Desperate people in parts of NSW are languishing for more than a decade on the public and community housing waiting list, which has ballooned by 8,500 in the past 12 months.
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In the year to March 2025, the number of households holding out for a government-supported roof over their heads increased from 57,401 to 65,853 - a leap of about 15 per cent in just one year.
And many of those are waiting years for housing.
"People are often on the list for many years with no indication of when they might be offered a property," Tenants Union of NSW policy and advocacy manager Eloise Parrab said.
"We have heard from people living in cars, tents and staying with friends or family while they are waiting.
"If people are able to secure private rental while they wait, they are more often than not paying rents that are unaffordable and require them to make tough decisions on whether to buy food and medicine and heating and cooling their home," she said.
General applicants on the north coast and Northern Rivers are the worst off - they face a eight year median delay to get a home.
'Very high needs'
Housing Minister Rose Jackson said this was down to two recent destructive floods that hit the region.
"Cost of living is compounded by natural disasters in the north of NSW," Ms Jackson told ACM, the publisher of this masthead.
"So they had a pre-existing housing crisis and then they had two devastating floods - 2017 and 2022.
"That has caused really acute challenges there."
In the 2022 flood event alone, 4055 properties were declared uninhabitable, while another 10,849 were damaged.
Andrew Gordon, who works in real estate and is a Lismore City councillor, said his agency lost 140 homes from its rental list in one hit during the flood.
His business managed 120 rooms for the homeless.
"They're all gone because they were in the floodplain," he said. "Those people occupying those 120 rooms, I tell you where they are, in some other postcode or dead."
A few decades ago, local real estate agents might have had 50 or 60 empty homes available to rent, but those days were long gone, Mr Gordon said.
"That was back in the days when there was supply," he said.
Now, they were lucky to have three or four - and low wages meant making the rent could be tough.
"When you live in a town where the average wage is $40,000 and they're paying $500 to $600 a week for their houses, you'd have to believe they're struggling," he said.
Ms Jackson said the government was throwing resources at the problem, including repurposing disused nursing homes for short-term accommodation and building new homes as quickly as possible.
"We're playing catch-up, but that area is absolutely on our radar as very high needs."
The amount of time people spend on the list varies across different parts of the state.
The next worst area is the Illawarra and Shoalhaven where the median wait is nearly three years.
While overall median wait times for general applicants have decreased from 24 months to 15 in the past year, that's increased slightly for priority households - from 3.4 months to nearly four.
"Priority" applicants are those with complex or urgent needs, who may be homeless, victims of abuse, domestic violence or rape, living with a disability, or existing in overcrowded or dangerous conditions.
But even general applicants are in fairly dire circumstances, including poverty and inability to afford - or find - private rentals.
And the issue is not confined to NSW. In February, the social housing waiting list surged to a record level of almost 64,000 in Victoria.
Not just a 'poor people problem'
Despite a cost of living-focused federal election, the major parties' policies were aimed primarily at middle Australia.
Community housing provider Home in Place, which manages about 8000 properties across Australia and New Zealand, said there was a "perfect storm" of increasing population, low vacancy rates and high rents, leading to low affordability and availability.
"You're inevitably going to see a tilt towards more people seeking subsidised housing of one form or another - and the grim reality is that we just don't have anywhere near enough of it, basically, because governments have stopped investing in it properly about 30 years ago," spokesman Martin Kennedy said.
"What you are seeing on the ground is that this is a problem that is really working its way up the income distribution pretty rapidly," he said.
"This is not just a poor people problem anymore, if I can put it that way. I think probably all of us now know people in our own lives who are struggling to find somewhere suitable that they can actually afford."
New faces of homelessness
Living costs rose again in the 2025 March quarter, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), but they rose most for people trying to survive on government benefits.
Mr Kennedy said many people who were trying but failing to pay rent or find a place to live aren't even eligible for social housing, which includes government-owned properties, those run by community organisations and those managed by the Aboriginal Housing Office.
We don't ration any other form of social assistance like this. We don't say, 'Well, sorry Mr Jones, technically you're eligible for a healthcare card, but we've run out, so you're gonna have to wait until somebody dies or gives up theirs voluntarily so we can give it to you'.
- Martin Kennedy, spokesman, Home in Place
"The new faces of homelessness, people that you would never expect - and who themselves would never in a million years have expected - would find themselves in that sort of situation."
This involved sleeping on friends' couches or sleeping in cars and then going to work, or being forced long after retirement age to continue working just to keep a roof over their heads, he said.
"We're talking about crazy stuff where you've got people who've got full-time jobs, up to and including frontline emergency services workers, who are staring down the barrel of homelessness," Mr Kennedy said.
"We're on fast forward to some kind of almost neo feudal situation where you've got [a] large and growing share of the population basically paying half their income to live in somebody else's house."
The NSW housing minister Rose Jackson said the state-wide social housing waiting list had ballooned because of the cost of living crisis.
"The demand side of the social housing waitlist is purely driven by affordability in the private market - people can't afford private rentals, in particular; they turn to social housing, that's what the safety net is there for," she said.
"We've seen stats [showing] people who have jobs needing homelessness support. That is all pressure on social housing, so, yeah, we are well aware of the fact that the demand is increasing significantly."
But the growing waiting list didn't tell the whole story, according to national campaign group Everybody's Home.
Hundreds of thousands of households across the country were ineligible for government-supported accommodation but nonetheless in extreme stress as rents vastly outpaced wages and Centrelink payments, campaign spokeswoman Maiy Azize said.
Everybody's Home is calling for 940,000 new social housing properties to be built over the next two decades to address the crisis, as well as rent increase limits like those in the ACT.
