Today (19 April) marks Youth Homelessness Matters Day, a national day of advocacy held each year to raise awareness for the specific and complex needs of young people experiencing homelessness.
While 12-24-year-olds only make up 16 per cent of the Australian population, they represent 24 per cent of the homeless population. But despite being nearly a quarter of the country’s homelessness population there is currently no federal funding dedicated specifically for youth homelessness.
The assumption that youth homelessness can be addressed in the same way as homelessness more widely ignores the complex and specific needs they have that adults, or older adults, do not.
We know that young people think about what experiencing homelessness looks like differently than older cohorts. Young people experiencing homelessness don’t always see couch surfing or crashing with others as being homeless, which leaves them to fly under the radar without any support.
Almost a third of young people who present alone to a homelessness service were couch surfing before they turned up. Over a third had experienced domestic and family violence, and almost half had a mental health issue.
In 2021-22 almost 40,000 specialist homelessness services clients were young people presenting alone. 46 per cent of these young people needed long-term housing, but only 3.9 per cent received it.
While the Federal Government has committed funding to increase social housing stock, young people are still rarely supported with social housing, making up less than 3 per cent of tenants, and are unlike to benefit equally.
Home ownership-centric housing solutions also leave young people behind. Most young people access housing through the private rental market because even with these, they have long been priced out of buying their own home. While there is no quick fix to Australia’s rental crisis, there are options to better support young people to afford housing.
Australia has an intergenerational equality crisis. Young people in Australia today are the first generation since federation to have a lower standard of living than their parents.
Their futures do not look any fairer, set to experience education debt accumulating at a faster rate than they can pay, increased taxation to support our aging population and more frequent natural disasters, along with carrying the costs of dealing with climate change.
Their needs and interests have long been pushed aside to favour older generations, a process beginning long before the pandemic. This broken generational bargain is a context we cannot separate from any conversations around young people because of the real and continuous impacts on their lives.
Young people experiencing homelessness need specific and specialised support, which is why we support Y Foundations’ call for the development of a standalone National Child and Youth Homelessness Strategy. You can find more information on Youth Homelessness Matters Day here.
