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.
…
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.
Yes, I do think something is missing here. As cold as it sounds, it’s the single person responsibility to provide for itself. If you are 70+ years old and you have nothing to support your retirement, it’s mostly your fault.
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Hang on, I don’t think I get what you mean. So you see homelessness as a purely individual problem that we shouldn’t make efforts to discuss or address as a society? Maybe I’m not understanding your comment properly but that’s what it sounded like you were saying from my reading.
They’re saying these people lived through a boom time, and had the easiest life of anyone as things have now gotten far worse to the point most people can’t even afford a home with a lifetime of work whereas their generation could outright own a house in a few years on a single income.
They coasted through life on easy mode, fucked the country for the current generation to keep their greedy lifestyle, didn’t save, and now have to be bailed out by society for a problem they made when were not even capable of supporting ourselves and now have to carry them as well.
That is such a fucked up view of the world that I have a hard time accepting that it’s real (even though I know it’s quite common).