For many of us, housing is the hidden crisis. We know there are people who live literally on our streets in our prosperous city but somehow they seem far away. They are people without much political clout.
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A combination of circumstances - a perfect storm - has led to a dramatic lengthening of the time people have to wait to get more than short-term accommodation.
Homeless people or those at risking of losing their home (because of domestic violence, for example) waited an average of 56.6 days in the April to June quarter compared with 45 days in the first three months of the year.
A big factor was a shortage of public housing. There were 3060 applications on the latest waiting list.
On top of that, vacancies in private accommodation are scarce. The third factor is the rising cost of living which makes the scant budgets of the poor even tighter.
As these waiting times have lengthened, the number of people housed has gone down, 61 placed in accommodation between April and June, a drop from 90 in the first months of the year.
One of the causes is the failure of the private rental market to offer much to people on low or virtually no income. Private landlords rent where they can maximise incomes - they aren't charities - and well-paid young professionals in a well-paid city can pay the rents demanded.
As the chief executive of ACT Shelter, Travis Gilbert, put it: "The single biggest problem for Canberra is that our private rental market is completely failing to meet the needs of anybody looking for a detached house that is earning less than $80,000, and any single person looking for a unit or an apartment earning less than $60,000."
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And public housing doesn't make good the shortfall. "I try not to use the term 'crisis' because what we're really looking at here is the predictable result of three decades or more of divestment from public housing, in particular," Mr Travis said. He may avoid the word "crisis" but for those on the street, it is.
The federal and territory governments need to address this problem. Clever solutions are needed to get more private money flowing towards social housing. And more public money is needed, too.
Building public housing isn't fashionable - but it is the right thing to do.
