Key Highlights :
With its glittering coastline and multimillion-dollar homes, Australia’s Northern Beaches is one of the country’s most sought-after postcodes. But the affluent suburb is also home to a growing population of rough sleepers, who are being pushed onto the streets by rising rental prices and low wages growth.
Sean Pearce, a 50-year-old former construction worker, never imagined he could be homeless. But after a shoulder injury put him out of work, he was unable to keep up with rental payments and was evicted from the Dee Why property he’d called his for 19 years.
“Those were the worst weeks of my life,” he concedes. Eventually, he managed to find basic shelter in the form of a second-hand van, but the ordeal has taken its toll. “Ever since then I’ve been suffering with depression and, yeah, tried to commit suicide a couple of times,” he says.
It’s a crisis hardly unique to the so-called insular peninsula. Low wages growth and an unprecedented increase in rental costs are squeezing more and more people out of the housing market everywhere. According to the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), levels of housing stress are at an all-time high, with 93 per cent of Australians dependent on Jobseeker and Youth Allowance suffering from it.
Rental vacancies are at historic lows of 1.47 per cent nationwide, amid low dwelling completions and surging migration. Put simply, there just aren’t enough homes to go around, even for people on moderate incomes.
NSW is expected to deliver just 180,000 new dwellings over the next five years, according to data sourced by the Sydney Morning Herald. Well short of its 314,000 target.
The state’s new premier, Chris Minns, promised to “rebalance” Sydney’s population growth by prioritising more residential development in the city’s east, near existing infrastructure and transport links. But developers looking to densify affluent areas like the Northern Beaches, Eastern Suburbs and Inner West appear to be facing a wall of “not in my backyard” (otherwise known as NIMBY) opposition to housing projects serving people on low incomes.
Just 100m from the car park where Sean Pearce lives in his van, a proposal for a new social housing development is being met by intense local resistance. The application to turn an ageing church and parking lot into a six storey mixed-use building aims “to increase the quality and quantity of affordable housing options available in Dee Why,” New Life Baptist Church says on its website. It promises to provide a range of dwellings that will service the needs of the region’s growing population in close proximity to retail and transport hubs.
But residents engaged during the approvals process and opposed to the development cite issues including traffic, noise, disruption caused by construction and loss of sunlight. Some also complain of potential “safety concerns” their prospective neighbours would bring.
“Having a boarding house in this already overcrowded residential street will impact the security of the locality,” according to one. “Having unknown (sic) come and stay here may increase the risk of theft, trespassing, privacy and also safety of residents on the street at night.”
Another critic warns a highly dense area of a single demographic “can potentially create a ghetto type environment”. Of 21 submissions tendered to the proposal, all but five were opposed.
As he waits in his van around the corner for his name to be called in the social housing lottery, Pearce acutely feels the judgement of his community. He cut himself off from friends and stopped going on Facebook, afraid of what they’ll think. “A lot of people think the homeless are automatically on drugs or drink. I don’t do any of that,” he says.
What he wants more than anything other than a roof over his head, is to have access to amenities like public toilets and a hot shower so that he and others living on the street can regain their dignity. “When you walk into Woollies and you feel like you stink and you feel like everyone’s looking at you ... If you can keep clean, that’s the bottom line,” he says.
The growing homelessness crisis in Australia’s affluent suburbs is a stark reminder of the need for more affordable housing options. But residents of some of these areas are obstructing the development of such projects, citing “safety concerns” and a fear of “ghetto type environments”. The reality is that without access to basic amenities and affordable housing, people like Sean Pearce are left with little choice but to survive on the streets.