Amid Gympie’s green hills, tents jut out from gullies and highway rest stops, pregnant women sleep in parks and the homeless keep lifesaving medication cool in Eskies.
This is just the visible fruit of a crisis coursing unseen through streets and homes of this regional city.
Ravaged by natural disaster and buffeted by shockwaves sent through the property market by the pandemic, Gympie exemplifies a housing crisis that is gripping Queensland.
“We’ve applied for 380 houses so far and we’ve been knocked back from everyone,” says a pregnant Marteaka Browne, who with Reg Marshall joined the ranks of the tent dwellers a month ago, after they were asked to leave their rental home. “There’s nowhere else in Gympie to go.”
The Queensland Council of Social Service chief executive, Aimee McVeigh, says the town is a “microcosm that illustrates Queensland’s housing crisis”.
“We’re seeing rents climb, particularly in regional Queensland, in ways that we haven’t seen before,” she says.
So as the premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, prepares to convene a housing summit next week, advocates such as McVeigh say places like Gympie require an emergency response.
They also warn that the summit will fail to resolve the crisis if it only produces short-term measures aimed at triaging the most egregious cases of misfortune.
‘How long is too long to have children in the car?’
The living room Melinda’s one-storey brick house that she shares with her husband and three boys has no couches and is adorned with Santa Clauses and reindeers.
Those figurines are a daily reminder of the family’s precarious living situation.
Christmas is about the time their lease will expire and Melinda’s family once again be thrown on the mercy of a housing market failing thousands just like her.
Melinda counts herself among the lucky. They were told to leave their last rented home in June. Application after application was knocked back before the family landed this rental at the 11th hour, just as they were on the brink of setting up a tent in a campground.
“More than the homelessness, the biggest thing was: does this affect my legal rights to keep my kids,” she says. “How long is too long to have children in the car before the government steps in and goes, ‘well actually you’re not taking care of the children’? I was thinking of which family members I could offload my children to.”
It was for their boys the family stretched Melinda’s husband’s salary as a truck driver and cut further into their budget to land their new rental.
She had also forfeited her last bond. It’s not as if she doesn’t know her rights – Melinda recently completed a law degree.
“But it’s really hard to barter with someone who holds your life in their hands,” she says. “No matter what, you have to keep your real estate agent happy.”
For others, it was easier to give up the once-ubiquitous Australian dream of a home and embrace a transitory life.
About five months ago Christine Barnes, 53, had to leave her home of almost four years on the outskirts of town after it was bought by developers. Despite having rented with the same real estate agent for 13 years, Barnes suddenly couldn’t find anything she could afford.
She retired after working as a cleaner and disability carer about five years ago due to back and neck issues. Now she gets by on a disability pension. Her sons “have their own lives to live” in Western Australia.
So Barnes bought a 1979 Viscount caravan and gave all her furniture to the Salvation Army.
“I told them, ‘who knows, I might need help later’,” she says.
Now Barnes flits between the highway rest stop just south of town and a car park by a duck pond where she can just about see her old home.
“I wouldn’t classify myself as homeless because I bought the caravan,” she says. “So at least I’ve got a roof over me head.”
When disaster strikes
In a grassed and lightly timbered gully beside the highway that runs through town, a family cooks meals above an open fire burning between an encampment of gazebos and tarps.
Gale Morgan, 68, wields the spatula as two little dogs watch on hungrily. A cat meows from inside a tent. Just before Morgan’s partner of 25 years died from cancer a decade ago, he told her to pursue their dream of driving around Australia. When she could no longer afford their rented home in Beerwah, that’s what she set out to do.
But Morgan only made it about an hour up the Bruce Highway. She had already sunk much of the money she had saved over her years working as a fly-in-fly-out traffic controller paying for expensive medication in a vain effort to save the man she loved.
“He was a hard worker and all that, he was very happy,” she says. “We couldn’t have asked for anything better [than] to be together.”
Morgan has now become “adopted grandma” to Marshall, 58, and 28-year-old Browne.
The couple don’t want to leave the town where Browne’s six kids live.
Until a few weeks ago, they’d been living in a house that Marshall and rented for 10 years. A new owner bought the house and asked him to leave. Marshall reckons new tenants are paying a lot more every week.
A diabetic, he now keeps his insulin in an Esky.
Community Action Inc provides emergency accommodation for at-risk youth and women escaping domestic violence.
Increasingly they are being forced to hand out tents and sleeping bags as part of “sleeping rough packs”.
The charity’s youth services manager, former real estate agent Murray Benton, traces Gympie’s crisis to a major highway upgrade that brought an influx of well-paid construction workers to town in 2020.
That same year Covid sparked a real estate boom as southerners flocked to the Sunshine State in record numbers and city dwellers looked for a tree change.
So Gympie was already under acute pressure when the Mary River burst its banks in two major floods in a matter of weeks earlier this year, disasters that drove many more from their homes.
Many other communities have been ravaged by natural disasters in recent years and much of the state is experiencing an unprecedented influx of internal migration, QCOSS’s chief executive says.
Vacancy rates, which dwindled to as low as 0.2% in Gympie this April, have hit record lows and rents have soared elsewhere too.
McVeigh says the crisis comes after decades of underinvestment in social housing by successive governments, both state and federal, and as a result of “policy settings that don’t deliver sustainable, affordable rentals”.
So while McVeigh says “really quick, short-term solutions” and crisis accommodation is needed, so too is a long-term plan of “real ambition”.
“I think it would be incredible to see a government that leads us toward a culture where housing is also considered to be a basic right,” she says.
She is calling on the government to set the goal of having a roof over the head of every Queenslander by 2032, including building at least 5,000 new social housing dwellings every year.
“Unless we have a clear commitment for the supply of more social housing in Queensland, this summit will be a failure,” she says.
• This article was amended on 18 October 2022. An earlier version said that Community Action Inc gives out 25 “sleeping rough packs” a month. This was based on supplied information the organisation later corrected. The actual figure is around four a month.
