The new Victorian Affordable Housing Rental Scheme won’t make a difference, says academic Libby Porter.
Porter, an urban planning professor at RMIT, says the scheme – which sets rents at 10 per cent below average market value for 2400 homes – won’t make a significant difference and will still leave vulnerable Victorians in housing stress.
“Studies show that at any given moment in time there are zero properties that are affordable for a household on quite a low income anywhere in Victoria, at all,” says Porter.
She is also concerned that the scheme, which targets low- and middle-income earners, will draw from housing stock that would otherwise go to people on the social housing priority list.
“I have a horrible feeling that once again it cannibalises public housing,” she says.
But Homes Victoria says that the total stock of public housing won’t change.
“Under the [Big Housing Build] package, the same number of public housing properties will be retained across the state and public housing will be made more sustainable through the replacement of 1,100 outdated dwellings,” says a Homes Victoria spokesperson.
Porter disputes this. She says that the package is only building community housing, while it demolishes existing public housing.
“We get zero – we lose all of the public housing,” she says.
But Homes Victoria says this will renew outdated dwellings and “public housing will be made more sustainable”.
But if turned into community housing it will have a higher rental cap of 30 per cent of a person’s income, compared to public housing’s 25 per cent, says Porter.
“If you’re on a low income and you’re already spending 30 per cent of that income on housing you are already struggling…so we have a whole ecology of housing policy that does not solve or address housing need, it deepens it,” she says.
A Homes Victoria spokesperson says that the cap of 30 per cent “means that regardless of the market rent of a given area, these homes will be affordable on a median income”.
But Porter says that governments around Australia are using community housing to offload responsibility for low-income housing.
“It effectively amounts to a kind of privatisation of social housing when we shift from public housing to community housing,” she says.
The Big Housing Build is a $5.3 billion investment by Homes Victoria that will deliver private and social housing. Community housing is a type of social housing managed by not-for-profit organisations, while public housing is entirely owned and operated by Homes Victoria. In March, the Victorian government announced a rental subsidy scheme for 2400 homes as part of the program. An independent review of public housing regulation is currently underway, with a final report due in May 2022.
(Featured Image: Flemington’s public housing commission towers during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns. CHRIS MCLAY, UNSPLASH).
