As an Adelaide resume writer, I’m most interested in the state of the national and local economy. This story is sourced from the ABC. I’ve edited it for length.
When you’ve got single mothers sleeping in tents in caravan parks, you know something is very wrong.
Meagan, 36, has been paying $300 a week to stay at the West Beach Caravan Park.
“I’ve always rented privately, I’ve never been in the public housing list [before],” she said.
South Australia has about 16,000 people on the public housing waitlist with about 3,600 of those on the priority one list.
The average wait time for category one cases in SA is about seven months.
This makes a laughing stock of the unemployment figures. In SA, thousands of people have dropped out of the workforce for one reason or another and are therefore not counted as unemployed.
Meagan is a single mum who receives a disability payment. She has applied for more than 40 properties around Adelaide’s western suburbs, since her previous lease was not renewed.
“I never, ever thought I would be in this situation,” she said.
Meagan said it had been “absolutely horrible” staying in a tent, particularly during Adelaide’s recent storms.
“I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning and I sat in the kitchen, because they’ve got a nice kitchen here,” she said.
“There were other couples sleeping on the floor of the kitchen so I can imagine how they were feeling, because I’ve got an alright tent but there’s other people in there that are living in nothing, like tiny little things.”
Meagan said there were others in the caravan park in the same situation as her, and she had also seen groups of people sleeping rough in the area.
“The situation is horrible,” she said.
“I guess I’m just lucky to be in a caravan park and not on the side of the road in a tent.”
Here is some background on the homelessness situation in SA: