The figures show tertiary students represent nearly 10 per cent of all homeless Australians. "That's phenomenal really," said Kate Colvin, deputy chief executive of the Council to Homeless Persons. "It’s almost impossible for students on low incomes to afford housing, and that’s why we’re seeing increased homelessness of university and TAFE students." Mr Mitchell said he was struck by "a really unlucky set of circumstances" when his sharehouse lease ended late in 2016. Though he had a steady job as a chef, his employer was struggling with the bills and he didn't have sufficient savings for a new bond. He knew some ex-squatters and was attracted by the prospect of not paying a landlord each month. "I spent a few hours driving around the nearby neighbourhood to see letterboxes overflowing or bins that were not being put out on bin night," Mr Mitchell said. "I found a place that was abandoned: the back door was open; it looked like nobody had lived there for a long time;

everything was disconnected; there were maggots in the fridge." Friends attest they helped Mr Mitchell to clean and fix up the Yarraville property. He told the neighbours he was a distant relative of the owner, but that story didn't hold water forever, and one day he returned to find the police had thrown his belongings on to the street. After that he spent a few weeks in his car or on friends' couches, "bouncing around other people’s places ... staying wherever I could".

That type of itinerant living is familiar to housing experts, who stress that homelessness does not just include people sleeping rough on the street but people in all sorts of compromised housing circumstances. The census showed 6771 tertiary students were homeless because they were in "severely overcrowded" dwellings, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines as a house that needs four or more extra bedrooms to properly accommodate its inhabitants. “Hopping from couch to couch or living in severely overcrowded apartments without any privacy or space to study and socialise is harmful and makes it impossible to achieve your full potential,” said Jenny Smith, chair of Homelessness Australia. "Their homelessness is so often hidden from view but is every bit as damaging." Luke Kenton, a 20-year-old policy, philosophy and economics student at the Australian National University, went from a comfortable college dorm to sleeping on couches in a matter of weeks. Having decided to leave college, he found it impossible to secure a sharehouse lease in Canberra, despite making an estimated 30-plus applications and having steady work in a politician's office. In a two-month period, Mr Kenton lived in four locations - including couches and a spare bed with a friend's family - while trying to start the university year.

"If you’re living on a couch you can't really put anything away anywhere," he said. "You don’t really have any of your own space to study or work. You have to be the first person awake every day and the last person to go to sleep. It definitely affected my study to an extent. It just made me exhausted." Ms Colvin said the fundamental problem was a lack of affordable housing in the major centres - a problem that had not been addressed by apartment booms in Sydney and Melbourne. She also called for an increase in the Commonwealth Rent Assistance payment which, for a single person sharing a house, is capped at $89.87 a fortnight and has not kept pace with skyrocketing rents. Advocates will repeat their calls for action on Wednesday, which is Youth Homelessness Day. The Turnbull government is still negotiating its revised National Housing and Homelessness Agreement with the states in a bid to make the scheme more accountable. The initiative, which was set up under Labor, had failed to meet most of its goals, including increases in supply and reductions in the number of people in rental stress. Mr Kenton found a permanent place to live in the Canberra suburb of Hackett, while Mr Mitchell found a room without a bond in his old stomping ground of Footscray. Both young men said they got "incredibly lucky", and while their studies may have been jeopardised for a period, they are now back on track.