Census data has revealed a million houses are sitting empty in towns where, just metres away, working families are being forced to live in tents.
Analysis of 2021 vacant property data has shown ghost towns are emerging at both ends of the housing market spectrum — in wealthy coastal areas and declining inland farming towns — at a time of unprecedented demand for rentals and soaring homelessness rates.
Libby Stapleton, mayor of Victoria's Surf Coast Shire where the majority of houses in towns like Lorne and Apollo Bay are vacant investment properties, said it had become a "massive issue".
"It's frustrating because our communities will not thrive unless they can sustain a permanent population, accommodate key workers, and also retain some fabric of community life."
Local governments are taking novel approaches to try to squeeze properties onto the rental market, including writing to non-resident ratepayers pleading with them to rent out their holiday homes and slugging absent owners with financial penalties.
But like many community leaders, Ms Stapleton said the onus was on state and federal governments to find both short and long-term solutions to normalise the housing market.
"Councils are doing what they can, but to be honest we will only ever be able to tweak around the edges," she said.
"There's no doubt that the need for change is urgent and it's immediate. I think it's really crucial that people understand the enormity of the impacts that are being felt.
"I think as long as we've got policies and a taxation system that treats housing as an investment as opposed to a basic need, it will continue to be an issue."Where are the ghost towns?
A breakdown of the census data on unoccupied homes showed a patchwork of under-utilised housing stock in both coastal and inland areas.
Some hotspots were trendy, wealthy, seaside towns where out-of-town owners chose to keep them empty or rent them out for brief periods via short-stay accommodation apps.
At the other end of the spectrum was empty housing stock in seasonal or shrinking farming communities.
"There are two key stories that are standing out in the data," said demography academic Professor Amanda Davies.
"There is second-home ownership, with our baby boomer population having second homes and holiday homes, and these are mainly vacant because census night is in August in winter.
"And then you have the remote or regional areas where there is seasonal labour, [where houses] are empty when there's no harvesting.
Some of the most extreme examples of unused homes were recorded on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula and Phillip Island, where in suburbs like Portsea three-quarters of properties were empty.
Unusually high vacancy rates were also recorded along Great Ocean Road townships, on the Queensland coast, and in the surfing towns of southern Western Australia.
The figures are not considered precise due to the myriad reasons people are absent on census night, but the findings correlate with anecdotal evidence and other data relating to investment properties.
Holiday home owners answer plea
The data comes as regional residents take increasingly desperate measures to find shelter amid the unprecedented mismatch between the supply of and demand for housing.
Some towns are reporting a surge in people buying tents to live in, while community services in areas like the WA Wheatbelt are having to return people to the streets with swags and tents.
And there are discussions around repurposing unused government properties for crisis accommodation in places like Newcastle and Eden along the NSW coast.
Several shires have resorted to asking holiday home owners to rent their second properties out to homeless locals, despite that option being less lucrative than renting them on short-stay accommodation apps like Airbnb.
In southern NSW, Eurobodalla Shire mayor Mathew Hatcher wrote to more than 8,000 out-of-town property owners, mainly from Sydney and Canberra, pleading with them to put their spare homes on the local rental market.
"We shouldn't really have to be in this space. A lot of it's about the state and federal governments not stepping up. But we did it out of desperation."
The letter stated that the shire was "in the midst of a housing crisis", and asked holiday home owners to rent out their properties for one to two years to help the community.
Mr Hatcher said while there had been a handful of critics, the response had been overwhelmingly positive.
"It's been amazing. We've had over 50 emails, more than 50 phone calls, and people specifically wanting to rent their homes out to a social housing agency," he said.
"We know of ratepayers from Canberra who have said they are putting their house on the market to help. They're doing it genuinely out of the kindness of their heart to benefit the community.
He said there had been a spike in the number of rentals advertised, with just four available rental homes in Bateman's Bay one week, to 50 the next.
But Mr Hatcher said the shire was aware it was a short-term fix while it waited for state and federal governments to find sustainable solutions.
Financial penalty for empty homes
Meanwhile, in Queensland some local governments are charging higher rates to owners of investment properties who are listing them on short-stay accommodation apps to try to get more properties onto the regular rental market.
But the Australian Local Government Association said that was not an option available to councils in all parts of Australia.
"These levers are only allowable by state and territory governments, so some local governments have very limited control over what they can do to drive more affordable rental properties for the future," said the association's president Linda Scott.
It is not just coastal tourist towns dealing with a large number of empty homes.
A breakdown of local government areas painted a more nuanced picture of the patchiness of the housing supply.
Many of the geographical areas with under-utilised housing stock were located inland, where towns are dealing with boom-and-bust mining cycles and the seasonal influx of agricultural workers.
One example was the Shire of Dundas which sits at the western end of the Nullarbor, close to the WA-SA border.
The 2021 Census recorded half of the homes there as being unoccupied, reflected in the local housing market via an online search showing family homes for sale for under $100,000.
Shire president Laurene Bonza laughed dryly when asked if she was surprised by the finding.
Ms Bonza said the shire's main town, Norseman, had been in decline for more than a decade due to mines being closed or going into care and maintenance.
"When the main mine went into care and maintenance most of those families left, which has a flow-on impact on the schools and shops," she said.
"You can definitely see empty houses here. A lot are older-style family houses.
"They're pretty humble and could do with a spruce-up but, if you're of a handyman bent, they are affordable."
The cheap homes might soon be in short supply though.
The town's main mine is due to reopen soon, meaning the empty houses will start to gradually fill.
Will the COVID trend continue?
There are subtle changes afoot that suggest the mismatch between housing demand and supply may start to reconcile.
Overall, there has been a small decline in empty housing stock since the 2016 census.
Some coastal towns like Lorne and Portsea have recorded a moderate increase in occupancy, believed to be linked to people with multiple properties leaving the city to live in their holiday homes during the COVID pandemic.
Professor Davies said it was too early to say if the trend would continue.
"It will be interesting to see if that holds true over the next five years, and whether people are making a more permanent move to coastal communities."
There are also reports in some coastal towns of baby boomers retiring to their holiday homes in increasing numbers.
Professor Davies said demographic shifts would increase pressure on the federal government to revisit the vexed issue of taxation reform.
"So there is a need to start to bring together those different threads and have a look at how [we can] stabilise housing, so it is more equitable across the country."
