TRANSCRIPT
Days before resigning in 2023, former Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews announced a plan to demolish all 44 of Victoria's public housing towers. As Australia grapples with an ongoing housing crisis, plans to demolish the homes of 10,000 Victorians and rebuild them by 2051, has many experts and residents scratching their head.
In April, the Supreme Court of Victoria dismissed a class action from tenants opposing the decision.
Determined to be heard, the residents are launching an appeal.
Louisa Bassini is the managing lawyer for Housing and Tenancy at the Inner Melbourne Community Legal Centre.
She tells SBS that Homes Victoria failed to properly consider the human rights of residents, in making the decision without consultation.
"Other grounds pertain to the group members' rights to have an opportunity to be heard. To this day, Homes Victoria still haven't consulted with residents and allowed them to put forward submissions regarding alternatives to demolition. And so our argument is that the trial judge erred in finding that this wasn't required and that this wasn't necessarily impactful on the outcome of Homes Victoria's program."
Victorian Housing Minister Harriet Shing told SBS the towers are long overdue for replacement.
"Well, anybody who's ever been in the towers or who calls the towers home will know that they're really noisy. They're cold in winter, they're hot in summer. They don't have access to the same sorts of ventilation, natural light or amenity that apply to every other form of housing around the state in terms of current codes of compliance."
In the North Melbourne Public housing towers, residents say they found out about the decision via a note slipped under their door, informing them that their homes would be the first to go.
Gabrielle de Vietri is the Victorian Greens Housing Spokesperson.
She's also the state member for Richmond, which has more public housing towers than any other electorate in Victoria.
On the day of the announcement, a public meeting was held for residents.
"All they had heard was that they had received a letter under their door on the day that Dan Andrews made this announcement saying, we're going to demolish your home. We don't know when sit tight. And the distress in that room was absolutely palpable because there had been no other information communicated. There'd been no consultation with residents whatsoever."
De Vietri says many of these towers are predominantly occupied by migrants and refugees.
With decades of community building inside the towers, she says residents fear being cut off from their support networks.
"And one elderly Vietnamese woman stood up and spoke on behalf of a group of residents that were all around an interpreter saying, we will chain ourselves to this building rather than let the bulldozers come in. This is our home. We are not letting it go. And they have built their community around this location. They have access to their doctors, they have their friends, they have their services, and they have their community there."
According to a recent report from the Victorian Housing Peaks Alliance, Victoria needs an extra 80,000 social housing homes in the next decade to get the state back on track.
The term Social Housing encompasses two broad categories, public and community housing.
Public housing is owned and managed by the state government, whereas community housing is managed, and often owned, by not-for-profit organisations.
Harriet Shing says tenants have the same set of rights regardless.
"Everybody in social housing, whether they are provided housing under the public housing system or under community housing, who's coming off the wait, who gets that housing as a result of that wait list and priority access is entitled to the rights that exist under the Residential Tendencies Act. They are the same irrespective of what part of the social housing system you are in."
But, while tenants may have the same rights once they're in community housing, the private organisations that own the dwellings can lease up to 25 per cent to people on the register of interest, reducing the number available to those on the priority wait list.
Government policy is that 75 per cent of all vacancies in social housing that is owned or managed by community housing organisations should be allocated to Priority Access applicants.
Public housing applicants are allocated on the basis of need, with those facing domestic violence, homelessness and people living with disability given priority access.
Community housing is a mix of those on the register of interest for social housing but not necessarily those facing the most precarious living situations.
Rent prices in community housing are also not subject to the same rent cap as public housing, with tenants possibly facing a 5 per cent rent increase if moved to community housing.
Louisa Bassini says this is not good enough.
"So this is returning to the estates, subject to availability of community housing properties, which means that these people would no longer be public housing residents. They would be living under the management of non-government organizations and with fewer rights that stem from the policies of those organizations. It's inadequate given that they're being evicted, their homes are being demolished, and still there's no assurances that they can return as public housing residents to the estates."
While there is general agreement that the towers are no longer up to building code standards, independent architects say there's no reason why the buildings can't be retrofitted.
Nigel Bertram co-authored a report making the case for retrofitting and is a practice professor of architecture at Monash University.
He says the plan to demolish is deeply flawed.
"They're all built in a very similar manner. So their modularity, if you makes them very suited to retrofitting actually, because they're systematic. So if we could work out a system for one building, it can be used on multiple buildings. They're almost like a kit of parts out of the precast factory. Were put together in the same kind of way. So with similar structures."
While unique changes and modifications that have occurred throughout the buildings over the decades, he says that can be dealt with.
"It's possible to bring buildings up to standard to different degrees, certainly to the point that they're fit for habitation and fit for ongoing use into the future... If you think about the city as a whole, we have a whole lot of buildings that are very, very cherished buildings from the 19th century. They don't meet current standards either, but we don't use that as a reason to knock them down. In fact, we think very carefully about how to make them livable for contemporary needs and retain them."
Aside from the social impacts on residents, he says the independent analysis has found retrofitting is not only cheaper, but better for the environment.
"We put all those social factors aside, we didn't cost them, we didn't discuss them, we just looked at the numbers of what would it cost, what's required scope of works, and its embodied carbon. And we found that environmentally and economically it's cheaper and better to retrofit rather than rebuild."
A number of similar reports have been released by architects and academics, arguing the case of retrofitting.
But Harriet Shing says these reports are misinformed about the condition and structure of the buildings.
"What I would say is that the sort of buildings referred to by that person constructed in the 19th century were not 26 stories tall. So the sort of engineering challenges that exist there in the first place are very difficult to compare with one and two story buildings or smaller apartment blocks, walk-ups, for example, of three or four or five stories. The second thing that's really important to note this is that communities have expressed a very, very clear desire not to be impacted by construction."
Gabrielle de Vietri says their team has knocked on the doors of every public housing resident in the Richmond electorate.
"Across all the estates, what we're hearing from residents is that relocation offices are... they're promising things that they can't deliver and they're threatening them with some pretty scary situations. So they're promising residents the right of return, which in fact, Homes Victoria's own relocation policy doesn't actually guarantee the right of return. And residents aren't aware that even if they do return maybe 7, 8, 9 years down the track, they're not actually going to be returning to public housing."
The government says residents do have right of return, but only if they're deemed eligible.
So, if someone's situation changes their eligibility for certain housing options, they may no longer have priority access to the housing they have now.
While the government insists that clear communications have been made with residents throughout the process, groups representing tenants told SBS something different.
Louisa Bassini says there are more than 800 households currently represented in the class action against Homes Victoria.
"They are residents of the three towers that are the first occupied towers that are set to be demolished. But we think that the outcome of this decision has ramifications for residents of all of the towers across Melbourne. So those 10,000 people, I think, all are watching closely and have an interest in this process being a fair one because their towers are also set to be demolished under the program. "
Katelyn Butterss is the CEO of the Victorian Public Tenants Association.
With a number of relocations already underway, she tell SBS that there have been mixed outcomes.
"We have heard from some renters that they are quite happy and we've heard from some others that they just don't meet their needs at all, that the layouts aren't culturally sensitive for them and that they're struggling to fit their furniture in the homes."
The Productivity Commission’s latest annual Report on Government Services reveals just 2.9 per cent of Victorian households are in social housing – well behind the national average of 3.9 per cent.
Katelyn Butterss says that one of the key concerns of the V-P-T-A is that when these social dwellings are rebuilt, many won't meet the needs of families currently in the towers.
"There are lots of larger families at North Melbourne and Flemington that we did a detailed piece of community engagement work with to really understand what their ambitions were for new homes to be rebuilt on the sites. And they had lots of very sensible and reasonable suggestions of things that they would like to see. And that included bedrooms that were large enough to have two single beds side by side, but the areas for older children available, if not in the apartment itself, then a common area that they could go and do homework quietly and very importantly, kitchens that are not open plan but are separated further from the rest of the home. Many cases for cultural reasons, but also to prevent the spread of cooking smells and to create an extra living space for larger families."
Harriet Shing says that the government is determined to proceed with their plans and vows that communication and consultation with communities will continue every step of the way.
"We will keep working with residents and with the community to provide them with accurate information. We will keep working to make sure that people have access to housing that meets their needs and we will keep working to make sure also that as the city grows and we head to a city the size of London, by the 2050s, we are providing a range of housing options for private renters, for people in social housing, for people looking to buy their own home and for people wanting to stay closer to where they grew up."
But Gabrielle de Vietri says the Greens won't stop pushing back until this plan is scrapped.
"So we're reaching out in as many ways as we can to try and stop this disastrous plan from happening because nobody agrees with the government's plan. Nobody agrees with their decision to demolish these towers, and nobody thinks it's a good idea. In fact, across the political spectrum and across experts and service organizations, residents and community, everybody agrees that it is a disastrous idea because any plan that starts with demolishing 7,000 homes in a housing crisis is not a housing plan. It's a housing disaster."
