This year local governments in South East Queensland have made it a crime to camp in public parks. Council officers (or subcontractors) have dismantled makeshift shelters, confiscated belongings, and issued fines to people already living on the edge. It’s a familiar scene playing out across Queensland, as local governments struggle to manage the visible fallout of a deepening housing crisis.
But history tells us these measures don’t work.
My new research traces a largely forgotten period in Brisbane’s history, when thousands of people lived in tents, huts made of corrugated iron and hessian bags, and former army camps because they had nowhere else to go. In the years after World War II, an acute housing shortage forced families to make homes in whatever spaces were available, including public parks, bushland, and disused military sites.
These communities were dismissed at the time as “shanty towns” and “slums”. Newspapers initially called them a blot on the city. Yet many residents were working families, pensioners, and returned soldiers – people who simply could not find or afford a formal dwelling. The state government had to continually extend its timeframe to “close the camps”, because people simply had nowhere else to go.
As pressure grew, including through a Courier Mail campaign focused on the poor living conditions of these camps, governments reluctantly acknowledged that people were living informally out of necessity. Brisbane City Council eventually connected some camps to water mains and provided toilets. The state government later built new public housing in the same neighbourhoods and rehoused many of the families who had been squatting in huts and tents.
By the mid-1950s, the informal settlements had gradually disappeared – not through eviction – but because new homes had become available.
In total, more than 8,000 families passed through Brisbane’s temporary housing camps between 1946 and 1954. That history is worth remembering as today’s councils pass bylaws to criminalise rough sleeping and public-space camping. These laws may dismantle encampments, but they don’t make the people, or the reasons they are there, disappear.
The same structural drivers that produced Brisbane’s post-war camps are once again visible. A chronic undersupply of affordable housing, soaring rents, stagnant wages, and a welfare system that fails to meet the cost of living. Informality is the spatial expression of policy failure.
Public land has long served as a safety net when the formal housing system fails. During the post-war period, former military sites, parks, and showgrounds provided shelter for those excluded from housing. We could take a lesson from that pragmatism. Instead of criminalising rough sleepers, governments could temporarily repurpose under-used public or government land like vacant lots, depots, and car parks, as serviced, legal camping sites. Regional towns already do this for tourists, offering free camping areas with toilets, water, and bins. Why not extend the same dignity to people who are homeless?
History also reminds us that informal settlements can foster community. Many of the post-war camps evolved into tight-knit neighbourhoods. Residents shared tools, helped build one another’s dwellings, and created informal libraries, kindergartens, and social networks. When these places were finally formalised, many families stayed on, buying local homes through state-funded loans. The stability provided by secure housing, despite its rudimentary nature, allowed people to rebuild their lives.
Today’s housing debate often feels trapped in short-term fixes but the 1950s experience shows that large-scale public investment, not piecemeal intervention, was what finally ended the crisis. The lesson from history is clear: you can’t police your way out of a housing crisis.
