Crikey reader reply: Recent coverage of public housing misses the mark

In this edition of Your Say, urban geographer at Melbourne University and Crikey reader Dr Kate Shaw weighs in on the politics of housing in Victoria.

Crikey readers could be forgiven for thinking the editors have gone soft on housing politics in Victoria. Several recent contributions, including one from YIMBY Ethan Gilbert and another by resident cynic Bernard Keane, are not much more than apologies for Labor’s sorry record on public housing provision. 

Both seem happy to dismiss public housing, with Gilbert airily declaring it “is on its way out” while Keane guns for the inner-city towers, labelling them “substandard, post-war public housing blocks that … fall well short of current standards on noise, energy efficiency and size”. We wonder how many tower apartments they have visited.

The fact is that despite chronic underfunding, the public units in the towers alone provide secure and comfortable homes to 10,000 households. Stories of broken lifts and needles on the stairs are legion but they do not apply to all blocks, and are related to lack of maintenance, cleaning, security and poor allocation policy: they are not reason to knock the buildings down. 

Notwithstanding, the Victorian Public Housing Renewal Program (PHRP) has been demolishing public housing and building mixed housing in partnership with private developers for the past two decades. Early rollouts reduced the number of public units while delivering huge profits to the developers who sold the private housing on formerly public land.

Despite widespread critique, the program will now proceed to Melbourne’s 44 tower estates following Dan Andrew’s parting announcement last year that all the towers would be demolished. The promise is that the public units will be replaced and increased in number by 10%. This is a miserable increase, and the new builds will take years. 

Prior to demolition, public tenants are relocated — often to suburbs well beyond their range, where they know no-one, miles away from their neighbours and communities and the services they patronised and knew well. Anyone who has been evicted from their home knows how awful an experience it is; for those on very low incomes, who have no options other than what is provided by bureaucrats with no personal connection to the many tenants they must relocate quickly, it can be deeply traumatic.

A report from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) released in December 2023 found that the relocation processes prior to all the PHRP redevelopments were poorly communicated and haphazard. Further research by one of the report’s key authors shows that since the tower demolitions announcement, the “community consultations” conducted by Homes Victoria have been little more than damage control. Designed to quell residents’ concerns about being placed in housing limbo prior to upheaval, the “consultations” continue to reveal the serious impacts of demolition on households and communities sustained over decades. 

Keane dismisses these concerns with a wave of the hand: “The current residents of the towers proposed for redevelopment will be found homes”, and entirely misses the point. In addition, the replacement homes are taking up the existing public housing vacancies, meaning those on the waiting list are waiting longer. The rest are in the private rental market and costing taxpayers a motza.

Keane is reenacting precisely the attitude taken during the slum clearances that preceded the construction of the estates. Yes, the neighbourhoods in Collingwood, Fitzroy, North Melbourne, Prahran and so on were rundown post-war, and they were demolished in the ’50s and ’60s amid protests at the time. Once again low-income people are being arbitrarily moved about and their lives and preferences dismissed as though they don’t matter. 

The renamed Big Housing Build has a dilemma. Of course new and improved housing is in theory preferable to old. In practice, not necessarily. Just as the terrace houses and workers’ cottages that survived the clearances have become desirable and gentrified, so too can public housing be retrofitted. Most of the towers have good bones and are structurally sound. Not all, this is clear — some have been so badly neglected that they probably do need to be demolished — but Melbourne’s towers were built at different times with different materials. Flats in some of the Carlton and Collingwood towers and Fitzroy’s Atherton Gardens have had extensive refits with windowsills repaired, insulation installed, repainting, recarpeting, new appliances and grounds landscaped with tenant participation and labour.

Andrews’ final thought bubble as premier had no publicly available rationale. There are still no evaluations of the buildings targeted for demolition, nor assessments of the economic, environmental and social viability of demolition versus alternatives. On the latter there is an important and rapidly growing body of work

A report soon to be released by architects at Melbourne University spells out the environmental damage of demolishing the towers — including the thousands of tonnes of concrete sent into landfill and carbon released in producing replacement concrete — and details the benefits of retrofit as a tried and tested alternative. Work from the architectural practice OFFICE on estates in Ascot Vale and Port Melbourne demonstrates that refurbishment and infill can take place without relocating existing residents, at significantly lower social, environmental and economic costs.

The big housing demolition is not only costing the state a great deal; in the short term it massively reduces the affordable housing stock. In the middle of a housing crisis, this is bizarre. Contrary to Keane’s argument that our object is to keep public housing tenants in substandard housing, it is to ensure they remain close to home while more public housing is built. Those towers that can be refitted can be done so with minimal disruption to tenants, who move within the blocks while the work is done. Most public housing estates have expansive grounds. New public housing should be under construction on those estates now, so that when it comes time to demolish the unsalvageable towers, tenants can move into new housing next door. In what way is this a difficult idea?

On the question of increasing private housing supply to solve the crisis, it is worth noting that the YIMBY argument comes straight from the property lobby’s playbook. Apart from being a blunt and rude tool when used to discredit sometimes legitimate local concerns, the idea that a general increase in supply will increase affordability is fanciful. Such an increase would have to be enormous to bring prices down across all the housing submarkets, which is something the vast majority of property owners and politicians don’t want anyway. We know that residential developers stage and stop building as soon as they sniff surplus, supported by media that scream disaster as soon as prices look like dropping. 

The only way to increase affordability is to build more genuinely affordable, non-market housing wherever possible, especially on government-owned land: non-profit co-op, community, public housing and more. YIMBYs could do something useful here: they could help lobby for commitment from the federal and state governments to the vastly most efficient way of providing decent housing to the largest number of people.

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