On the 14 December 2024, housing advocates and people experiencing homelessness occupied three adjoining empty properties in Brunswick, an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Australia, which have cumulatively been empty for almost 25 years.
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Government reforms since colonisation have created a landscape where housing in Australia is now treated as a commodity rather than a basic necessity for living. When the area now known as Brunswick was first colonised and the land privatised, only 1 out of the 10 allotments sold for speculation at a Sydney auction was actually lived on by the purchaser, a legacy that continues today.
In 2023, nearly 100,000 homes in metropolitan Melbourne, or 5.2% of all dwellings, were found to be either empty or underused. This number exceeds the 48,620 households currently on the Victorian social housing wait-list, suggesting vacant homes could house everyone on the list twice over.
With 540,000 rental properties in Melbourne, utilising vacant homes would increase rental stock by nearly 20%. The number of vacant homes also equals more than two and a half years’ worth of new construction, based on the annual average of 37,000 new homes built.
This action is not without historical precedent. Dr. Iain McIntyre, Historian and research fellow at The University of Melbourne has written extensively on the historical role of squatting in the housing crisis following the end of World War 2. According to Iain, squatters “had the most impact in Victoria where three days after the house in Hawthorn was squatted the Premier announced that the state government would introduce its own legislation to give councils and municipal shires the power to install tenants in disused houses, with the state government to guarantee the payment of rent”.