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While homelessness in Australia has remained relatively stable at the national level, its spatial distribution is becoming more nuanced. This paper draws on homelessness estimates produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to explore the spatial dynamics of homelessness in Australia over a fifteen-year period. Building on existing work, we show that homelessness is becoming more urbanised with evidence of spatial convergence, mainly driven by a surge in severe crowding in our major cities. However, when exploring intra-city patterns, we find distinctive intra-city spatial dynamics featuring strong suburbanisation of ‘couch surfing’ in state capital cities, contrasting with shifts in severe crowding numbers toward middle and inner regions of most state capitals. We argue that these dynamics reflect the retreat of affordable rental housing supply to the outer suburban fringe, and the coping strategies that ‘couch surfers’ and those aspiring to live in the inner cities are compelled to follow in response to the changing spatial configuration of affordable housing.

There is evidence of a shortage of low-rent housing stock in Australia. But there is a puzzling aspect to this evidence because it would appear that vacancy rates in the low-rent housing stock are relatively high. The paper establishes this relationship using a unique panel database for two very different cities within Australia. This panel database permits measurement of various dimensions of housing supply across value segments in a metropolitan private rental housing market and at different points in time. Our research findings describe vacancy patterns, turnover of tenancies and survival rates of properties by rent value segments and explore associations with the spatial concentration and polarisation of the low rent housing stock.