HOW TO WRAP A PUBLIC CAR-PARK
AS A GIFT TO PRIVATE SECTOR HOUSING?
SHAME ON YOU LABOR … WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR HOUSING THE MOST NEEDY ?!
With the chaos at the Public Housing tower lockdown, the general public is starting to ask questions about what the government is up to with Public Housing. Maintenance seems shoddy and the apartments are overcrowded. Why isn’t the government looking after the buildings better? Why is the government not building enough Public Housing to ease the overcrowding and the waiting list?
A HEARTLESS ANNOUNCEMENT DURING THE CHAOS.
On July 6th 2020 a government press release trumpeted “Car Park Key To More Affordable Housing In Port Phillip”.
The City of Port Phillip is handing over public land (formerly a car park) to a private business called HousingFirst. The State Government is adding a sweetener in the form of $22 million of funding to finance the building works
It is all presented in language that makes it look good...
HousingFirst Limited is a registered Housing Association, and the announcement says that a mix of tenants will be eligible for the homes, including people over 55 and people with disability, and can even reconfigure adjacent apartments for larger families or to house a carer.
There are 10 Housing Associations and 30 Housing Providers in Victoria and get referred to via cute home spun terminology such as Community, Social, and Affordable housing, but in reality are private businesses that receive government funding and financing. Not all but many of them have high costs. If prospective tenants are taken from the public housing waiting list, they will often have higher incomes and will be profiled as “low risk”.
THERE IS DELIBERATE POLICY AT WORK HERE
Those siding with the government are spreading a narrative on the decline of Public Housing and are using it to stigmatise, and now to detain public housing residents in a lockdown. The fact is that Victoria has had a punitive public housing system whose residents have been neglected for decades. Public housing in Victoria is the product of decades of neglect, disinvestment and stigmatisation by governments and media.
The amount of public housing in Victoria has been hovering in real terms around the same mark of 65,000 dwellings for the last two decades. In the meantime, the private business going under the moniker of Community Housing grew their dwellings from 11,000 in 2011 to 19,000 in 2019 with funding from programs such as the Australian Government’s 2009 Nation Building Economic Stimulus Package which included stock transfers.
According to the Auditor General's Report there had been 9,000 Management Transfers of PH to Community Housing at June 2016. According to a 2014 document a further 8,300 properties were provided by DHHS - including capital and title transfers.
Public Housing now makes up only 2.7% of all the housing in Victoria.
In the meantime, the number of people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity in Victoria has increased to 100,000, and waiting time is 1-2 years for extremely urgent applications and out to 6 years for urgent cases. This is no surprise with no net additions to public housing stock for twenty years.
The lockdown of the towers has helped put a human face to Public Housing tenants. These are people with jobs. These are mothers, fathers, children, families, students and workers, all with hopes and aspirations just like anyone else.
Now it the time to look at what is going on in Public Housing and what is needed to get both Labor and the Liberals to change policy. We need to reinvest in Public Housing like they did post WWII and up to the 1980s which saw thousands of new public housing swellings get built each year. There are 100,000 people on the waiting list and many more unregistered and homeless who could do with a helping hand like the people did then.
Sources
VAGO 2017 Managing Vic's PH 2017
p26. CHFA "Allocation, eligibility, and rent setting in the Australian community housing sector" 2014
This is not the first car park that CoPP has handed over to HousingFirst. They gave them 2 other car-parks (in Liardiat St Port Melbourne behind the Telstra building in Bay St & in Woodstock st cnr of Marlborough st) AND $40M over 10 years to build the properties.
ReplyDeleteThanks Marcia .... and that is just the City of Port Phillip. I wonder what else has been going on. There seems to be no accountability to this, as I guess the public think it is still "public housing" being built, when in reality a private business is getting a "leg-up" so to say with a multi-million donation of land and money.
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