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There are definitely not 20k+ Victorians out on the streets every night. That figure almost certainly includes the vast majority of homeless people who are sle

• PeterisP 6y ago
  Thing is, if you make a reasonable service available, "the vast majority of homeless people who are sleeping on mates' couches" will be competing for the same spots with those who actually are sleeping on the streets otherwise. If some sort of safety net is available, then some people who'd otherwise find some solution to pay rent - whether it's going over their heads in payday loans or getting into petty crime or resorting to prostitution or some other way - some of them will choose to actually use that safety net instead. So the demand for that safety net if it's available should be expected to be larger than the number of people who "fell through" in the absence of it.
• AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Sure, but those people who sleep on friends couches, or in homeless shelters, or in boarding houses occasionally are all people who sleep rough sometimes. Gathering statistics on this is not the easiest thing to do, but I’ve read more than once that about two thirds of Australia’s homeless sleep rough regularly. So while there might not be 25,000 people sleeping on the streets of Victoria on any given night, a good portion of that number will find themselves doing it often enough. Meaning if you want to keep those people from sleeping out in public places, then you really do need to provide all of them with housing, and also that you certainly can’t provide only 2000 of them with temporary housing and then claim that you’ve solved homelessness (even only temporarily).