SAVE PUBLIC HOUSING COLLECTIVE'S
SUBMISSION TO THE
VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT’S
10 YEAR STRATEGY FOR SOCIAL AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Alongside our petition, SPHC has written our own submission. Please read and continue spreading the word: The government's current agenda is not working to solve homelessness or for creating secure housing! They must prioritise public housing!
Overview
The Save Public Housing Collective (SPHC) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the 10 Year Strategy for Social and Affordable Housing.
It is important that the Victorian Government is engaged in an open and transparent dialogue with the Victorian community about the extremely urgent housing crisis across the State. SPHC is focussed on the evidence demonstrating what is needed to address this crisis and advocates for the adoption of necessary measures across all three tiers of government.
Our Collective estimates that at the end of March nearly 110,000 adults and children have registered with Housing Victoria’s Housing Register and will continue to rise. This figure is based on the most recently published data on the government’s own website and the rising trend of the previous twelve months including a COVID induced spike.
SPHC has noted the statement in the Strategy that “public housing will remain a central part of the system, maintaining its current stock levels and benefiting from increased investment in renewal, upgrades and maintenance”.
There is, though, absolutely no commitment in the draft strategy to build more public housing. Growth in what is referred to “social housing” is being passed over to community housing.
Adding to this is the advice on page 7 that the draft strategy is proposing that even community housing (as part of a fictitious continuum) should not be seen as permanent and that tenants will “transition...to build independence and participate in the private rental market and home ownership.”
This statement summarises perfectly the deeply flawed policy settings currently in place. Instead of having a policy foundation that commits to affordable, secure housing as a human right the current policy settings demonstrate a primary commitment to ensuring that both private investors and private developers building for profit are the real beneficiaries of their policies.
The evidence from both here in Australia and around the world is conclusive that public housing, owned and managed by society collectively through government, is the single most important feature of a just and fair housing system based on a commitment to housing as a human right. It is also the single most important component for solving homelessness.
Public housing must rapidly and significantly grow in Victoria to address the current housing affordability and safety crisis. The Interim Report from the Inquiry into Homelessness in Victoria advised that their survey of those who were experiencing homelessness or working in homelessness services across the state, placed the provision of public housing at the top of their priorities. The government needs to respond to and act on this advice from those who know what is needed to be done by government.
We urge Homes Victoria to include in the 10 Year Strategy a clear and costed plan for rapidly increasing the amount of specifically public housing to provide housing for all those who are currently on the Housing Register within three years and then meet ongoing need as the foundation for a 10 year plan and beyond.
We also ask that the final plan clearly refer to public housing as the foundation element of a plan and completely remove use of the term ‘social housing’.
Our submission will now address each of the 10 Year Strategy key areas of focus.
1. Pathways
For people experiencing housing stress and homelessness, the largest barrier to addressing their needs is a lack of public housing, as people experiencing homelessness and workers in support services told the parliamentary Inquiry into Homelessness in Victoria.
Homelessness and emergency housing services are in crisis due to the lack of long-term accommodation and early intervention programs in Victoria and are forced to focus on the short-term and immediate needs of people experiencing homeless rather than focus on long-term solutions.
Improving the flow of information and connection between services are important, but are not of themselves going to solve the growing housing crisis particularly for those in extreme housing stress.
The single most effective and sustainable pathway to good housing outcomes is the direct delivery of high quality, well maintained public housing in all neighbourhoods and regions. Keeping a home requires lifetime tenure and an absolute guarantee of rent that is pegged at 25% of income, not the 30% imposed by community housing organisations.
The 20% higher rents (that often has other estate service charges added on top) in community housing pushes tenants to the recognised level of rents that create housing stress. This is an unconscionable policy that is currently supported by the Victorian government.
The basic tenets of our public housing system in Victoria are world class - yet our capacity to deliver on them is profoundly undermined by: lack of ongoing direct investment, damaging policy choices to reduce and privatise the stock, and a profound lack of government commitment to the basic principle of public housing as essential to a just and sustainable housing system.
The Inquiry into Homelessness report released March 2021 also found that there needs to be an evaluation of the process and management of housing services with services moving to becoming outcomes-based services rather than crisis led. The sector has to reorient services toward a more flexible and integrated approach.
- Remove service duplication
- Better designed multidisciplinary services
2. Communities
People living in public housing are already well connected into their local communities.
The grassroots and community-based response to the hard lockdown of public housing buildings in Flemington and North Melbourne in 2020 are direct evidence of the exceptional talent, capacity and generosity of neighbours and local communities connected with public housing residents.
Our own work in neighbourhoods targeted by the state government’s Public Housing Renewal Program (PHRP) has shown very clear evidence of a high level of support for public housing neighbours from their wider communities. It is therefore wrong of Homes Victoria, and other agencies, to continuously frame public housing communities as disconnected and dysfunctional.
This is particularly egregious in the depiction of the housing system as a ‘continuum’ in the 10 Year Strategy Discussion Paper, which strongly infers that the government’s final housing policy will be one of progression from worst (homeless) to best (private ownership).
The steps in between suggest a kind of ‘ladder’ that everybody should be aiming to climb towards private ownership. This is deeply damaging, erroneous in fact and highly misleading.
Public housing should not be seen as transitional but as the most secure and sustainable form of housing.
Private housing is not a tenure of ‘independence’ and is only sustained through high levels of public subsidy through everything from the taxation system to the network of publicly funded infrastructure and direct grants to support homeownership for a shrinking number of households.
The inference that public housing tenants are ‘dependent’ (and therefore failing) and private owners are ‘independent’ (and therefore successful) is repugnant and factually incorrect.
The depiction of the ‘continuum’ creates a climate of public conversation that assumes that those who are not in privately owned accommodation have failed, and that this failure is their own fault.
It fails to understand the corrosive structure of private property as the very instrument that drives and continuously deepens inequality.
It obscures the reality that for many people, private ownership or even rental will forever be out of reach for socio-economic and structural reasons not of their own making.
It fundamentally demonises and stigmatises anyone who is not at the government’s declared ‘pinnacle’ of housing provision.
3. Growth
As described above there needs to be a commitment to directly lead and invest in large scale building of new public housing and the upgrading of existing public housing.
Recent research clearly demonstrated that the most cost-effective and efficient way to deliver good housing outcomes, as well as good value for government investment, is direct public delivery of publicly owned and managed housing.
This requires the immediate cessation of the sale of ‘surplus’ or underutilised public land. This land needs, first, to be considered as part of the Victorian community’s and Government’s Treaty obligations to First Peoples in Victoria. It then needs to be subjected to mandatory feasibility testing as new public housing.
We contest the assertion that the Big Housing Build (BHB) as announced by the government is an appropriate policy framework to address housing needs. As shown by researchers at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University, the BHB represents a very poor social gain for the amount of investment, and obscures the extent of loss of public housing that it will deliver if implemented in its current form.
Growth in community housing must not come at the expense of public housing.
Both the BHB and its predecessor- the Public Housing Renewal Program- directly transfers public housing assets to private owners and community housing providers. The shift to community housing imposes a significant rent burden increase on tenants as we have described above.
The transfer of stock and tenancies to community housing organisations reduces transparency, introduces highly differential experiences between providers, enables the hardest to house to be overlooked, and drives the privatisation and loss of public housing.
It fundamentally weakens our housing system, making it more unfair, more inequitable and more inefficient. Community housing is not the answer to resolving homelessness and housing stress - this is clearly evidenced by the rise in the number of people on the waiting list and the thousands more in housing stress during precisely the period when stock and tenancies have been transferred to community housing organisations.
4. Partnerships
Genuine partnerships can be integrally important to delivering just and sustainable housing outcomes for everyone in Victoria.
We reject the statement, though, in the consultation paper that community housing providers should play the central role in growing what the government brands as ‘social housing’.
Growth must be, as stated above, directly led and invested by the government in the form of public housing.
Community housing providers have a small and niche role to play through specific partnerships but that role must never be at the expense of public housing stock numbers or tenancy management.
As an example of failure of the government’s current partnership approach through the PHRP, the demolition of the Gronn Place public housing estate and its redevelopment by a partnership between the government, Women’s Housing Limited and private developer A V Jennings, has seen nothing built since the deal was signed in 2018, despite Women’s Housing Limited promising urgently needed emergency accommodation for women would be built. The partnership on this estate appears to be about maximising profits for A V Jennings, with construction delayed until this is guaranteed through private sales to homeowners and investors at inflated prices. This project and others stalled under the PHRP are about delivering profits opportunities to developers not urgently needed public housing.
Homes Victoria also needs to acknowledge that all types of housing and all of its interventions are occurring on the unceded lands of First Peoples and that the Treaty negotiations currently underway require sustained consideration of the responsibility of all government agencies and all sectors of non-Indigenous society to First Peoples sovereignty. The SPHC suggests this could be considered in the form of a Pay the Rent model where the provision of social housing is understood as partial reparation for dispossession. Homes Victoria should make a commitment to ensuring that no Aboriginal person experiences homelessness especially those living on their own Country.
5. SPHC Recommendations:
1. Adopt a policy position that establishes affordable, secure housing is a human right for all Victorians.
2. Change the language and framing of the Homes Victoria’s philosophy to place public housing at the centre of delivering on that human right by removing all references to a ‘housing continuum’ and any inference that there are better and worse forms of tenure. Commit to changing the public discourse that demonises public housing by immediately ceasing to refer to both estates and tenants as dysfunctional, disconnected or ‘not fit for purpose’.
3. Develop a clear, costed and committed plan to directly build high-quality and environmentally sustainable public housing dwellings in Victoria in the next 10 years as a foundation of that human right, starting with providing accommodation to everyone on the current waiting list within 3 years and then responding to the existing latent demand as expressed in housing stress figures beyond this period;
4. Make a publicly stated commitment to upholding responsibility as a good public housing provider who cares about tenants and their living conditions. To operationalise this:
a. immediately implement the recommendations from the two latest Victorian Auditor General Office reports about the maintenance of public housing;
b. develop a clear, costed and committed plan to upgrade and maintain (without any displacement or loss) existing public housing stock; and
c. empower tenants to have a say in how their housing is managed;
5. End the continuous sale of public land across government departments and agencies and develop a mandatory process for reviewing the feasibility of all currently owned vacant or underutilised public land to develop as directly delivered public housing;
6. Immediately equalise rents between public housing and community housing providers to no more than 25% of household incomes and confirm this in legislation;
7. Immediately legislate to ensure community housing providers are bound to the Victorian Charter on Human Rights;
8. Establish a Public Housing Ombudsman; and
9. Commence open discussions with First Peoples and Aboriginal communities informed by a Treaty framework as to the responsibility of Homes Victoria to First Peoples’ aspirations around housing justice.
Contact details: savepublichousingcollective@gmail.com