Page 12 - BOL Oct20 Edition

If we realised the true cost

of homelessness, we’d fix

it overnight.

Australia’s six-month moratorium on evictions is due to end soon. No one keeps track of the costs
Some states have extended the moratorium, but when it ends In Australia, despite government efforts to house people during
that’s likely to force even more Australians into housing insecurity the pandemic, we still see many on the footpath with their bags
and outright homelessness. The moral and health arguments for and begging signs. They are mostly the men. Women tend to
housing people are clear, but many people are unaware of the find other ways to manage their homelessness such as couch
financial cost we all bear for not fixing homelessness. surfing or staying with adult kids or extended family.

Social commentator Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece, Million- Beyond the human tragedy, what most passers-by fail to see is
Dollar Murray, for The New Yorker in 2006. It’s the story of two the cost of homelessness to us all. It includes the bills for police
Nevada police officers who spent much of their day dealing with and ambulance call-outs, prison nights, visits to emergency
homeless people such as six-foot-tall ex-marine and chronic departments, hospital stays and mental health and drying out
alcoholic Murray. They regularly picked up Murray and drove clinics.
him to hospital, drying-out clinics, the police lock-up and mental
health facilities. These expenses are rarely collated and tabulated to find the
true cost of homelessness to the public. The costs are dispersed
His bills were so legendary the policemen worked out, based over so many government agencies and facilities that they
on his health care alone, it would have been cheaper to house are managed in a piecemeal way, as they always have been in
him in a hotel with his own private nurse. When not drunk, Australia. The result is a hefty hit to the public purse.
Murray was a charming, smart, talented chef. By the time he
died of intestinal bleeding, they calculated the cost of Murray’s Financial case for housing the homeless is clear
homelessness over a decade was US$1 million. To understand this further, we did a global scoping review of
research since 2009 that examined the value of providing a
Those two Nevada policemen did something that is rarely done secure, stable home for formerly homeless people and the wider
anywhere – they calculated (OK, roughly) the cost to the taxpayer taxpaying community. In total, we examined 100 research papers
of one man’s homelessness. And, in doing so, they showed, as and analysed outcomes across a range of domains including
Gladwell pointed out: physical and mental health, emergency department use,
substance use, well-being, community integration, mortality,
The kind of money it would take to solve the homeless criminal justice interaction, service use and cost-effectiveness.
problem could well be less than the kind of money it
took to ignore it. The overriding consensus among the 100 peer-reviewed studies
and agency reports was that housing stability brought a raft of