Brisbane’s housing affordability crisis has pushed an increasing number of the city’s most vulnerable residents into homelessness, with many forced to seek shelter in makeshift encampments in parks and public spaces. But as tent camps become more visible across the city, Brisbane officials have launched a contentious crackdown on rough sleepers, evicting homeless individuals from their improvised dwellings and seizing their meager possessions.
The human toll of these heavy-handed tactics became starkly apparent last week when Sasha Harmond, a homeless mother living in a tent in Orleigh Park, learned that her eight-year-old son Elijah was dying in the hospital. The very next day, as Sasha grappled with this devastating news, police and city workers descended on the encampment, ordering Sasha and her partner Matthew Schulz to vacate their tent in the pouring rain.
Though the couple complied and relocated to an adjacent park, city officials nonetheless seized and destroyed all of their belongings – including a memorial box containing Sasha’s last mementos of Elijah. “She bawled her eyes out,” Matthew recounted. “Anyone going through this in a mansion would struggle. We’re living rough. It’s rough enough.”
A Question of Priorities and Compassion
Aid organizations report that the clearance of the Orleigh Park encampment was not an isolated incident, but part of a broader pattern of homeless camp evictions as Brisbane’s housing crisis escalates. With the city now the second-most expensive in Australia, the homeless population has surged to over 10,000 individuals, many living in vehicles or tents.
Some observers argue that the crackdown on rough sleepers is more about shielding affluent residents from visible poverty than addressing any genuine security concerns. “We should be pissed off,” contends Cameron Parsell, a social sciences professor at the University of Queensland. “But rather than being pissed off by the people in the park, we should be pissed off about the lack of affordable housing.”
Paul Slater, president of a community group that distributed tents to the homeless, believes the council’s actions were likely prompted by complaints from wealthy neighbors. “The council literally threw out a tent that I’d given that they’d put up the day before,” he noted. “I’d given them a brand new tent. [The council] threw it in the garbage”.
Dispersing Encampments Raises Safety Risks
For all the rhetoric about addressing crime and antisocial behavior, service providers caution that the crackdown on homeless camps may actually undermine the safety of rough sleepers, who are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
Bevan, 52, who became homeless last year, purposely avoided encampments and slept alone under a bridge to minimize his visibility. But this isolation left him vulnerable to repeated assaults, including being robbed of his blanket at knifepoint. “I felt it was best just to give them up,” he explained. “It’s better than dying.”
Dispersing and scattering rough sleepers may reduce their visibility, but it eliminates the relative safety and solidarity found in encampments. “Safety for people who are sleeping in parks or in tents is to get them out of that situation, into housing,” stresses Lesley Leece, CEO of a local homeless aid organization.
A Deepening Crisis With No Easy Answers
With nearly 48,000 households on Queensland’s social housing waitlist and an average wait time of two and a half years, there are no quick solutions to Brisbane’s homelessness emergency. But advocates argue that punitive camp clearances and property seizures only serve to further traumatize and destabilize the city’s most vulnerable residents.
For Sasha and Matthew, evicted from their tent the day their young son passed away, the crackdown added unimaginable cruelty to an already unbearable loss. “It’s spiteful, deliberate,” Matthew said of the destruction of their few cherished belongings. “I don’t know whether it’s to set an example or whether it’s scare tactics.”
As Brisbane grapples with a worsening housing affordability crisis, the city’s response to homelessness has become a referendum on its priorities and compassion. Will officials continue to criminalize and displace rough sleepers in the name of public order, or will they treat homelessness as a humanitarian emergency demanding an urgent and empathetic response? The lives of the city’s most marginalized residents hang in the balance.
