Evicted Hobart renter now sleeping in a tent amid housing crisis

A Hobart woman the ABC is identifying only as Effie, not her real name, has been living in a tent in southern Tasmanian bushland with her dog since being evicted and failing to secure a new rental, the ABC reported on Monday, as the state’s only dedicated rough-sleeper outreach service warns it is stretched beyond what it can manage.

Effie told the ABC she applied for rentals up the east coast, in Queenstown and in the north of the state without success. Emergency accommodation proved hard to find because she has a dog, so she pitched a tent instead. A passer-by who spotted her alerted Street 2 Home, the Salvation Army-run outreach team that now visits her regularly. “I was unsuccessful for every house that I applied for,” she told the ABC. She said her dog, Gus, keeps her warm at night and that the arrangement is manageable. Her search played out against the rental squeeze pushing up rents across Hobart’s suburbs.

Why it matters

Street 2 Home is the only program in southern Tasmania that actively goes looking for people sleeping rough, checks whether they need help and connects them to services, rather than waiting for them to come forward. Its three-person team is already at capacity. Program lead Chris Allen told the ABC the service is now fielding daily calls, where it once went long stretches without any, and that the flow of people becoming homeless is outpacing the flow of people being housed. He said most people sleeping rough do not know how to find help online, which makes an outreach team that physically looks for them hard to substitute. The service’s reach has also been shrinking rather than growing: its operations in the state’s north closed in September 2025, and its north-west operations closed in June 2026, both for lack of funding.

The numbers

The ABC reported that roughly 2,500 people are experiencing homelessness in southern Tasmania. Homelessness among Tasmanians climbed 45 per cent between 2016 and 2021. Of Tasmanians who first came to a specialist homelessness service in 2022-23, 944 were sleeping rough at the time, and 74 per cent of that group had slept rough before. Separately, the state’s housing waitlist had stretched to about 1.7 years as of August 2026, and priority public housing applicants can still wait up to two years. Professor Catherine Robinson, director of Homelessness Australia and a co-author of a University of Tasmania report on the issue, told the ABC that outreach offers a human connection that online-only services cannot replace, calling it critical, and that trust built with an outreach worker can be the turning point that gets someone to seek help earlier.

What’s next

The University of Tasmania report Professor Robinson co-authored pointed to insufficient affordable housing, a shortage of homeless accommodation and unmet health needs among the main drivers behind the rise in rough sleeping, and recommended better resourcing, more shelter capacity and closer links between health care and homelessness services. None of those fixes are in place yet, and Street 2 Home’s own footprint is contracting rather than expanding while demand grows. For Hobart’s rental market, Effie’s case is a visible marker of a tighter underlying trend: a near two-year wait for public housing and a 45 per cent rise in homelessness point to a private rental supply that is not absorbing people who lose a lease, pushing more of that pressure onto crisis and outreach services that are themselves running short of funding.