Australian housing crisis: Rental advocate Jordan van den Lamb’s squatting campaign slammed
A controversial social media influencer that claims to be helping fix Australia’s housing crisis by encouraging homeless to squat in vacant properties has been slammed by a peak real estate body.
A controversial social media influencer who claims to be helping to fix the national housing crisis by encouraging the homeless people to squat in vacant homes has been slammed by a peak real estate body.
Known as PurplePingers on TikTok and Instagram, Jordan van den Lamb has attracted an audience of nearly 250,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok — and created a database of homes across Australia that have been vacant for at least two years.
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Dubbed the ‘Robin Hood of renters’, van den Lamb connects followers with homes from the database privately but occasionally posts the addresses of the vacant homes on his Instagram account.
Earlier this year he shared a video to his channels as something of a call to arms.
“Are you sick of rich people hoarding empty houses during a housing crisis? I know I am,” Mr van den Lamb said, standing outside a rundown house in the Melbourne suburb of Chadstone. “Here’s how you can do something about it.”
The S*** Rentals website database now has nearly 1700 properties, along with his social media listings.
Mr van den Lamb said he started the database to collect addresses of properties around Australia a few months ago after posting a video to his 200k+ followers on TikTok.
“How it works is people will send an address to a Google form and they generally provide an explainer on how long the place has been vacant or how to get inside,” he said.
Mr van den Lamb said he then checked for any planning or development applications for the residence and views the state of the house on Google Maps.
“I’m targeting places that have been abandoned by the owner for at least two years,” he said.
Mr van dan Lamb said his solution to help solve the housing crisis operates in the grey area of law, pointing out ways the people in one Aussie state can take advantage.
“South Australia doesn’t have squatting laws; they’ve just got adverse possession laws and trespass laws,” he said.
“A fundamental principle of our title system in Australia is that if you don’t use that land productively and someone else does, it becomes their property, as part of the adverse possession laws.”
In July, Mr van den Lamb highlighted a Prosper Australia report that showed Melbourne has close to 100,000 vacant homes.
“The fact there are 100,000 homes (on the list) means that pretty much one in 20 Melbourne metropolitan homes are vacant,” Mr van Den Lamb told his followers.
He theorised that based on the average house size in the city, that those empty homes ‘could house 250,000 people’.
However, Real Estate Institute of South Australia legislation and industry adviser Paul Edwards told The Advertiser while there were no laws surrounding “squatting”, anyone who was found on another’s property would be considered a trespasser.
“Anybody who is not authorised to be on that property either as a tenant or boarder or lodger – they are not approved for the property and therefore are known as trespassers,” he said.
“And just because the owner might not know about the people living on their property that still doesn’t given them (squatters) the right to live there.
“They have no legal right to be in that property; they’re basically breaking and entering.”
Mr Edwards warned Mr van den Lamb to stop encouraging squatting.
Mr van dan Lamb said housing was a fundamental human right and if the governments are “unwilling” to resolve the crisis, people are forced to seek extreme solutions.
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Originally published as Australian housing crisis: Rental advocate Jordan van den Lamb’s squatting campaign slammed