Sleeping in the driver’s seat

I once managed the fieldwork for a longitudinal study into homelessness, the below is not an individual/real person but rather a compilation of countless stories I heard throughout this study.

The car park is never completely quiet, even late on a Thursday night. There’s the hiss of tyres on wet bitumen as late shoppers cut across the lines like they own the place. Nearby, trolley bays clunk and the automatic doors breathe open for no one. Now and then a shout carries across the lot. The fluorescent light turns everyone pale and makes every movement look slightly suspicious. And there’s the posture of a person trying to disappear without looking like they’re hiding.

I met her, (we’ll call her Carol), on one of those nights when the air has a kind of metallic cold to it and you can feel the city settling into its own sleep. Carol is 62. She has the careful, deliberate manner of someone who has spent a lifetime being respectable, the sort who pays bills on time and worries about inconveniencing other people. She should not have been sleeping in the driver’s seat of a small hatchback.

If you glanced at her in daylight, you would place her instantly – sensible shoes, tidy hair, a cardigan that has been washed a thousand times. The kind of woman who has worked and raised children and made dinners and shown up when needed. The kind of person you assume has a home. But at night, in that car park, she was making herself as small as possible.

The windows were fogged slightly from her breath. The seat was reclined just enough to rest, not enough to look like a bed. A supermarket bag held the few things she needed for the next morning. No obvious “homelessness.” That, she told me, was partly the point. “I don’t want anyone to think…” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t finish the sentence, because the sentence is heavy with stigma – I don’t want anyone to think I’m that kind of person.

In Australia we have a very specific picture of homelessness. It is the man on the street. It is the visible rough sleeper. Carol’s homelessness is quieter. It is the older woman who rotates between friends’ couches, a car, and the occasional short-term motel when she can afford it. It is the kind of homelessness that tries not to be seen, because being seen feels dangerous, humiliating, or both. It is, increasingly, common. And it is one of the most morally revealing failures of modern Australia – that a life can be lived “responsibly” for decades and still unravel into a car park at night.

The story begins, as these stories often do, with a relationship breakdown. She had been with her partner for years, long enough that finances and routines were braided together in ways that are hard to separate cleanly. When the relationship ended, the house ended too. Just in the quiet legal and economic way that breakups now happen – a property sold, a division of assets that looks fair on paper, and then a shock when the rental market meets you with a price tag you can’t absorb.

Carol worked part-time for much of her life. First there were children. Later there were older relatives. Work had to fit into whatever space remained. Like many women of her generation, she did the unpaid work that makes paid work possible for everyone else. The result is predictable – fewer savings, and less buffer when something goes wrong.

When she returned to full-time work later in life, she found what older women often find – it is harder to climb back into a labour market that has already sorted you into a lower rung. Her income wasn’t enough for a rental market that, in many places, has become structurally hostile to older single people.

She tried the normal steps first. She stayed with a friend for a few weeks “just while I look.” She told herself it would be short. She refreshed rental websites like a second job. She went to inspections where ten, twenty, sometimes fifty people were also trying to look like the most reliable applicant. She collected documents, references, payslips, the humiliating proof that she was not risky. And then the weeks became months.

Friends were kind, until kindness started to strain. No one says it directly, because Australians are polite, but there are only so many weeks you can be the extra person in someone else’s household before you begin to feel like an intrusion. You become careful about fridge space. You become careful about showers. So, you move to another couch. Then another. Then, on nights when there isn’t a couch, you sleep in the car.

Carol described the first night she slept in the car as if she were confessing a minor crime. I kept thinking – how did I end up here?” she said. “I’ve never been in trouble. I’ve always… done the right thing.”

That phrase, the right thing, is a moral key to this whole issue. A society that tells people “do the right thing and you’ll be fine” quietly collapses when people do the right thing and end up in a car park anyway.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated 122,494 people were experiencing homelessness at the time of the 2021 Census. In that count, 19,378 were aged 55 and over, about one in seven of all people experiencing homelessness.

But the ABS itself is careful – Census homelessness figures reflect what can be counted at a moment in time, and homelessness is famously difficult to enumerate because it often hides. Older women, in particular, are more likely to be in forms of homelessness that don’t look like street sleeping. In 2021, older females experiencing homelessness were more likely than older males to be staying temporarily with other households.

Specialist Homelessness Services data gives another window into this reality. In 2024–25, SHS agencies assisted around 31,700 older clients (55+), with around 12,200 experiencing homelessness when they first presented. These are a mainstream demand signal.

The most dangerous misconception is to treat “hidden homelessness” as less serious. Sometimes it is physically safer than sleeping rough. Often it is psychologically corrosive, because it combines insecurity with shame. It forces people to manage not only their housing crisis but their reputation.

Carol told me she would park at night and then move early in the morning, before the day crowd arrived. She would wash up in public bathrooms, careful to leave no trace. She would keep her car clean so no one could tell. She would show up to work looking, in her words, “normal.” This is how the respectable life unravels – quietly, and with enormous effort to keep it quiet.

It’s tempting to romanticise vehicle living in the age of #vanlife, with its polished fantasy of freedom. Carol’s car however, is a cramped space where sleep is shallow and vigilance is constant. Sleeping in a car means never fully resting, because you are always half-alert to footsteps, voices, a knock on the window, the possibility of harassment. It means waking with aches and stiffness that don’t improve with age. It means the small humiliations of daily life without a home. There is nowhere to store food safely. Nowhere to stretch. Nowhere to cry without feeling exposed.

It also means the logistical grind of not having an address – how do you receive mail? How do you keep documents safe? How do you do phone calls that require privacy? How do you manage medication? How do you attend job interviews or medical appointments without the steadying base of a home?

The ABC recently reported on Australians who are “hidden homeless” and seeking shelter outside the usual systems, people living in vehicles and other informal arrangements, often because the rental market is out of reach and the formal homelessness pathways don’t fit their circumstances.

The crisis is expanding into forms that are harder to see and therefore easier to ignore.

Carol didn’t want to go to a shelter because she couldn’t bear the idea of being seen there. She imagined bumping into someone she knew. She imagined being labelled. She imagined the loss of dignity. That’s the paradox – dignity makes people hide, and hiding makes the problem harder to address. “How could it happen to someone like her?” is the wrong question. The right question is – why is it so easy now?

If Carol’s story teaches anything, it’s that homelessness is not always the end of a long chain of dysfunction. Sometimes it is what happens when ordinary vulnerabilities pile up. A relationship ends. Savings are thin. Work is hard to rebuild. Meanwhile the housing market has become a high-stakes contest. Add rising rents and tight supply, and the safety net fails. When you put these pieces together, the narrative changes. This is about a system that has become brittle, where one fracture in a life can send a person over the edge.

Older women’s homelessness is often described as the outcome of “the superannuation gap.” That phrase risks becoming bloodless. But it names something real. Years of lower pay and interrupted employment, much of it shaped by unpaid care, turn into lower retirement savings. Then a later shock makes the shortfall immediate. A relationship ends, or health gives way, and suddenly there is no margin at all.

Carol spoke in the language of ordinary ethics – “I’ve worked. I’ve looked after people. I’m not asking for luxury.” She is asking for a basic thing – a stable place to live at the age when stability should be easier, not harder.

When she tried short-term motels, she discovered the cruel arithmetic – motels feel like a lifeline but they are often financially impossible as a long-term solution. A few nights can swallow a week’s income. And then you’re back in the car. Friends’ couches feel safer, but they come with an expiry date written in politeness. So, the car becomes the fallback.

Carol said something that stayed with me – “I don’t want to be a problem.” That sentence reveals how deeply many older women have been trained to keep themselves small. They are less likely to demand help loudly. More likely to endure. More likely to disappear. That endurance is often praised. It is also exploited. Because a problem you endure quietly is a problem policymakers can ignore.

Australia’s homelessness conversation often becomes a contest of urgency. It gravitates toward the most visible crises and the most publicly legible suffering. All of those claims on attention are real, and none of them should be pitted against one another.

But older women are often the cohort that slips through because they don’t fit the stereotype of “homeless.” They are more likely to stay out of sight, moving between couches and cars, delaying contact with services until crisis forces the issue. Some are still working, still presenting well, still functioning, until they can’t.

There are several pressures here, though they rarely arrive one at a time. A housing market built around dual incomes punishes women living alone. Separation or bereavement can strip away housing security almost overnight. Lower lifetime earnings, often shaped by interrupted employment and unpaid care, leave far too little margin when that shock lands. The labour market and rental market then add their own quiet exclusions.

Shame deepens all of it. Fear of judgement or harassment pushes women out of sight, so they keep trying to look fine on the outside even when everything underneath is precarious.

Carol did not want to tell her adult children at first. She didn’t want them to worry or to feel they had to rescue her. That reluctance is deeply human, and it also means the crisis can deepen before anyone intervenes.

Whenever we tell stories like this, there is a risk of implying that if someone is homeless, they simply haven’t reached out.

Carol did reach out, eventually. She contacted services. She learned the language of the system. She learned that many services are overwhelmed. She learned that crisis accommodation is finite and often designed for short stays, while her problem, lack of affordable, stable housing, is long-term.

Specialist Homelessness Services can steady people and connect them with the help they need. They can do heroic work. But they cannot conjure housing stock out of thin air. When social housing and affordable rentals are scarce, the service system becomes a waiting room.

Hence why the best services increasingly emphasise prevention and rapid rehousing – catching people earlier, sustaining tenancies, moving people into stable housing quickly. A recent community case study in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health argues that older women experiencing homelessness often need specialised responses to access suitable long-term housing and stabilising support.

Governments are beginning to speak more directly to this. NSW, for example, has announced new social housing projects aimed at supporting homeless older women, explicitly noting the urgency of the cohort and the need for more secure housing options. Whether these initiatives meet the scale of need is another question, but the acknowledgement is important – the problem is now too large to keep treating as an anomaly.

Carol’s descent into car parks only took a year. And once you are in that state, time works against you. Exhaustion accumulates. Health deteriorates. Paperwork becomes harder. Hope becomes harder. You start making choices you didn’t expect to make: missing meals, putting off medical care, pulling back from friends because explanation itself feels exhausting.

There is a temptation to respond to stories like Carol’s with moral sentiment – “It’s terrible,”  “No one should have to…” All true. But sentiment is not policy. If we are serious, the response must be structural, and it has to be calibrated to how older women actually experience homelessness – hidden, shame-heavy, often first-time, often triggered by disruption.

A serious response has to start with prevention that treats older women as a priority cohort. The warning signs are familiar, and they usually appear well before someone is sleeping in a car. Early intervention should be resourced and proactive enough to reach people before crisis, because many will not ask for help until the situation is already acute.

It also means getting people into stable housing quickly rather than cycling them through motels and short stays. Temporary accommodation only a temporary tourniquet. None of this works, though, unless the housing on offer is genuinely affordable to a single older woman on a pension or a low wage.

There is a broader cultural task as well. Tenancy rules should do more to reduce arbitrary displacement and rent shock, because security itself is a prevention tool. And we need to stop treating homelessness as a moral identity. Carol is a person whose housing fell away.

None of this requires lowering standards or creating “dependency.” It requires recognising that housing is foundational infrastructure. When housing is unstable, everything else gets harder. Health frays. Safety frays. Work becomes harder to hold. So does any sense of community.

Before I left Carol that night, she did something that made me understand the depth of the shame. She straightened the blanket and tidied the front seat so nothing from outside would suggest a person was living there. These were symbolic actions – a last attempt to maintain the feeling of being “normal.” “Sometimes,” she said, “I think, if someone from my old life saw me… they wouldn’t believe it.” They wouldn’t. That’s exactly why it matters.

Older women’s homelessness confronts Australia with an uncomfortable truth – the line between “secure” and “homeless” has become thin enough that a respectable life can fall through it quickly. And a country that allows that, quietly, routinely, in car parks at night, has to ask itself what it thinks housing is for.