In four days, more than half a million people have watched a 40 minute Go-Pro video of a former criminal and rapper marching around three Illawarra public housing estates.
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It's part of a series, where the eshay influencer known as Spanian - real name Anthony Lees - who grew up in public housing in Sydney, visits "ghetto areas" around the globe to stickybeak into what life is like for people who live there.
Many of his videos clock up more than a million, and sometimes even two million, views.
In the Wollongong edition, he visits Mangerton's Myuna Way and surrounding streets, Warrawong's Bundaleer Estate, known best as "Lego", and the streets of Berkeley.
The walk-around aims to present a grim view of life in the Wollongong "projects", which Lees has dubbed our "most dangerous neigbourhoods," but also seems to glorify what he describes as the "hood" life.
"It's mad bruh, I like going through the hood with all the lads there, ready to knuckle on with someone," Lees says.
Lees wants to know about the worst things that have happened in these places - there's a potted retelling of the 2015 murder of Mark Dower, and the recent Warrawong stabbing death of Kristy Mcbride gets a few mentions.
Amazed by amount of social housing
Based on the comments on YouTube, it's eye-opening for people who have never set foot inside a housing estate to see this.
And for those who live or grew up in housing, it reflects their lives back to them - a perspective rarely in the public eye.
They don't put it exactly this way, but there are some good questions raised by Lees and his companion about the government policies and social structures that have created these places.
He's amazed by how much social housing exists in large blocks, highlights how rundown parts of it are, and how the same architecture is repeated in public housing estates around NSW.
He nails how the way things look can influence how people act, saying gardening can be the difference between a place looking like "Mad Max or a retirement village".
But the video is also a bit derogatory of the people who happen to be living there, and in one scene he seems to condemn a bunch of young men to the life he's followed because they are public housing tenants.
In all of his walking around shaking hands with men who idolise him, Lees misses that there are diverse, ordinary people who happen to live in social housing.
And most of them are living pretty unassuming lives, by the looks of the quiet streets around him on the day he visits (although perhaps late nights and weekends might be a different matter).
Everyone should have the right to live somewhere that's better designed and maintained, without drugs and crime on their doorstep, and it's clear that the mass of public housing sandwiched together creates social problems.
But there are also strong communities in these places, and he's looking for the worst of it and zeros in when houses are abandoned or windows get smashed, and also imposes so much of his own experience - speaking to people who reflect this back to him.
While the video gives an important platform to people who are not used to being seen or heard, except when things go very wrong, there's a bit of a missed opportunity.
As one Mangerton social worker, who helps young kids living there to become independent, remarked - "I wish it was researched and done properly, because it is important to point out these places do exist".
Inaccuracies are there from the start
Introducing Wollongong, Lees - who has spent years in NSW jails - said he was shocked by the number of men from Wollongong who are incarcerated.
"I don't know what is going on here, but all I know, for all my years in the jail system, for such a little town ... there would always be lads in jail saying they were from Wollongong," he says.
"In every jail there's at least one person from Wollongong."
Growing up in central Sydney, perhaps Lees didn't realise Wollongong is the third largest city in NSW. It's also the population centre of the Illawarra - sometimes collectively referred to as Wollongong - which has more than 300,000 people.
It would be surprising if there wasn't "at least one" person in jail from here.
Lees goes on to talk about "crime rate" of Wollongong, which he has sourced from an data site called Red Suburbs, which uses crime data and population to rank different areas out of 100.
He pulls up some figures for Wollongong CBD, population 20,000, which has many times the crime of NSW and Australia.
"What's going on in Wollongong?" Lees asks, incredulous.
What do Wollongong's crime statistics say?
Wollongong definitely has its fair share of crime - but mostly what's going on is that there's problems with the data.
Given his statement about the number of people in jail, he probably should have used the data for the Wollongong LGA, which shows that the area has slightly higher overall crime than NSW and Australia, and less violent crime. The crime rank is 38/100 - which sounds about right.
On Red Suburbs, the individual suburbs which rate highest include Sydney CBD and Shellharbour City (both 100/100, whereas the suburb of Wollongong CBD ranks 40/100) - where there are a high rate of crimes compared to the number of residents, and also a number of shops or services like police stations which can inflate reported crime levels.
You can also see the flaw in the creation of a crime rate for each suburb by looking at some of the worst ranked places in the Illawarra: known crime enclaves (sarcasm alert) of Yallah - crime rank 43/100, population 122 or Maddens Plains - crime rank 50/100, population 8.
These tiny places actually rate worse than two of the three suburbs Lees visits - Mangerton and Berkeley (both 21/100) and are on par with Warrawong (46/100).
Despite this, he has got it right that these places contain some of the most notorious public housing streets.
They are the places where stabbings, brawls, drug crime and public disturbances are reported, where emergency services are called regularly, and that need support from the government and community sector to improve life for the people living there.
Pity then that Lees misconstrues the work of one of those vital organisations, linking it to jail release, when actually it's a Southern Youth and Family Services crisis centre, office and youth accommodation.
Although it does encounter kids who interact with the judicial system, that's a tiny part of the work. Actually, SYFS is a place where disadvantaged youth and people in crisis can access out of home care or supported living and gain independence.
Lees describes SYFS as "almost an extension of your prison sentence - you get out jail ... you're put into that and if you behave you're put into them flats [pointing at other housing blocks]. So them lads I just shook their hand, they would have been on stage three."
He reads from the sign outside the crisis service office, then ad-libs that there are "release services, stuff like that" because that fits the narrative he's telling.
"I've never been to a block of housos that has a release system from prison and juvenile justice in the middle of it," he marvels.
The camera pans into the back yards, but all it can see is some neat lawns and a bit of washing flapping on the line.
Perhaps his illuminating look into the social problems these areas face would have been more rich if he'd tried to speak to the people working there.
Next, Lees heads to "Lego" - Bundaleer Estate in Warrawong - and then Berkeley (the lakeside suburb home to Wollongong's Lord Mayor) where they traverse streets of public housing properties.
"It's funny, no matter where you are, it's like they use the same blueprint, the same template," Lees remarks, accurately describing the blanket approach to social housing taken last century that still remains today.
"You could stick someone in the middle of there and say 'where are ya?' and you wouldn't know if you were in Campbelltown, Newcastle or Wollongong, it all looks the same."
In Warrawong and Berkeley, he meets a number of young men who want to shake his hand (and sometimes perform burnouts for him). Most of them look and dress a lot like Lees.
Lessons from real-life
The best part of the video - which has resonated with his audience judging by the comments - is at the end, when Lees encounters Blake, who lives in the apartment complex Illawong Gardens in Warrawong.
The young man is thrilled to see Lees, telling him he wants to be like him one day travelling the world, and speaking about how he and his mates had been hoping the influencer would visit their neighbourhood.
He's not the sort of person you hear from often, but tells Lees he's been through DOCS (now the Department of Family and Community Services) as a child and then to SYFS - similar to the one Lees walked past in Mangerton - and has ended up living in the Warrawong apartments.
"If you're homeless and have nowhere to go, [you] go onto housing, if you're on the list, they'll either put you here or Lego," he said.
"As long as you got a roof over your head, that's all that matters to me."
Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
