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A Homeless ‘Safe Space’ Challenges Australia’s Power Brokers

SYDNEY, Australia — Some are clean-shaven 18-year-olds whose hairstyles command as much of their attention as their pursuit of a home. Others are immigrant women in their 60s, struggling to keep up with a mortgage and appreciative of a warm meal.

Over the past six months, an unsanctioned shelter under a towering construction site in the heart of Sydney’s central business district has become a gathering place for the homeless and the working poor. Some of the space’s leaders, living on the economic margins, say they are also there to challenge Australia’s power brokers — right on their gilded doorsteps.

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

Just across Martin Place, where the camp is, sits the Reserve Bank of Australia. Every living former Australian prime minister has office space within a few blocks. The state Parliament is around the corner. The state housing minister’s office is within the line of sight, albeit buried in a high-rise.

“It’s not accidental at all,” Lanz Priestley, 72, the camp’s organizer, said of the location. “The decision makers who cause all forms of marginalization and exploitation, Australia-wide, make those decisions here.”

At a time when Australians are wondering if their country is still the egalitarian powerhouse it once was — a time when the “Australian Dream” of property ownership is looking more and more distant to many — this homeless shelter has quietly become a very public and controversial home of resistance to inequality and indifference.

For many, the Street Kitchen Safe Space is a place to sleep, to eat and to be around a homeless community filled with camaraderie. But it has also acted as a sort of living, breathing exhibit: a live urban installation that reflects a broad mix of social ills.

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

“Increased homelessness and street homelessness is a symptom of a bigger problem, of a lack of affordable rental housing in Sydney and other parts of New South Wales,” said Wendy Hayhurst, chief executive of the New South Wales Federation of Housing Associations, which advocates affordable housing.

The camp has been a persistent concern for the Sydney City Council, which has grown weary of its prominent location, citing concerns about safety.

“The 60 Martin Place hoarding is not a safe or sustainable housing option for people sleeping rough,” a city spokesman said when asked about the camp. “Alternative accommodation has been offered to all people in the area.”

This week, in fact, as they have done regularly since the camp’s inception, the state housing office set up shop directly opposite the camp — or safe space, as residents prefer to call it — encouraging people to register for public housing.

There were murmurs among some in the camp that those who signed up would leapfrog to the top of the 60,000-applicant waiting list for taxpayer-subsidized housing.

But Dan, a Thai man who regularly cooks for the space, said that even those who found a home craved the camp’s vibe.

“I recently got housing down the road, near Central Station,” he said. “It’s so lonely. I come back in the middle of the night to talk to the guys and play chess.”

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

Mr. Priestley, who commands unanimous respect in the shelter, said it began when a group of women approached him near Martin Place, saying that they no longer felt safe sleeping on the streets of central Sydney. Many had been woken in the middle of the night and assaulted. Several, Mr. Priestley said, had been raped.

“They said, ‘We don’t feel safe on the streets anymore, because we’re waking up to guys trying to sleep with us,’” he said.

Today, the space shelters, feeds and clothes an array of people. Its drop-in system allows visitors to take what they need on any given day. It also regularly sees full-time workers from Sydney’s central business district, such as cleaners and security guards, stop in for a meal. Mr. Priestley said many of these visitors could no longer afford to both eat dinner and keep up with their mortgages.

An April 2017 report from Anglicare, which surveyed 67,000 properties in Australia, found that Sydney did not have a single property that would be affordable to a single person living on government benefits.

Mr. Priestley said the community response to the project had been largely positive, and this week, those who walked by seemed to pay the camp little mind.

“I have a positive opinion on it,” said a silver-haired, paisley-tied man in his 50s, en route to work at the Reserve Bank. “They keep to themselves, really.”

Much like the Occupy movement that used the same location in 2011, the shelter has crowdsourced many of its ideas. There is a People’s Library. There is a “take a coat, leave a coat” area: the brainchild of a “local entrepreneurial project.” Written in chalk on the scaffolding of the development is a proud set of community bylaws: “No Drugs, No Alcohol, No behaviour violating Safe Space.”

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

“One of the tricks of doing something like this is to let the community decide for themselves what the rules should be,” Mr. Priestley said, chopping some potatoes with a cigarette in his mouth.

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

This week, though, thoughts have turned to an impending threat. Local government pamphlets that have been circulating state that, on Saturday, scaffolding will be built in the area the community is occupying. Mr. Priestley, who used to work regularly with developers, dismissed the legality of the action, saying the plans for scaffolding had not been included in the developer’s original application.

City of Sydney officials said in a statement Friday afternoon that the developer had submitted an application to amend the permit, and that it was approved on May 15.

Bill Tyler, a 62-year-old who stays in the space frequently, said removing it would simply push homeless people to other locations, like the nearby train stations.

A week from now, the space may be transformed into another example of Sydney’s property boom, all construction and glass on the way to ever-soaring prices.

But for the moment, for a small, content crowd, the Martin Place safe space is almost home.

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Credit...Adam Baidawi for The New York Times

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