique solutions to the problems of homelessness. This latter point may get lost in some of the concerns about Australia's tendency to concentrate inequality on the outer, and middle suburban, fringes of our cities. The point is not that the inner city or the outer city carry the burden, but that we share responsibility for the issues and problems. If a homeless person is better able to find a job or a friend or a support system in the west then shouldn't we give them the best possible chance of taking advantage of these things? As Darcy and Laker argue: "Greater attention to the concepts of place and sense of place can only improve policy makers' understanding of how to best to alleviate homelessness in the places that homeless people call home".
At the end of the day, this unique and important research leaves us with the paradox that homeless people may well feel safer and serviced in the inner city but have a better chance of getting back onto their feet in the west.
Pathways to Homelessness: Personal and Structural Factors in Location and Mobility of Homeless People, Briefing Paper No. 1, January 2002 can be obtained through the University of Western Sydney School of Applied Social and Human Sciences. The research was conducted in a project conducted jointly by the University of Western Sydney, the City of Sydney Council, Shelter NSW and Sydney City Mission.
