No home. No roof overhead. That’s a hell of a new and unwanted experience. Ignore what the YouTube Influencers say, you never sleep well in a car, surrounded by your worldly goods stuffed into a couple of bags, especially when you are old and not street smart.
But that is not the beginning, or even the end, of the story or the unfolding journey. Homelessness rarely just happens out of the blue like a capricious stealth strike from a malevolent Universe, there are always lead in signs, always indicators subtle or otherwise, always portents of the possibility of domicile discardation. I felt it coming in so many ways. The writing of that can wait for another time.
Right now, as I write this, within smell of my 72nd birthday, my existence is tagged by the number ****#. That is the keypad entry number to both the secure facility and the monk’s cell sized room I sleep in. All the people who live here live under a protective veil, and necessarily so, for many are escaping domestic violence, many are escaping the ravages of their own addictions, and others like me are finding temporary respite from the unrelenting internal pressure caused by the brutality of childhood abuse experiences and the unexpected removal of secure accommodation.
This environment, this institutionalised environment, reminds me so much of the Catholic Orphanage I grew up in. Not in the sense that it is rife with the abuse that the Orphanage was, for it is not, but rather because it is a very controlled environment. Everything happens under the gaze, for safety reasons, of CCTV, so privacy becomes a removed item. It is like living in a fishbowl where the observation and monitoring is as needed as the need to breathe is needed, for some of the people who temporarily live here have endured life experiences that would crush the souls out of smarmy judgemental types, and it is understandable if, on occasion, as I’ve been told, a touch of psychosis can reign.
Of course, I can simply leave anytime I like, it is not a prison. It is a Transitional Housing Facility offered up by the Qld Dept of Housing. It sits on the continuum between emergency accommodation at the sharp end, which I was afforded for a period, and the ultimate aim of a place of one’s own in the world of Social Housing.
This facility houses people from many backgrounds. There are women here escaping domestic violence, and there are women here who were divorce-dudded into totally unexpected penury and homelessness, and there are men here who have experienced the same. There are others, like me, with old age pensioner incomes, who were tossed out of once secure accommodation into the now unaffordable private rental market by property owners simply exercising their right to sell. There are people here with alcohol and other drug addictions, and some are quite ravaged by those addictions. Some are ex-prisoners on transition back into the world. Others here have fallen through the cracks in our mental health systems. Some of the people here are probably just like you, the reader, pretty normal folks, the only difference between them and you is that a perfect storm of unwanted experiences hit some of them at the perfectly wrong time. All that I am saying here is that judgement is an arsehole’s game and thankfully not everybody judges.
Homelessness has a feeling all of it’s own. It is a de-tethering from the comfort of sense of place, a rapid de-coupling from a personal environment carefully constructed with objects placed just so. The photos of the kids on that wall, that favourite coffee spot on the verandah, the very unscrutinised nature of just being, just being in your own chosen environment. All of that goes out the window and you are left holding the material aspects of your life in the couple of bags that each hand can hold. It becomes a brutal winnowing out process that dumps away what was once thought necessary.
I was quite surprised by the getting rid of things process, because there was nowhere to store everything. I’m a minimalist, even so, there was some amazement at the number of objects that crawled out of the woodwork when I was emptying out my place. Some things are now in plastic crates under a friend’s house. Some things went to Op Shops, some things were given away, some things couldn’t even be given away and ended up at the dump. Humiliating. The end of some treasured things.
Homelessness also contains many surprises that come from the far left of the left of left field. Within three days of landing on the street I was contacted by an Australia-based Survivor Advocate who stepped into my despairing mind space and who, with solid tangible help, enabled the creation of a viable pathway back to eventual independence. He knows who he is, I know who he is, and I am grateful.
So, I am in transition, on the path from where I was to where I will next be, with no great moans coming along for the ride. Nothing about the experience of being homeless compares in magnitude to my childhood abuse experiences, doesn’t come remotely close, and that fact helps me to maintain some perspective on what I am currently going through. Yes, being homeless is beyond difficult, it is hard, very unnerving, and it would be an empty glossing-up if I tried to pretend otherwise, but take it from me, there are far worse things than that in life. The sad thing is that any of these things exist at all.
Homelessness is eminently visible in our society and yet remains strangely unseen and seriously untackled. Yes, it affects the older poor like me, and the younger poor, but it also affects the working poor, and the lower middle class who never dreamed it could happen to them. It affects people who cannot care for themselves and it affects people who can. Homelessness holds up a mirror to the greed-based and profit from real estate at any cost nature of the society that we all live in.
And … I guess there are always personal lessons contained within the homeless experience, and I am finding some. The autistic traits I carry, which may be natural to me or may have been induced by childhood abuse and trauma, mean that I have an ingrained penchant for wanting to be invisible and unnoticed, and since one of the traits I carry is a low level of voluntary social interaction skills (hermitsville) … well … homelessness seems to grandly hit all of those buttons all at once because the invisibility of homelessness envelops like a cloak. Even I can see that I need to learn to become a bit more social, and a bit more visible, like, real quick.
So there you go … I see no particular value in complaining and blaming all and sundry on any issue. I write about how an experience feels, and this has been about homelessness and how it feels, to me. It strips artifice away, and it leaves you standing naked in the real.
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We cannot house our people. We cannot build and sell an acceptable shitty car, or electrics, or white goods, or shirts, but, we are signed up for nuclear weaponry when we could not panel beat the dents, lacking a skills base and with shortages in every area of thinking, doing, succeeding, What is wrong? Where are we going bad in our basics?
In many ways from a long time ago, I know how you feel. I was homeless for a while, trying to figure out how to get into housing. I ended up using a flatmates website which got me one place, then another and then another until I finally got lucky and got into renting my own place. After several years, I finally eventually came good. I believe this is luck more than anything else, and hard work as I’m still on the younger side. In my job, I have found that some people give an address which has ended up being a park. There is no residence, but the ‘address’ is acceptable for many different aspects of life that needs an address.
I hope you find something stable to live in. Everyone deserves shelter and stability. It’s wrong how many people are in a similar situation
Goes back generations or decades with both ALP & LNP adopting imported US policies whether described as neo-liberal or social-Darwinist, that encourages empathy bypass.
Especially apparent with the rise of Howard and LNP targeting oldies and boomers, with various ‘subsidies’ for their house prices/values, while negating threats to the latter e.g. crimping or not investing in social/public housing and flexible zoning.
Thank you for sharing your story…. Quite aside from the political commentary, your road to becoming more social is well under way!
Your acceptance of a shitty situation is humbling, you are right on the money, analysing your physical presence in the context of “downsizing” and discarding parts of your life… I hope you took photos of all those treasures, store it up in the clouds.
Wishing you all the best
Phil Pryor:
Oh, but we can. We just choose not to. It’s a choice which I am sure will repeat on us. Badly!
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,
I provided you with a report of 2 illegal debt schemes. administered by Services Australia. On all 3 occasions, your office refused to take action.
The schemes are as follows.
1- Fake review scheme. Serivces Australia did not conduct a formal review I applied for 2 years ago. instead, they sent me an objection letter and used it to force me into significant debts.
#2. Family Assistance office automatically issue debt notices for 100% of rent assistance payments if a parent was not eligible for its FTB-dependent supplement (15%). They sent me 2 debt notices (over $4000) made under this scheme. The second time was after I reported the abuse to the Prime Minister office and ACOSS.
Both Services Australia and ACOSS refused to acknowledge or publish the rules of the schemes. Yet they advised me to pay off the debts or apply to AAT.
How Services Australia decide whether to conduct a formal review or replace it with an objection letter? Do Services Australia use these schemes on Aboriginal/Indigenous people? What about elderly people? What about people with mental health issues? People diagnosed with schizoprenia?
Anthony Albanese, you have to take action.
Arnd and others will be aware of a huge campaign to knacker, even kill, the CMFEU and any union side of the building equation. Perhaps wrongs, crimes, have occurred, but the vast majority of the evil comes from the huge building operators, their bumboys on councils, their methods of getting approvals, redevelopemt, financing and controlling the legalisms required, in which choking supply and driving up prices is key. If union activity is muzzled, political, financial and corporate controls will see limited supply, controlled releses, steady exploitation, all to the detriment of the little buyer and the impoverished renter. I have one family connection on the inside of committees, council approvals, state government machinations, developer plotting, etc. and the picture has never been good, fair, honest, clear. “He” worked for a while for Australia’s biggest in this game, but left in frustration at the illegalities he was expected to grease and apply. So, we cannot house our people…Incidentally, I saw a house completed in a few days in the USA, long ago, all studs, guns, boards, stucco, prefab, coated, done. While we use slow 19C methods of hand tailored time consuming “care” to achieve the results. So??
PP, twenty months ago the house next door was demolished, and a foundation slab for the new construction laid. Now, one year eight months later, the constructed duplex nears completion. The builder is a relatively well-known company but perhaps could change their name to Snail Constructions P/L. A single instance of a story replicated thousands-fold across the Aussie landscape…. e.g. downtown Lismore gets wiped out in Feb 2022 and nearly three years later dispossessed residents still await rehousing, similar stories in bushfire zones. Something pathologically errant in this approach to built structures in this country.
As in so many other matters, we could learn from the Chinese.
Quite right Phil.
The building industry is a “concrete jungle” as I saw it described yesterday.
In such an outlaw industry workers need a strong, even ruthless union just to survive.
The govt. response to allegations of union criminality should have been an investigation of the entire industry.
Labor has become liberal-lite.
Great straight-up article, thanks Keith. Without anything like the background circumstances you speak of, I too have been on the edge a few times. It brings a perspective to reality.
Never mind the CFMEU, since the days of privatization of public services and assets, it’s a tango with politicians, banks, land barons and some developer corporations. There are many ways the homelessness / housing situation could be practically addressed, but the tangoers don’t want to as they have too much to lose, and too much dirt on one another.
In all my years in construction, and more than 20 as an independent troubleshooter and forensic contracts specialist, the majority of frauds (and there are many for huge sums) have been committed by white collar folk, mainly in government / public service. And although cases mainly get settled on a project by project basis, the offending individuals rarely, if ever face charges, and maintain their employment to possibly go on and be available to repeat corruption and crimes.
This article from New Matilda CFMEU vs BANKS, makes a valid point about the hypocrisy and protection system at play.
It’s no wonder Albo’s ALP has been obscure on how they’re gunna achieve 1 million homes in 5 years.
It makes me so fucking angry.I can’t begin to imagine how you’ve put up with all the shit you’ve been through Keith,I remember your other stories,and we know there are plenty of others out there.We’re little different to the yanks,and we’re going down the same shithole.Neoliberal trickle down ,my arse,they’re pissing down our backs at the same time talking out of both sides of their mouths.So called democracies have been well and truly captured by voodoo economics that serve nobody but the filthy rich and global corporations.Fuck them all.Especially our current weak as piss government.
Canguro,
Ummm, I don’t think we should be taking too many leaves from the Chinese book on construction, given the lack of basic safety for workers and the questionable standards of both materials and the finished product.
Yes, things could be done quicker , cheaper and bettter than is the norm here, but baby and bathwater, remember.
Powerful yet tragic, Keith. A riveting read, on such a sad situation.
i have never been homeless I have been close but for the friends i have.
I live OS now purely because I cannot survive on the pension in australia. Its impossible without me getting a shitty job that allows me an extra $3-400 a fnt to live on. My pension would be totally exhausted on rent. I would need a car and who would lend me the money to buy something reliable? Let alone, who would give me a job. I am not advocating for a massive hike in the pension, but it would be appreciated. And thats before having a social life…….I know many friends on the pension who never venture beyond the front gate.
We got to stop delegating all social issues to the market. Its created havoc and kaos, lets not be insane and keep doing more of the same.
The government needs to grab the bull by the horns and build close in, not further and further out. Historical preservation is such a stupid 17th century notion that seems to put preserving old buildings in front of a decent society. Preserving a suburb’s character is a euphemism for let me enjoy my richness and P…Off. The quarter acre block is dead, long live a more inclusive housing stock.
If you follow all my postings you would see that there are a lot of things that can be done. Lots of others have give it a go with ideas too. Things should be done, can be done …….but wont be done. Lets all just dip into our super………that will end well…….everyone else wants to get a piece of the action.