As research this week showed high housing costs continue to drive homelessness in the ACT, community organisations have been working hard to provide a safety net to Canberrans unable to afford the city's expensive rents and housing prices.
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Safe Shelter reopened its doors on Tuesday ahead of winter. The shelter, in Lewis Hall at St Columba's Uniting Church in Braddon, will provide floor space to up to eight homeless men on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights until October 1.
The shelter has operated there since 2013 and fills an important gap in homelessness services.
Canberra's only other single men's shelter, St Vincent de Paul's Samaritan House in Hackett, was almost always at full capacity, Safe Shelter coordinator Richard Griffiths said.
Safe Shelter takes guests without prior notice and on a first-come basis.
Mr Griffiths said the toughest part of being homeless in Canberra was "probably that you are isolated from the community".
"You've got nowhere really to wash ... You're getting dirtier and dirtier, and colder and colder, and [as a result] you're not thinking straight," he said.
Mr Griffiths said welfare agencies had reported the "mental faculties" of Safe Shelter guests appeared greatly improved after their stays.
Safe Shelter provides Street Swag bedding kits to guests who don't have their own, and shower facilities.
The shelter's other benefit was the opportunity for homeless men to have a chat to the volunteers.
The ACT has the second-highest rate of homelessness in Australia, second only to the Northern Territory, according to an ACTCOSS and ACT Shelter report this week.
Canberra/Goulburn St Vincent de Paul Society president Frank Brassil said homelessness came in many forms.
"Rough sleepers are the most visible and, while their situation is acute and much deserving of our help, many more people are homeless in other ways," he said.
Homelessness Australia chief executive Glenda Stevens said a lot of homeless Canberrans are "what we call the 'hippie homeless'".
"They're staying with friends, they're couch surfing, it might be somebody who's a little bit older and just happens to be staying with a relative," she said.
The unaffordable cost of housing underpins the plight of both 'rough sleepers' and the 'hippie homeless'.
"We have a perception that [Canberra] … is the world's most liveable city," Ms Stevens said. "But if you are on a low income, it's very, very difficult to be able to afford anything in a city that has high costs associated with housing due to the general high level of income."
She said 37 per cent of Canberrans came to homelessness services because of accommodation issues – well above the national average.
