www.silverguide.site –

Lincoln Curtis says if you ask him a simple question, you get a simple answer.

Why is he homeless? There aren’t enough houses, he says. What does he need? A job. What is he doing about these things? Waiting for one, looking for the other.

“I just got on the social housing waitlist two months ago,” he says. “They’ve told me I will have to wait five to seven years.”

The 23-year-old has worked the mines, then carnivals, travelling around. Now he’s in Wagga Wagga looking for a home and a way to pay for it.

Lincoln is standing with his friend John Bryce in one of the regional city’s biggest homeless encampments. Last Saturday, a newborn baby – a twin – died here, after their mother gave birth in a tent by the river. She had been living there for months, taking fresh water from the apartment block next-door to drink and bathe, walking 10 minutes down the river to go to the toilet.

Lincoln didn’t know the woman who lost her baby – members of the camps stick to their own crews – and he doesn’t really want to talk about her.

But he whispered a few words quickly before he looked away.

“If she had had a house, she would have had more support,” he says. “Apparently, she didn’t even know she had twins coming.”

The family in the tent had been known to the department of housing for years, though Homes NSW won’t say if they ever had temporary or fixed accommodation. Tucked along riverbeds, in free campsites, across parks, in tents and caravans, are Australians living through the crunch of the housing crisis.

They’re single mothers with five kids, they’re aged care nurses who can’t afford a private rental, cleaners in the same position. Some, the grey nomads, don’t want a home, they see themselves as travellers, but the majority, like Lincoln, do and can’t get one.

Lincoln gave up his dog, to a family with a young girl, to get a room at St Vincent de Paul’s temporary accommodation. But John won’t – and because of that, he’s stuck. He’s been on the waiting list for seven years.

John has been living in the encampment at Wilks Park for more than a year. Before that, he was in a swag on the river. The council have tried to evict him several times for overstaying the 24-day camping period, he says.

“Where else am I supposed to go?” John says.

“Unfortunately, I can’t get anywhere to live, the department of housing walked through here. I’ve got two big dogs. They’re not going to give me somewhere, she’s looking at me going, ah, yep, no way.”

Over the past five years, the community has watched as the encampments have ballooned. But Wagga is not unique.

Just not enough homes

The data on rough sleeping in regional areas shows it is increasing, in higher per-capita rates than the cities, says Michael Fotheringham from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

“If you look at sort of the geography of homelessness in Australia, we see more people are homeless in our capital cities than in regional areas in total,” he says. “But per capita in remote and regional areas the rate is higher.”

In urban areas, the trigger for homelessness is often eviction, while regional Australia just does not have enough housing, he says.

“The nature of homelessness is different in regional or rural areas,” Fotheringham says. “Overcrowding plays a big part, most strikingly in the Northern Territory. And the proportion of people living in camps and sleeping rough is a really big factor too.”

On top of this, services are struggling. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show services around New South Wales served 67,824 clients in the 2024-25 financial year, with the number of people being turned away rising to 59 a day on average, up from 57 last year. Only 36% of clients needing short-term or emergency housing were actually provided with it.

Damien Adams is the manager of Edel Quinn – one of the two emergency accommodation shelters in Wagga run by St Vincent de Paul.

He reels off the stats – they have 16 rooms (always full), send about 100 meals to encampments each week, helped 234 people in the last financial year, and support 32 rough sleepers roughly each week. The demand, he says, is unrelenting.

“Each week we will support the clients to go and apply for places, rentals and shared accommodations, anything we can afford to do, caravan parks,” Adams says.

With only 16 beds, the people staying in the temporary accommodation, like Lincoln, have to keep their spots by applying for places. This can be hard, Adams says – it’s not easy jumping through the hoops, filling out forms, getting to inspections on time.

“It’s a historical thing. They probably had trouble in the past and now have no trust in the system.”

Priced out

The biggest challenge though is not service burnout, Adams says, but rents.

“The people we work with are on government payments, so they’re on the jobseeker or on the disability support pension, so $736 at the lowest point. Now the lowest rent in Wagga today is $380 a week. So that prices them out of the market completely.”

Last week, Anglicare Australia’s rental affordability snapshot showed people on the lowest incomes have no access to the private rental market, with just one rental nationwide affordable for a person on jobseeker. A full-time minimum wage worker could afford just 0.5% of listings.

In the Riverina region, in south-western NSW, the picture is dire. None of the listings were affordable to a person on jobseeker, and less than 2% were affordable for an adult on the minimum wage.

The report found social housing applicants in the region faced waits ranging from five to 10 years, with longer delays in high-demand centres like Wagga. Two-bedroom options in the town often had a wait of a decade, with smaller dwellings even harder to get.

Julie, who did not want her last name used, is standing next to her caravan in Oura Beach, about 20 minutes out of Wagga.

• Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads

Rugged up, the 45-year-old has a gentle face and speaks softly. Four years ago she had a mortgage and a full-time job in security. But through her work she developed PTSD and a shoulder injury. She can’t work full-time any more. She is on the disability support pension and in 2023 joined the social housing waitlist.

“Six months after I went through putting in the forms and all that stuff, they said that because I have too many medical issues, they would not provide me with housing,” she says.

“I’ve got panic disorder. Because I used to be a security guard, I have PTSD. And [my doctor] said I need to be near a hospital.”

Julie says the rejection letter from Homes NSW stated that she is unable to “live independently without supports”. Unable to bring herself to apply again, she has been living alone in her caravan in the park for three years now. She’s just accessed the last of her super, $45,000, to buy a caravan to live in. But she would really love a proper home.

“They’re knocking people back on the smallest of things,” she says.

The week before the newborn died, a television network ran a segment in which locals claimed Oura Beach had been overrun, was dirty with needles, and had become unsafe. Julie says since then the camp had been targeted, with cars coming in at night to harass them.

“People just don’t want to see homeless people,” she says.

Across Australia, some councils are abandoning their “welfare first” approach to rough sleeping, instead seizing tents and breaking up camps.

But other communities are pushing back – they want something done. On Tuesday night in the centre of Wagga, about 40 people gathered to discuss what could be done.

On butcher’s paper, they wrote solutions that could happen immediately – fresh drinking water, 24-hour toilets, food vouchers. And other ideas about big system changes – more social housing, less Airbnbs and changing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. They want to see broad action – from all levels of government.

The NSW premier, Chris Minns, on Friday announced a “cross-agency group” that would bring together service providers, councils, police and the state government to help rough sleepers to access “more permanent forms of housing”.

“The priority is to ensure that all rough sleepers are not only moved on, but moved forward into safer, stable housing,” the statement read.

Dominique Rowe, the CEO of Homelessness NSW, says if we sleepwalk past this tragedy the number of people sleeping rough will only grow.

“Without a significant and sustained commitment to social housing, affordable housing, and properly funded homelessness services, we will continue to see more encampments, more people sleeping rough, and more tragedies.”

Australia has the ability to end rough sleeping – it just needs the will, she says.

“People should not be living in a tent without access to clean water in one of the wealthiest nations on Earth,” Rowe says.

“We have the resources and the knowledge to end homelessness. What we’ve lacked is the political will and urgency to treat this as the humanitarian crisis it is.”