This isn’t the retirement that Mary had dreamed of.
The former midwife spent years living on a cattle station with her husband on the north-western edge of Australia - outside her window, the vast and ruggedly beautiful Kimberley region.
Now, though, the frail 71-year-old spends most of her days and nights in her battered car. Her current view is the public toilet block of a Perth shopping centre.
Mary is not her real name. She does not want people she knows to find out she is living like this.
She is one of the roughly 122,000 people who are homeless in Australia on any given night, according to data from the country’s bureau of statistics.
A recent government report says that 40% of renters on low income are now at risk of joining that cohort.
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In recent years, record house prices, underinvestment in social housing, a general shortage of homes and drastically climbing rents, have left much of the nation’s growing population struggling to find a place to live.
As someone who works with the homeless it’s not as cut and dry as you would like to believe. Lately, within the past couple years or so, I’ve been working more and more with elderly homeless people who simply can no longer afford to live. So what happened? at one point they were fine. granted they were on a fixed income (this is key here) they got by. were able to pay rent, buy food, medical care, etc. But the problem is that fixed income. Sure you anticipate increases here and there but the thing is within the past couple years or so things have increased A LOT. Where I live “renovictions” are up 85% and many of these elderly are the victims of said renovictions. It’s such a common story at this point. they’ve lived in the same apartment for years, decades even, paying practically nothing and then the landlord comes in and evicts them for the purpose of renovating and increasing the rent exponentially for the next tenant.
So what happens when you’re on a fixed income, you’ve been paying the same low rent for years and years, and now you’re suddenly thrown into the current rental market? you sleep on a bench. And you can’t say to these people “well you should have planned better” it’s almost impossible to plan for your landlord suddenly deciding to change their mind and taking advantage of a situation. So why don’t they stay with family? a few do, many don’t because said family is also struggling or living in a one bedroom apartment themselves or even a studio and can’t take them in. Also the majority of the time if these elderly people are already renting chances are they don’t have familiy.
And these people aren’t addicts, they’re not crazy, they’re just old. And the sad factor of the matter is, and the media doesn’t report this, is that these people tend to commit suicide after awhile. Homeless deaths don’t get reported in the media cause…well…no one cares but the people who work with these people hear about it on a weekly basis. just last week an elderly woman who was homeless for 3 or 4 months that I worked with killed herself. it’s common now. I tend to try and make sure the elderly are doing alright mentally and emotionally cause they’re more prone to sucide than the others but, I mean, this is the world we live in now.