Gentrifictation vs Homelessness

 Does urban renewal displace marginalised people? 

Spoiler alert: nope. Homelessness wins.

This illustration was inspired by my recent trip to Melbourne and Adelaide. Visit almost any Western city and you’ll notice the same dissonance: modernity in the sky, besieged by decay on the ground. Walking around, it seemed like every nook and cranny had been christened by a vagrant’s sleeping bag.

Juxtaposed against my embarkation points of Tokyo and Singapore, the contrast feels sharper still.

It’s a fair generalisation that while Western cities promise inclusion, innovation, and sophistication, they fare worse than many Asian counterparts at the meat-and-potatoes government drudge of responding promptly to street-level disruption and filth.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t trying. Health and policing budgets have ballooned.

At the same time, social housing is a shrinking share of housing stock, and communities are not exactly clamouring to build more.

I think these trends are related.

When I was growing up in Adelaide, people with severe intellectual disabilities were housed at Minda Home, and the criminally insane were kept at Glenside. From the 1960s onward, revelations of abuse behind institutional walls, coupled with the growing belief that independent living was integral to human dignity, drove the transition toward community care.

The institutions emptied.

Where did the residents go?

Why, they went to my suburban street.

At various points during the day, I could hear one of them screaming from the government units on the next block.

The savings of deinstitutionalisation were false.

Sure, you no longer have to pay for big brick human holding pens. But now you have more police callouts, more people cycling through ERs and lockups, trashed houses, and pissed-off suburbanites who - thanks to rising property prices - now have something substantial at stake.

What surprises me is how rarely academic publications and welfare activism connect the dots between the overflow of high-needs residents into community settings and growing opposition to social housing.

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute notes that social housing developed a stigma as more mainstream families (like that of Labor PM Albanese) were deprioritised in favour of higher-needs residents, in a process called residualisation.

Meanwhile, mental health advocates such as Orygen describe a “missing middle” of people too unwell to live independently but not unwell enough for hospital.

Yet studies of deinstitutionalisation often assume the inevitability of community care while treating “prejudicial attitudes” toward social housing as an unexamined given.

Everyone stays in their lane.

Perhaps I’m looking back on Adelaide through rose-coloured glasses, but people once had little problem living alongside returned veterans, young families doing it tough, or the occasional single parent in public housing when they trusted the system to contain genuinely disruptive cases elsewhere.

An ugly truth goes mostly unspoken: today’s NIMBYs may not have a problem with public housing itself. They have a problem with the current mix of public housing residents.

Which leaves us with a diabolical three-body problem: a geographically stretched mental health system overflowing into a burdened police force and a social housing sector tied up managing existing stock, without the fiscal or political capital to build more.

If, as the popular refrain goes, housing is a human right, then perhaps “housing” has to include some form of institutional care - if only to free up space for the less disruptive unhoused.

Until then, the experiment continues, even though the results may already be in.

No matter how much we gentrify spaces, the homeless will reclaim them.

But we will keep building up because it’s too hard to build down.