I’m wary of how diluted “affordable housing” means. Bypassing Council, VCAT and third party appeals are very tasty prizes for developers and I’m sure plenty would manipulate the definition of “affordable housing” to get a ticket to far less planning oversight, especially with the low bar of entry at 50 million. More housing is desperately needed, and NIMBY pushback has definitely been an issue, but I really hope the homes will actually be affordable, and that the Vic government planners will enforce good quality design, not boundary to boundary grossness with no setbacks or green space.
It’s difficult to have any faith in this government taking public housing needs seriously after how it has behaved since installation. Everything thus far has prioritised developers and shown near zero regard for community and amenity for public housing residents.
Sometimes it feels like they are trying to offload pesky public housing and wind down the whole department over time.
They’ve effectively privatised it. They’ve established a non-profit company called Building Communities they they’ve contracted out building and managing “social and affordable housing” to for the next forty years. The government will still own the land that the buildings are on, but housing will no longer be managed by Homes Victoria (which itself was spun off from the Department of Families Fairness and Housing Victoria to manage public housing). It all stinks, and it’s going to lead to worse outcomes for everyone.
With the tower sites they’re already flagging that it’ll only be about 1/3 public with the rest commercial meaning how much land is retained is in question. At a minimum public housing priorities will lose any strata vote.
There are good reasons not to build monolithic public housing but communities need to be retained and it would mean the scale would need to be even bigger. As it is it won’t even cover the wait lists.
There’s zero trust in this government when it comes to public housing and mostly for well founded reasons.