A sad, rusty table sits alone on the second-storey balcony of a home on one of Melbourne’s best streets, the green paint flaking from years of exposure to the weather.
On the ground floor of the Victorian terrace – worth an estimated $1.9 million – weeds sprout from an unattended front garden and spill over onto the concrete porch.
Letters and junk mail are piled up in a beaten-up white and green letterbox.
Nobody is home.
Nobody has been home for decades, it appears.
The 169 sqm block in Fitzroy North means different things to different people.
For the owner, a person who news.com.au understands lives or previously lived in a nearby street, the home is an investment — its value has grown by 3000 per cent, or 31 times its original cost, in the 43 years since it was snapped up.
For others, including socialist Jordan van den Lamb, it represents greed and the “morally reprehensible” act of investing in property as an asset at a time when so many have nowhere to live.
Van den Lamb — who you might know as Purple Pingers, and who is the man behind landlord shaming website Shit Rentals — led a group of protesters and at least one dog inside the Brunswick Street home in 2024 to advertise to all that this particular home is “empty”.
The group unfurled banners from the second storey.
One read: “Victoria: 100,000 empty homes including this one — 60,660 homeless”.
Another read: “Better to squat than let homes rot”.
Two years on, the curtains remain drawn behind the cast iron lacework of the home in what is undeniably one of the best locations in all of Melbourne.
The 11 tram that passes every few minutes carries visitors on a five-minute ride into the heart of the city. But on its doorstep is one of the most popular shopping strips and culinary experiences in the country.
It’s little wonder some people feel resentful when they see it’s been “left to rot”.
Van den Lamb’s campaign two years ago has gone from strength to strength ever since. His tactics are controversial. They involve soliciting details of suspected empty houses around the country and advertising them on a database for squatters who might need a roof over their head.
Some homes he passes on to those in need directly, instead of advertising them widely.
But it doesn’t always go right.
In April last year, a Victorian woman went to check up on the home of her late father. She had inherited it after he passed away.
“I tried my key and it didn’t open and then I realised there was a blind in one room that I never pulled down and there was a security camera over the garage — not mine,” the woman told Melbourne radio.
Her late father’s belongings inside the home were gone — a consequence of strangers moving in, changing the locks and making the home their own after van den Lamb shared the address online as an “empty” home.
“It made me feel very unsafe,” she said.
“Violated. Just really vulnerable.”
The woman was not your typical vacant home hoarder. She had been caring for her sick mother elsewhere. When her mum died, she left the home unchecked for two months. That’s all it took for her address to be posted online and squatters to move in.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese even weighed in on van den Lamb’s activities.
“I think he’s a disgrace,” the PM told Melbourne radio in 2024.
“It’s quite clearly just reprehensible, self-indulgent behaviour.”
In an interview with The Project after the woman’s experience, van den Lamb said: “I think I feel very sorry that her belongings were taken but I also think about the fact that every four days a person experiencing homelessness dies in this country even though there are hundreds of thousands of empty homes for them to live in”.
“It’s a house that was empty for 17 years … it’s a tough one.”
He said he had been advertising homes for squatters for “a long time” and “this is an incredible outlier”.
“This is the first time that’s happened, that’s for sure.”
There was no such outcry when van den Lamb and several others filmed themselves inside the terrace house in Fitzroy North.
News.com.au has spoken to neighbours and former neighbours who say it was tenanted for several years in the mid-2000s before it was vacated.
A picture of the home in 2014 shows weeds were so overgrown that they reached the top of the window on the second storey and onto the neighbour’s yard.
“I didn’t know it was empty until I saw Purple Pingers’ post,” a former neighbour told news.com.au.
“I lived next door from 2005 to 2007, private rental. Our rent was $500 for the five-bedroom joint. It was a bit of a party house.
“We were friends with next door and even cut a doorway though the fence.”
On van den Lamb’s video advertising the home as “empty”, the same person wrote: “I lived next door in the mid 2000s. So sad to see it wasting away and not being utilised. Beautiful homes left to rot. This was once a bustling and beaming share house — right next door to my old one. If those walls could talk.”
Former producer on The Project, Tom Whittyer, wrote on the same post: “Holy shit. I jammed in this house for about five years in the early 2000s. It was in decent shape back then.”
Property websites estimate that the home would fetch almost $1.9 million if sold today, or $1355 per week if tenanted.
But not doing either of those things is the owner’s prerogative. And that’s precisely where the debate gets ugly.
In December 2024, a similar protest was organised at a so-called “empty home” in neighbouring Brunswick.
Purple Pingers, who ran unsuccessfully for the Victorian Socialists at the federal election last year, posted the home on Instagram and organised for an “occupation”.
Protesters again hung banners and climbed on the roof of the home. One sign read: “This house has been empty for 15 years”.
In footage from the scene, where van den Lamb wore a hat that read Squat The Rich, a neighbour tried to intervene.
“You’re all idiots … all of you. This is not your house, this is nothing to do with you. You should just move on. This is nothing to do with you, it’s private property … you should all leave.”
Police were forced to step in and move the neighbour on after a protester asked: “Let me get this straight — it’s idiotic to have empathy for homeless people?”
News.com.au has reached out to van den Lamb for comment.
“Migrants aren’t to blame from the housing crisis, it’s incredibly wealthy people who own all of the houses,” he said.
“In Metropolitan Melbourne alone, excluding holiday homes, there are over 100,000 empty, under-utilised homes; and these are homes with active water connection, so someone is actually paying the bill.”