The housing crisis and homelessness in Australia

On any given night, more than 122,000 Australians are experiencing homelessness — including families, older women, young people, and First Nations Australians. But behind these figures are people: people whose lives are disrupted, whose health is compromised, and whose futures are put at risk.

This is not a story of individual failure. It is a story of systemic gaps in policy, affordability, and service design. And the evidence — from Australian researchers, frontline organisations, and international counterparts — is unequivocal: we know how to end homelessness. The question is whether we have the political will to choose to.

The Social Impact of the Housing Crisis

Housing is not simply shelter. It is the foundation for stability, safety, health, and participation in society. Without a secure home, people face heightened risks of unemployment, mental illness, family breakdown, substance use, and contact with the justice system. For children, homelessness disrupts education and development. For older adults — particularly older women, now the fastest-growing cohort experiencing homelessness — it can mean the loss of dignity and safety in later life.

Homelessness also strains communities. It places pressure on emergency services, health systems, and social services. It fuels cycles of disadvantage and deepens inequality across generations.

University of Queensland Professor Cameron Parsell, one of Australia’s most prominent researchers in poverty, homelessness and social services, has spent decades examining these dynamics in Queensland and beyond. Writing with colleagues for The Conversation in April 2025, Parsell noted that homelessness has become ‘the other housing crisis politicians aren’t talking about’ — a chronic condition driven not by individual circumstance but by structural failures in the housing system. His research has consistently found that what prevents people from exiting homelessness is not personal shortcomings, but inadequate housing supply and policies that require people to prove they are ‘housing ready’ before being given a place to live.

"When people have access to housing that is safe and affordable, they no longer have to live as patients, criminals, inmates, clients, and homeless people." — Professor Cameron Parsell, University of Queensland

What the Research Tells Us

AHURI: Australia’s Housing Research Evidence Base

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) is the country’s peak body for independent housing and homelessness research, funded by federal, state and territory governments. AHURI’s extensive body of work — hundreds of research reports spanning housing supply, affordability, social housing, private rental markets, First Nations housing, and homelessness — forms the evidential backbone of housing policy in Australia.

Key findings from AHURI research paint a sobering picture. Social housing in Australia expanded by just 2.3% between 2018 and 2023, while the population grew by 6.8% — meaning the proportionate share of social housing has continued to fall. AHURI research has documented that the capacity of Australia’s social housing system has been effectively halved over the past 30 years: in 2020-21, around 30,000 new applicants were granted a social housing tenancy nationwide, compared with 52,000 in 1991 — a decline of 42% in raw terms and 61% proportionate to population.

AHURI has also tracked the compounding pressures of the private rental market on vulnerable households. Research led by scholars including Professor Nicole Gurran (University of Sydney) has highlighted how short-term rental accommodation, restrictive zoning, and sustained underinvestment in social housing have converged to create a rental crisis that low-income households cannot navigate on their own.

In 2025, AHURI released its South East Queensland Displacement Monitoring report, tracking housing affordability, social housing availability, and demand for homelessness services in Brisbane — with particular focus on the implications of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The report is part of a series aimed at calibrating policy responses to ensure the Games deliver a legacy of social inclusion rather than displacement.

Professor Hal Pawson and the City Futures Research Centre (UNSW)

Professor Hal Pawson, Associate Director of UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre, is another leading voice in Australian housing policy. His 2020 book Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform — co-authored with Vivienne Milligan and Judith Yates — provided a landmark analysis of Australia’s housing system failures and called for fundamental structural reform. Its themes have since shaped advocacy, academic debate, and government action nationwide.

In Queensland specifically, City Futures Research Centre produced two reports for the Queensland Council of Social Service (QCOSS) in 2023 and 2024 examining the state’s housing crisis and recommending reform pathways. The 2023 report identified that Queensland’s affordability and homelessness problems had been compounded by a fragmented and underpowered approach to housing policy — findings that contributed directly to the Queensland Government’s subsequent reorganisation of housing governance, including the creation of a unified housing department and an expert advisory panel.

Pawson and his colleagues also lead the Australian Homelessness Monitor (AHM), a biennial national study — co-produced with Professor Cameron Parsell at UQ — that tracks homelessness trends and their relationship to housing market conditions, labour markets, and social security policy. The 2024 AHM found that rising mortgage costs, rental inflation, and low vacancy rates have compounded the risk of homelessness for low-income and vulnerable households, and that Australia’s social housing shortfall now stands in the hundreds of thousands of dwellings.

"To meet all needs, our social and affordable housing sector needs to triple in size over 20 years." — Dr Chris Martin, UNSW City Futures Research Centre

The Scale of the Social Housing Challenge

Research by Pawson, Milligan and Yates has estimated Australia faces a shortfall of more than 433,000 social housing dwellings — a figure that, if unaddressed, is projected to grow to 727,000 by 2036, accounting for population growth and current affordability trajectories. Addressing both the backlog and emerging need would require a nearly tenfold increase in current construction rates: from approximately 3,000 to 36,000 additional social housing dwellings per year.

This gap between need and supply is not abstract. It manifests daily in Queensland’s social housing waitlist, in families spending months in motel accommodation, in people sleeping rough in Brisbane’s parks and under its bridges. The research is unambiguous: the market will not fill this gap. Public investment — at scale and sustained over decades — is essential.

Solutions Are Possible: Evidence from Brisbane and Beyond

Micah Projects: Housing First in Practice in Queensland

Few organisations demonstrate the power of Housing First more compellingly than Micah Projects, a Brisbane-based not-for-profit that has been at the forefront of ending homelessness in Queensland for 30 years. Micah’s Housing First approach prioritises unconditional access to stable, permanent housing — without requiring people to prove themselves ‘ready’ for housing — combined with integrated health, mental health, and social support.

Micah’s track record is remarkable. Its 50 Lives 50 Homes campaign in 2010 housed 230 people experiencing chronic rough sleeping. This was followed by the 500 Lives 500 Homes campaign, which successfully housed more than 580 Brisbane households over three years. Micah’s Street to Home program deploys nurses and outreach workers across the city around the clock — meeting people in parks, in cars, under bridges — to connect them with housing pathways and health care.

UQ research evaluating Micah’s programs has documented positive outcomes across health, housing stability, family safety, and child welfare. Importantly, the research has also quantified the economic case: there is an estimated annual saving of approximately $13,000 for each person supported to move from chronic homelessness to secure housing, through reduced use of emergency services, hospital care, and the justice system. Research by Parsell and colleagues found that people housed through Micah’s initiatives experienced meaningful positive life changes — consistent with international evidence on Housing First outcomes.

In 2023-24 alone, Micah reported a 65% increase in families experiencing homelessness in Brisbane — a sobering indicator of how rapidly the crisis is escalating, and how critical frontline organisations with proven models are to the response.

Micah Projects also serves as the backbone organisation for Brisbane Zero, a collaborative campaign working to end rough sleeping in Brisbane using a real-time, by-name data approach. Brisbane Zero tracks every person experiencing homelessness by name, enabling a coordinated, person-centred response across agencies.

Brisbane Zero and the Built for Zero Model

Brisbane Zero draws directly on the Built for Zero methodology developed by Community Solutions, a New York-based non-profit organisation that leads one of the most ambitious and evidence-rich approaches to ending homelessness in the world. Since 2015, Community Solutions’ Built for Zero initiative has grown into a movement of more than 140 communities across the United States committed to measurably ending homelessness for entire populations.

The methodology is grounded in a deceptively simple insight: you cannot manage what you cannot measure. Built for Zero communities establish a unified ‘by-name list’ — a real-time, person-specific database accounting for every individual experiencing homelessness — and use this data to coordinate housing placements, identify system bottlenecks, and track progress toward functional zero. Functional zero does not mean that no one will ever become homeless; it means that homelessness has become rare, brief, and non-recurring.

To date, 14 Built for Zero communities in the United States have reached functional zero for veteran or chronic homelessness. A further 42 have achieved measurable reductions. The evidence is clear: the approach works when communities have the will, the data infrastructure, and sufficient housing supply to implement it.

New York City’s own homelessness crisis — where on any given night roughly 125,000 people sleep in shelters and thousands more on the streets — illustrates the consequences when Housing First principles are not consistently applied at scale. The New York City Comptroller’s office has documented the counterproductive effects of encampment sweeps and criminalisation, noting that when a Housing First model was applied to veteran homelessness a decade ago, it resulted in a 90% reduction. Applying the same approach to street homelessness more broadly, the Comptroller’s report argued, could make New York the first large city in the US to reach functional zero for rough sleeping. This international experience reinforces the Brisbane Zero model and provides a compelling case for scaling it further.

The Coalition for the Homeless — one of New York’s longest-standing advocacy organisations — has similarly argued that deeply affordable housing for the lowest-income households is the only durable solution to mass homelessness. Their 2025 recommendations echo what Australian researchers and practitioners have long argued: housing vouchers and market incentives alone are insufficient; what is required is a substantial and sustained investment in housing that low-income people can actually afford.

Tax Settings and Structural Drivers of Unaffordability

No serious examination of Australia’s housing crisis is complete without addressing the role of tax policy. Australia’s settings — particularly negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount — have consistently skewed investment toward existing housing stock rather than new supply, driven up prices, and advantaged property owners over renters and first home buyers.

AHURI research on housing tax reform has identified these settings as a key structural barrier to affordability. Inquiry work by researchers including Alan Duncan and Gavin Wood at the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, funded through AHURI, has examined pathways to reform that balance economic and political realities. Their analysis, along with work by Pawson and colleagues, has underscored that reforming tax incentives — or redirecting their benefits toward new affordable and social housing supply — is one of the highest-leverage levers available to policymakers.

Professor Pawson has specifically recommended that phasing out private landlord tax concessions, or restricting them to newly built homes, could generate revenue to supplement the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) and dramatically accelerate social housing construction. These arguments are not ideological — they are grounded in modelling, comparative international analysis, and decades of accumulated evidence.

Investing in the People Who Do the Work

Behind every housing placement, every outreach visit, every tenancy sustained, there is a frontline worker. Australia’s homelessness and housing support sector is chronically underfunded relative to the scale of need it is asked to address. AHURI’s 2024 National Housing Research Program specifically funded work examining ‘workplace trauma on the housing and homelessness frontline’ — a research priority that reflects how unsustainable working conditions have become for the people holding this system together.

Research by Parsell and colleagues at UQ — including an AHURI-funded investigative panel into building and retaining an effective homelessness sector workforce — has highlighted that high turnover, poor pay, and vicarious trauma are not incidental to the sector’s challenges; they are symptoms of structural underinvestment. If Australia is serious about ending homelessness, it must resource the people doing that work: funding long-term service contracts rather than short-term grants; investing in workforce wellbeing; and building integrated service systems that reduce duplication and allow practitioners to focus on the people they are there to support.

Community housing providers also need secure, long-term funding to build and manage high-quality, affordable housing stock. The current patchwork of time-limited grants and funding rounds creates uncertainty that discourages capital investment and makes long-term planning difficult. The model must change.

A National Priority: From Crisis Management to Prevention

The evidence assembled by AHURI, UQ’s researchers, UNSW’s City Futures Research Centre, Micah Projects, and international counterparts like Community Solutions and the Coalition for the Homeless all points in the same direction. Ending homelessness is not utopian. It is achievable. Communities have done it. The research tells us how. What has been missing is sustained political will and adequate investment.

Australia has moments of extraordinary success to build on. The COVID-19 pandemic response — which moved many rough sleepers into vacant student accommodation and motels, with coordinated support — showed what is possible when government acts decisively. Professor Parsell and UQ colleagues documented that these emergency responses ‘worked extraordinarily well’ and demonstrated, above all, that homelessness is a policy issue and is solvable. The response tapered off; it should instead have been expanded.

For Queensland, the stakes are particularly high. With the 2032 Brisbane Olympics approaching, AHURI’s South East Queensland Displacement Monitoring research warns that without deliberate policy action, Games-related investment risks worsening housing stress for the most vulnerable Queenslanders. The Olympics can be a catalyst for social housing investment and homelessness reform — or it can make things worse. That choice belongs to government.

"Homelessness is a policy issue — and is solvable." — Professor Cameron Parsell, University of Queensland

Addressing the housing crisis and ending homelessness must be a national priority. It requires long-term vision, cross-sector collaboration, and political courage. It requires investment in research, in frontline services, and in housing supply. It requires tax reform, planning reform, and governance reform. And it requires compassion — the recognition that every person, regardless of their circumstances, deserves a safe place to call home.

The question, as always, is not whether we can end homelessness. It is whether we choose to.

Key Sources and Further Reading

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). (2024). 2024 National Housing Research Program. ahuri.edu.au

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). (2025). South East Queensland Displacement Monitoring: 2025 update. Martin, D., Ralston, L., Alves, T. and Brackertz, N. AHURI.

Community Solutions. (2025). Built for Zero: Theory of Change. community.solutions

Coalition for the Homeless. (2025). Housing is the Solution 2025: Recommendations. coalitionforthehomeless.org

Martin, C. & Pawson, H. (2024). Homelessness prevention in Australian residential tenancies and social housing law. In Routledge Handbook of Global Perspectives on Homelessness Law Policy.

Micah Projects. (2024). Impact Report 2023-24: Home for Good. micahprojects.org.au

NYC Comptroller. Housing First. comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/housing-first/

Parsell, C., Kaakinen, J., Fitzpatrick, S. & Kuskoff, E. (2025). What does it take to end homelessness? Tweaking or transforming systems. Housing Studies.

Parsell, C. (2025, April 16). Homelessness – the other housing crisis politicians aren’t talking about. The Conversation.

Parsell, C. & Clarke, A. (UQ). (2020). Lack of affordable housing blocks efforts to reduce rough sleeping. UQ News.

Parsell, C. et al. (2025). Social work’s role in both direct practice and advocacy to sustain tenancies and prevent homelessness. British Journal of Social Work.

Pawson, H., Parsell, C., Clarke, A., Moore, J., Hartley, C., Aminpour, F. & Eagles, K. (2024). Australian Homelessness Monitor 2024. UNSW City Futures Research Centre / UQ.

Pawson, H., Milligan, V. & Yates, J. (2020). Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform. Palgrave Macmillan.

Pawson, H. & Milligan, V. (2024). Towards a national housing policy for the 2020s. In Australian Urban Policy: Prospects and Pathways. ANU Press.

UNSW City Futures Research Centre. (2023 & 2024). Reports for QCOSS on Queensland’s housing crisis. cityfutures.ada.unsw.edu.au

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