Feud blows up on Adelaide street over hoarder home
Neighbours are raising the alarm over a hoarder who lives next door, as insane photos show her possessions spilling out of the house onto the front lawn.
Neighbours are raising the alarm over a hoarder who lives next door, as insane photos show her possessions spilling out of the house onto the front lawn.
Those who live near the woman’s house, located in a southern suburb of Adelaide, in South Australia, are demanding the council remove the rubbish.
There’s so much junk at this hoarder’s block that she has been forced to live in a caravan out the front of her home. And the front lawn is filled with rubbish. Presumably, the house itself is too.
One neighbour, Ray Lovell, told 7News that the sheer amount of junk strewn on the lawn posed a serious fire risk to houses nearby like his own.
“If there’s a fire in that house, how are they going to fight it? If the house next door catches fire, who is to blame?” he told the TV channel.
Hoarders’ homes also attracts rat and insect infestations, which can impact on houses nearby as well. Mould is also an issue in the house itself in cases of extreme hoarding.
The local council, the City of Onkaparinga Council, has set a deadline for the woman to clean up the home. Otherwise, they will forcibly do so.
“Once the deadline of the notice has passed, the council will inspect the land to determine if compliance has been forthcoming,” the council said.
She has until June 30 for the items to be removed.
“Should the matter not be resolved, we will undertake the required works, as we did in May 2023,” the council added.
The council referenced drastic steps they had to take last year, after receiving similar complaints about the state of the home.
Tragically, it’s been reported that the woman responsible for the hoarding had a brother who was murdered in 2010.
Hoarding was categorised as a mental illness in 2012 and is associated with trauma.
It comes as on Saturday, a new report revealed that South Australian councils are spending a whopping $2 million a year to investigate complaints about hoarders.
And these complaints are on the rise, according to the report, called the Hoarding and Squalor Study.
Of this year’s 273 complaints – 220 of which were in metropolitan council areas and 49 per cent related to a repeat instance of hoarding and squalor, The Advertiser reported.
Ten years ago, a Sydney hoarder and council made national headlines when they found themselves in a similar situation.
A rubbish heap that had been accumulating for decades in the front yard of a Bondi home was finally removed by the local council.
The council charged the woman $350,000 in cleaning costs racked up since 2006. The hoarder ended up being arrested ahead of the court-ordered cleanup, after she refused to make way for council contractors trying to work.
Waverley Council did provide an on-site community support service for the resident as garbage collectors took heaps of their 200-cubic metre pile away.
At the time, clinical psychologist Catherine Madigan said “extreme hoarding is definitely an illness”.
“Just to come in and chuck everything out, it’s pretty brutal,” she added.
“If someone’s got a psychosis and you put them under additional stress, you could set off a psychotic episode.”