Teen homelessness more than doubles

TEENAGE homelessness has doubled in the past two decades despite Australia's record run of prosperity.

Household wealth has trebled since 1996, but there are now 22,000 12- to 18-year-olds among the 100,000 homeless across the nation, up from an estimated 8500-10,800 in 1991.

Young people cite a breakdown in their relationship with their parents or step-parents as the main reason for their homelessness, a new report reveals.

Each night, one in two will secure an emergency accomodation bed; the others are left to the streets or "couch surfing" at a friend or acquaintance's home.

The report, Australia's Homeless Youth, to be released today by the National Youth Commission, paints a sorry picture of neglect. Programs for emergency accommodation and transition into longer-term housing, and services to reconnect young people with their families, are all deemed inadequately funded.

It also notes the abject failure of state care programs, finding "a third of young people leaving state care are case-managed into homeless services" and 42 per cent of homeless adults in emergency accommodation had been in state care as youths. The NYC report comes after Kevin Rudd flagged homelessness as a key social priority. The Prime Minister has committed $150 million during his first term for extra housing for the homeless, and in January he commissioned a white paper to examine strategies to tackle the issue over the next decade.

For years, governments have made commitments to address youth homelessness and poverty, only to be caught out by the complexity of the problem. In 1987, former prime minister Bob Hawke declared: "By 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty."

The report says funding for the highly regarded emergency accommodation program Supported Accommodation Assistance Program had "stagnated" since the mid-1990s, and the successful $20 million Reconnect program introduced in 2001 to help homeless youth reconcile with their families should be trebled.

It calls on the Rudd Government to invest an extra $100 million in its first term to address shortfalls in homeless services on top of the $150 million election pledge, and $1 billion overall in the next decade.

The new spending could generate as much as $900 million in savings on welfare costs, health and mental healthcare, drug and alcohol programs, the justice system and jails, the report says.

It is the most significant study undertaken on youth homelessness since the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published Brian Burdekin's seminal Our Homeless Children in 1989.

"Youth homelessness has doubled at a time when you'd think it would be reducing," NYC chair David Eldridge told The Australian.

"There are a lot of causes: family conflict, sexual abuse of young people, parents responding inadequately around divorce, inappropriate management of young people within the state care systems and the further issue of housing affordability," said Major Eldridge, from The Salvation Army.

Melbourne homeless man Darren King, 19, lives in a dormitory room at The Hub, a type of backpackers' residence.

"It's scary - you just don't know what's going to happen to you day by day," he said. Mr King said he was thrown out of home at 15 when his father married a younger woman.

Mr King said he had the same dreams as other Australians: home, car and family.

"I've signed up for a public housing spot," he said. "We'll just have to see."