Million-Dollar Murray was a towering former marine who lived homeless in Nevada.
When sober, Murray was charming and potentially productive. Yet Nevada police spent years ferrying him between hospital emergency wards, drying-out clinics, mental health facilities, and custody.
In 2006, social commentator Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece for The New Yorker examining the experience of two Nevada officers who spent much of their working days interacting with homeless people such as Murray.
When Murray eventually died of intestinal bleeding it was calculated his homelessness had cost $US1million over a decade.
In the years since Gladwell's piece, myriad studies have reinforced the notion that homelessness costs taxpayers more than ending it would.
For example, the University of Queensland recently found that people who experienced extended periods of homelessness used $48,000 worth of state government-fund services on average over just one year. But it would cost just $34,000 to provide that person with permanent supportive housing - including access to the care they needed.
The results of this study shouldn't shock us. Permanent housing improves people's physical and mental health, increases their labour market participation, relieves pressure on police and the health system, and reduces people's vulnerability to becoming a victim of crime. In the Queensland study, those put in homes saw their demand for mental health services decline by a remarkable 65 per cent.
Little wonder then that 49 eminent economists who responded to a pre-budget survey backed by the Economic Society of Australia rated boosting social housing as their number one priority. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, unfortunately, didn't take the advice.
As the housing boom stampedes on, we need that attitude to change urgently. More than one million Australians are now in housing stress. Many are just one unexpected event away from homelessness - a relationship falling apart, a job loss, a serious illness.
There are 116,000 Australians who are homeless and 290,500 have sought help from specialist homelessness services in the past year. That number is expected to surge 9 per cent this year.
In Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, the situation is much worse. Homelessness in the Hunter Valley region is forecast to increase by 40 per cent.
But unlike so many complex and nuanced problems, we actually know what we have to do to fix homelessness. We've even done it before.
Australia was once a global leader in the construction of public housing. In the eight years after World War II, our nation built almost 100,000 public housing homes. Following the Global Financial Crisis, the Commonwealth invested $5.6 billion to build an extra 20,000 social housing units and refurbish a further 80,000.
We also used to be a nation of home owners, but our home ownership has been falling over the past 25 years, dropping from 43 per cent to 30 per cent.
We can safely predict that percentage will drop sharply soon given the housing boom. In Newcastle and Lake Macquarie, the value of a typical house surged by 21.3 per cent in the past 12 months.
What this means is that for the first time in Australian history ordinary low-income people cannot afford to rent a decent home, much less buy one.
Nationally, there are now zero affordable dwellings in the private market for households earning $220 or less per week and a tiny handful affordable to households earning up to $355.
If you're on minimum wage, or a disability or age pension, you will now struggle to put a roof over your head in the Hunter, and in most other parts of the country.
That's why we are now desperate for a major injection of funding into social housing now.
The problem was already enormous in 2019 - throw in a pandemic and a housing boom and it is now diabolical.
Australia has long prided itself on egalitarianism. But if we want people of all backgrounds rubbing shoulders in our towns and cities we need to make sure low-income people can afford to live there.
And if we invest now, we won't just help alleviate homelessness; we'll help boost our post COVID-19 recovery.
Expanding social housing would create abundant jobs - for every $1 million spent on residential construction, nine existing jobs are supported while three new ones are created. Unlike other major infrastructure projects, social housing construction can be undertaken at scale within two years of the policy announcement, and the jobs could be distributed across regions with high unemployment.
Australia has bounced back impressively after the initial shock of the pandemic, but we know that rebound is fragile. Many have lost jobs or encountered private trauma in recent years. Millions are under housing stress.
Access to a secure home is a necessary foundation for anyone trying to rebuild their life. Australia in the 2020s can afford to offer that foundation to each and every person who needs it.
