By RUBY MULLER

If you have ever dined alfresco on Melbourne’s bustling Degraves St, you have probably met Jeff*.

He would have stopped as you sipped your latte and excused himself, before explaining that he needs $25 for a room in a homeless shelter. Despite his unkempt beard and worn clothing, he is well spoken and smiles as he asks for change.

Perhaps you gave him a dollar. Either way, he kindly thanked you for your time, bid you a good day, and slipped away into the crowd.

Jeff is one of 22,789 homeless Victorians, and one of the many Melburnians on the waiting list for public housing.

This is his second time on the waiting list, and this time he has been waiting for more than three years. In total, Jeff has spent seven years on the streets, and has earned the nickname "Turtle" for the hiking pack he always carries.

It wasn’t drugs or mental health issues that landed him where he is today, but a rebellious streak at 15. 

“Dad was always with the army,” he says.  "I was going though that stage where you wouldn’t do as you’re told – you know, everyone goes through it.”

Jeff was left in a boys home when his dad was working out of town. When he returned without bringing Jeff home, he ran away and soon began living alone.

And for a while it worked. He had his own place and had found jobs bartending. Jeff lived that way for a decade until he moved to the country to follow a girl. 

“I quit my job, left my flat. Spent all my money moving up there. She turned out to be really, really violent.

“It got worse and worse, and then she stabbed me with a screwdriver. I came back to Melbourne, and had nothing to come back to. And here I am. And that’s how I ended up homeless.” 

Though Jeff has been offered bartending jobs since, he says he wouldn’t be able to keep it without first finding a place to stay. And he doesn’t earn enough money from begging to keep up a place, so he keeps trying for government-assisted housing. 

“You can’t really sleep in an alleyway, get up, and go to work. You’ve got to be able to shower, wash your clothes, eat, sleep. All that comes first.” 

“They work on a priority system. Seg 1, Seg 2, Seg 3. So the more problems you got, the faster you get the housing.”

While this priority system helps to ensure that the most critical cases get seen to first, underfunded help services mean others go without. If you don’t fit into this flowchart, the government can’t help you until everyone else has found a home.

“So because I have no mental problems, because I have no drug problems and I have no kids, and I’m over 25 so I’m not a youth, I don’t drink alcohol – all these things work against me. They’re like, ‘You don’t need it as bad as someone who does have these problems’. So yeah, I’ve just got to wait it out." 

A year before Jeff became homeless, a National Partnership Agreement was stuck between the Victorian and federal governments to fight growing numbers of homelessness.

Since the National Partnership Agreement was enacted almost 10 years ago, total funding has increased from $28.6 million to $58.5 million. But while the Victorian Government spends more on homeless services, funding from the Commonwealth is making up less and less of that total. 

Just last year an inquiry into the effectiveness of the models of National Partnership Agreements showed that spending could not keep up with demand. 

As a result, there are many people like Jeff who slip through the cracks, not extreme enough to qualify for priority or often any assistance at all.

Community-run initiatives and private institutions pick up the slack, thanks to public donations and unpaid volunteers. People who suffer from chronic homelessness like Jeff come to know and rely on these informal networks, ad hoc lifelines for the long-term homeless. 

One of those is the Rev Greg Crowe of the Uniting Church in Malvern. The father of four, who lives with his family in the church house, has offered up his own home to those in need when all other options were exhausted.

He’s gained a lot of insight into the many factors that contribute to homelessness, and the difficulty of locating – let alone treating – any single cause.

 Some of the people he meets are like Jeff, left homeless from a cocktail of misfortune and Melbourne’s housing affordability crisis. But the people who come to him are often those who can’t hold a regular job due to mental health issues, and therefore need extra support to afford housing.

“There are other people that are homeless for a variety of reasons, it might be short-term homelessness, it might be long-term homelessness but it might be because they have been kicked out of home, or life’s taken a tragic twist, or it might be because their psychotic behaviours ... they can’t hold down a place," Greg says.

“And so I think there are some people ... who have said, ‘I don’t want live with anyone, it’s better for me to stay by myself’.” 

Having previously worked in Juvenile Justice, the minister has seen the journeys of many to extreme poverty. He says the path to homelessness isn’t as simple as not having wealth.

“Some of the stories that I’ve heard have been about people who can’t cope living in accommodation, aren’t able to sustain living in their own unit because of their chaotic behavior, their impulsive behavior, their lack of ability to be able to look after their funds," the minister says.

Some, perhaps because of brain injury or other issues, have their money controlled by State Trustees or a family member, and they resent that lack of control, that ability to make their own decisions. So even though they possibly could have afforded a small flat, they end up resorting to crime, he says.

This feeling of disenfranchisement defines chronic homelessness, he says. He has often leant a hand where he could, calling crisis centres and cheap privately owned housing for those who turn up at his door needing a room. But that is not always welcome.

One night, when a man knocked on the minister's door asking for help, all he could find was the Gatwick Hotel. 

“He says, 'There’s no way I’m going there ... I’d get beat up or something’," Greg says. The man told him "people walk up and down the corridor screaming at night, banging on your doors”.

The Gatwick was the most notorious privately owned housing in Melbourne. Now it has been sold and will be the home of another season of Channel Nine’s renovation show, The Block. 

The Andrews Government has pledged to relocate the tenants and, as part of a $2.7 billion investment in housing support, will be spending $20 million to upgrade the quality of other rooming houses around Victoria. But there's still not much for those at critical risk – those who ended up in accommodation like the Gatwick. 

And while $300,000 of that budget is for reopening an overnight "safe space" in the CBD for rough sleepers, it works alongside proposed laws to make sleeping on the street illegal.

I’d be happy with just a tiny little one-room place, you know what I mean? Somewhere to go and sleep each night. And, safe. Roof over my head, it’s warm, it’s dry.” – Jeff

Even if services are available and decently funded, their effectiveness relies on people knowing where and how to find them. 

It’s through tapping into this kind of underground network of community engagement that  homeless support publication The Big Issue finds most of its employees.

 Sam Clarke, a facilitator at the publication, says many of the people who come to them for help have been referred by other vendors.

“There are some that find out about us via homelessness service expos like Homeless Connect. We have found that word of mouth has been the most effective avenues of people seeking us out to sell the magazine,” he says.

But jobs are limited by council regulations about where they can sell the magazine, and many people looking for work – including Jeff – are turned away.

At the conclusion of the 2016 inquiry into the National Partnership Agreement on homelessness came a warning that the system for dealing with the homeless might become arbitrary if funding continued to collapse.

Until this gap is filled, people like Jeff will continue to live day-to-day, begging strangers for a chance to sleep under a roof for just one night.

Amazingly, Jeff still chooses to consider himself lucky. 

“The way I see it is, no matter how bad you’ve got it, there’s someone who’s got it worse. I may be homeless and all that, but I mean, there’s people who are kids in the children’s hospital and they … aren’t even going to reach their teenage years," he says. 

“But it does make you start thinking, ‘what’s the point?’ you know what I mean? You know, when you try and you try and you try ... and you hit a brick wall,” he says. 

Jeff isn’t asking for much, just four walls to help get him back on his feet and a part of the community again.

“I’d be happy with just a tiny little one-room place, you know what I mean? Somewhere to go and sleep each night. And, safe. Roof over my head, it’s warm, it’s dry.”

One can only hope that when he finds it, it is worth the seven-year wait.

 * Not his real name.