Smith St, Brunswick St: homelessness in Fitzroy and Collingwood rising

Drug dealers don’t even bother to hide their seedy crime as traders in this hipster suburb say they have had enough.

At a street corner on Fitzroy’s Smith St, a man deals drugs to multiple homeless people during the course of a 10-minute conversation.

“It’s just weed,” Stefan, which is not his real name, tells Leader.

“It’s not the stuff that sends you crazy, like what they're on over there” he says, pointing to a group of people over the road who he in the early stages of an ice high.

Less than 20m from the drug users, young families and teenagers, some of whom glance back out of curiosity, line up outside popular ice cream chain Messina Gelato.

Earlier in day, Leader took a video of a pair of men exchanging a significant quantity of what appears to be heroin outside St Mark’s Church in Fitzroy — an iconic 170-year-old bluestone building surrounded by some of the city’s most expensive property.

Stefan says he spends time on Smith St because it’s “party central” all day and every day, but local traders are becoming increasingly fed up with the brazenness of the public use and exchange of hard-core amphetamines and the attendant rise in violent behaviour.

“Begging, and the accosting of patrons and passers by is basically ever-present,” Roman Leopoldseder, who owns Brunswick St’s Labour in Vain Hotel, tells Leader.

Roman, who has lived in Fitzroy for 40 years and owned Labour in Vain for 18, says Brunswick St is beginning to resemble the 1970s once more, when the place was a “dump”.

“Anti-social behaviour is definitely on the rise. Almost everyday something untoward is happening,” he says.

“Either the police are significantly under-resourced or they don’t care.”

Down the road at La Case Pizza, a smashed side window from a robbery during the night awaited the owners on Wednesday morning.

“I don’t want to speak to you — everything is fine,” a manager in broken English tells Leader.

Rabina Bradley, chief executive of charity St Mary’s House of Welcome on Brunswick St, tells Leader the organisation was observing a worrying trend of new faces and “vulnerable” rough sleepers with severe mental health issues.

“We’ve certainly observed a lot more vulnerability in those we’re helping,” Ms Bradley says.

“A concern is that we just don’t know so many of the people who are coming to us.”

She says the number of people congregating at the charity’s door in the morning, where they shower, receive a hot breakfast and clean underwear, had increased significantly since lockdowns ended.

Ms Bradley says Smith and Brunswick streets are popular areas for the homeless diaspora because of the access to established services.

In the course of 15 minutes, walking from Smith St to Brunswick St, Leader witnesses a drug deal, a grown man weeping with a bottle of red wine next to a support worker at St Mark’s Church, homeless bedding draped across the entrance of Fitzroy’s historic town hall, and a severely drug-affected man collapse outside St Mary’s House of Welcome.

Sabina Bickford, who has worked as a florist on Smith St for 10 years, says the scenes she observed daily were “hard to believe in a country like this”.

“It’s definitely getting worse. It’s pretty confronting,” Ms Bickford says.

Brunswick St retail worker Ashley, who did not want her surname printed, says it is “jarring” to see, but it is a sight Fitzroy locals were now used to.

A Victoria Police spokesperson says they will continue to work closely with the City of Yarra and homelessness support agencies.

“The community can expect to see a highly visible, robust police presence in the Fitzroy area,” they tell Leader.

“If an offence is detected, or a matter reported to police, we will respond and deal with the matter at hand.”