Tenants’ rights activist Purplepingers infuriates boomer homeowners by revealing how easy it is to access ‘abandoned’ properties

Baby boomer homeowners are furious after a prominent tenants’ rights advocate discovered an empty Melbourne home and boasted that anyone who wanted to could break into it.

Jordan van den Berg, known online as Purplepingers, encourages squatters by keeping a list of abandoned houses. He advises people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless to move into these houses.

On Monday, he posted a photo on social media of himself standing in front of an apparently abandoned house in Prahran, 5km southeast of Melbourne’s CBD..

The front door was clumsily locked with wire clothes hangers and padlocks. According to Mr. Van den Berg, this was an attempt to ‘keep people out’.

According to realestate.com.au, the average house price in Prahran is $1,745,500.

“Rich people really need to seal up their abandoned homes better, especially the ones that still have electricity and water,” he wrote in the caption.

Mr van den Berg told Daily Mail Australia the house was “clearly empty” and neighbours had told him it had not been occupied for at least six years.

His post was the latest in a series highlighting how many homes are currently sitting empty or abandoned, with many Australians struggling to find stable housing.

While few would disagree with Mr van den Berg’s commitment to fairer conditions for the 31 per cent of Australians who rent, his advocacy of squatting has irked some homeowners who feel it is their right to leave their homes empty if they so choose.

In April, a wave of indignation arose against Mr Van den Berg when he published the addresses of vacant houses and noted that squatting is not ‘necessarily illegal’.

In Australia, you are generally allowed to occupy a home if it looks abandoned and the doors are not locked. If the house is locked, you risk being charged with burglary, and if you stay after the owner has asked you to leave, it is trespassing..

Homeowners said Mr van den Berg “should be arrested” for his activism, even though it is not illegal to publish a list of vacant homes. One even vowed to “beat the living daylights out of him”.

One angry response on X, formerly Twitter, read: ‘I would love it if you broke into my house. That wouldn’t end well for you, mate.’

Mr van den Berg told Daily Mail Australia he did not break into the Prahran home – he only posed for a photo outside the house – and said he was used to death threats..

In April, he sparked a national debate about homelessness when he posted a video explaining that squatting is usually legal as long as the house is unlocked.

“Fun fact, squatting in Australia isn’t necessarily illegal. Which is the best kind of legal. Especially if you don’t actually have a lock on the front door,” he said.

“So yeah, here’s a free house if you want it.”

A squatter can legally become the owner of a house if he stays there long enough.

Also known as prescription, this tradition has been in use for a long time and allows someone to take control of an abandoned property if they have lived there for 15 years in Victoria or 12 years in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia.

Owners can still evict anyone from their property before they reach that boundary.

Mr van den Berg, a lawyer, said he had noticed that homeowners who were away from home were using ineffective locks to deter squatters, instead of properly securing their homes, after he started paying attention to the problem.

“I think it’s because they know that people now know it’s vacant,” he said.

Mr van den Berg acknowledged that his videos were polarising, but said his critics were mainly people who would rather see the homeless remain homeless.

“There are people who understand the idea that we shouldn’t have people without homes, as long as we have homes without people, that’s pretty simple,” he said.

‘But there are also people who don’t like the idea of ​​housing the homeless at all.’

According to Mr Van den Berg, it is ‘simply greed’ if owners deliberately leave their properties empty.

“It is ridiculous that landlords are abandoning their properties to increase their value and then selling them later when we are in the middle of a housing crisis,” he said.

‘For this particular house – and for many similar houses – no building permit has been applied for, they are not for sale, they are left to rot.’

Mr van den Berg admitted that the average Australian was against squatting as a solution to the housing crisis..

However, he said the housing shortage was nevertheless having a serious impact on Australian society, with young people increasingly “dissatisfied” with never being able to buy or rent a home at a reasonable price.

According to Mr Van den Berg, this dissatisfaction has grown into ‘contempt’ and a feeling that the Australian way of life is no longer worth defending.

“It’s clear that there are a lot of people being exploited here. I think a lot of people want something done about it. And if nothing is done, it doesn’t look good,” he said.

He added that previous governments had helped provide affordable housing to older generations to “prevent people from feeling this sense of contempt… by giving them something to defend” – but that this is no longer happening.