The Domino Effect No One Sees

How one case is reshaping housing decisions across NSW

Recently, there was a news article in NSW that aired the plight of a hoarder. This seems to have created a domino effect and the fallout has basically affected every person with a Specialty Case Housing Worker¹ across the state of NSW, with them now facing the probability of eviction.

As soon as I saw this article, I knew I was basically screwed..

Don’t get me wrong, I really feel for this guy. For his place to get in that bad a state, there’s a lot happening with him, mentally, emotionally, and community wise. Nathan, the gardener who discovered how this guy is living, isn’t wrong in what he said. Where are the carers and support workers when you need them most?

Having lived experience with this kind of problem, I know for a fact that a person who ends up living this way is dealing with a lot of grief and loneliness, not to mention health issues.

Considering the state this guy’s house is in, I found myself wondering whether he had family and if he does, why are they not visiting him to check in on him! But who knows, they could be the reason why he’s grieving and what may be causing this.

Other causes can include severe depression, loneliness which can lead to a state of not caring about the condition of the property. Recently, I’ve had to farewell two senior grrrbabies. One passed from complete kidney failure, and the 2nd, almost to the day a month later, I needed to send to live with friends, because he needed more than what I could offer him. I could cover the medicinal requirements sure, but he needed hands on care and because of my own physical limitations, I knew he’d be best suited with a family that could give him 100% of the support he needed.

Also, because of how this home is designed structurally, and the shortcuts Housing took when this property was being built, my place was no longer suitable for his physical wellbeing.

Having to give him up completely destroyed me and it made me not care for my own home for a time.

So yes, my heart goes out to the guy in the news article. There should have been services available to help him, or Housing should have cared more for their tenants to check in and see how he’s actually doing, not just checking to see if his rent was being paid on time. But one extreme case does not equal every case statewide.

Just like clothing sizes, there are very different types of hoarders.

Extreme Hoarders:-

You’ve seen those. They appear on those TV shows where teams go in to try and dig through the mountains of clutter and rubbish to find the home that was once livable. And admittedly, these shows are impressive with their achievements even if a bit traumatising for people like myself.

This level of hoarding is also usually the type of people living in conditions where basic sanitation has broken down, usually because they are unable to reach their bathrooms buried under mounds of clutter, but not all extreme hoarders get this out of control. As I’ve mentioned earlier, every case is different.

Moderate Hoarders:-

I think I fall into this category. There was one time when I was pushing extreme, when mental health (bullying and harasment by others), physical health and also moods like severe depression and grief got the better of me.

And honestly? It’s an easy cycle to fall into…

I clean. I blink.
And somehow… it’s back.

And after a while, you stop asking “how?” and start asking “what’s the point?”

It CAN lead to giving up after a while!

But I’ve come a long way since then. My goal is always to fill up my bins, and if I can get away it, occasionally filling up my neighbour’s bins. I donate, recycle and sell when I can and sometimes even upcycle.

But I have trained myself to have rules with what comes in and what doesn’t, and also what goes out.

I knew why I hoarded!

After a lot of self reflection, a support group and just talking to others with lived experiences, I’d figured out what my problem was:

1 – Twice in my life, I lost everything.

2 – Growing up, I had no friends, no real love from my family, and I was relentlessly bullied, not just by my peers, but by those in authority and also family members.

3 – I had a ton of grief to deal with in varying stages of life.

4 – My body has also been a battleground for a lifetime of health dramas to the point where everything else became secondary to my own survival.

So being a shopaholic (yes, retail therapy) and collecting things (I used to call myself a bower bird, not a hoarder) just built up and got worse over time, so where people might have one of everything, I easily had 20-50 of everything. They became my security blanket.

Mild hoarders

Not to be excluded, thought I’d mention this. This is the harmless type. The “live in a place long enough and possessions will take over” type. Every person who has ever had to handle a deceased estate would have had to deal with this, and I’m pretty sure they would have all mentioned something like: “OMG how are we gonna get rid of all this! I never knew they had so much stuff!”

Those that fall in between these categories…

It wasn’t until my mother passed that I realised her hoarding was so much worse than mine. I only managed to save maybe 5% of her belongings and that STILL filled up my garage. And this was AFTER I left a mountain of her stuff in both her backyard and frontyard ready to be collected by Housing’s cleaning crew.

So why am I feeling screwed?

So why I’m feeling screwed is because I know Housing. And so I should considering I’ve lived under them for over three decades.

If you could picture a playground bully. You know the type. We never know the backstory, but there is ALWAYS a back story. It could be just insecurity, he’s not getting the love or attention he craves at home, or he’s being overly disciplined, so he takes that frustration out on the more helpless kids at school.

Now magnify that to a Government department, where each chain of the hierarchy is still getting pressure on them from a higher power. The only place to go from there is down, so tenants classed as problematic or difficult, i.e, “specialty case” tenants, we’re going to cop the brunt of their very subtle aggression.

So when I saw that news article, I knew exactly the fallout that was gonna happen, and sure enough it did.

It came as no surprise to me when Mark (not his real name) said to me that due to orders from higher up the chain, he now needs to visit me every two weeks, and if I don’t improve fast enough, they’ll need to start the process for tribunal.

When he came again two weeks later, he said that he would have to start the ball rolling re Tribunal.

I asked him during both visits if this was because of the media news article about that hoarder. He said yes. He admitted that this was coming from ‘higher up’ — possibly even the NSW Minister for Housing. And this isn’t just happening to me, it’s happening to everyone statewide who has a Specialty Case Housing worker.

Whether that’s exact or not, what I’m experiencing feels like a system-wide tightening — where people like me are being pushed toward tribunal, regardless of individual circumstances.

On researching who the Minister for Housing is, I did find this believable, as he kept referring to her as ‘she’, and when I looked into who ‘she’ might be, sure enough, the current Minister for Housing is the Hon. Rose Jackson.

Knowing my propensity for panic attacks every time I read a Dept. of Housing letter, Mark tried to break down the process of what will happen over the coming weeks to try and minimise my panic attacks when I see the letters that will inevitably come.

But it doesn’t erase the fact that, if worse comes to worst, by October 2026, I may be without a home.

1. A Specialty Case Housing Worker is usually someone trained to deal with hoarders and how to supposedly help them get their place in order. ↩︎

Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.