Why we need to talk about social housing
Author: Veronica Lee (Communications Director) and Connie Gamble (National Affairs Director)
Social housing. It’s often a tricky topic in conversation, one that those who haven’t experienced first-hand tend to tentatively avoid, but generally agree could be improved. Ask yourself this: have you ever had an in-depth conversation about social housing, or even overheard one? For many of us, the answer is an uncomfortable no. Yet, fellow Melburnians are likely familiar with the big, brutalist social housing towers standing tall in many suburbs. Moreover, a silence and stigma spanning decades leaves Australian social housing lagging behind in fulfilling its potential. By observing the potential for social housing in other countries, a genuine investment in providing more accessible housing can simultaneously serve to eliminate this stigma.
Let’s start with a definition as far as Victorian policy goes. Social housing has two key branches: public and community housing. The difference between the two is management; while public housing is long-term rental housing managed by the government, community housing is managed by non-government organisations, generally charities.
In Victoria, we face a growing problem of public housing supply and demand. A growing waitlist of Victorians is expected to reach 100,000 in 2020, of which approximately a quarter are children. Meanwhile, existing public housing infrastructure is gradually deteriorating with time, while we aren’t adequately engaging in new developments to meet Victorian needs.
Let’s quickly reflect instead on a conversation topic much more familiar to millennial ears: “Will we really be able to afford a house?”. Many of these conversations will fizzle out after a brief echo chamber of “I’ve accepted I just never will”, or “the media might actually be right about the consequences of expensive avocados”.
This media-saturated discussion of affordable housing for the next generation has held, and continues to hold its share of the limelight, though the same cannot be said for social housing. Yet, social housing is overtly addressing the same problem of affordable housing for Australians, and critically, is ‘for people on low incomes who need housing, especially those who have recently experienced homelessness, family violence or have other special needs’.
How did we get to a stage where we lack adequate discussion about social housing, where silence and stigma are barring much needed development and improvement?
The beginnings of social housing
The Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV) that oversaw the development of public housing in the 20th century was founded in 1938. It was formed under the Housing Act 1937 in response to the consequences of the 1930s depression, with the goal of rebuilding the slum areas in inner-city Melbourne.
However, public housing as we know it today predominantly came about during the postwar era due to the housing shortage crisis that followed, an issue many parts of the world faced. During this period, governments were eager to produce as much housing, in the most efficient manner possible. This resulted in a period of architectural experimentation and technological advancement in prefabricated housing all over the world, that were sometimes, rather poor in quality due to the need for rapid erection.
Although the HCV itself was dissolved in 1984, it was predominantly known for its 1960s prefabricated concrete brutalist public housing estates found in many of the inner-suburbs of Melbourne: Carlton, Collingwood and Kensington to name a few. These buildings have persisted over the decades to add a physicality to today’s social stigma surrounding social housing residents, the buildings deteriorating over the years.
A look at social housing today
Public housing acts as a safety net for those who are most vulnerable in our community. It provides housing for those who cannot access or struggle to maintain tenancy in the private rental market due to a range of different factors. Although the Victorian government recently announced a $500 million package to help improve the current state of our social housing infrastructure, it is not enough to make up the decades of disinvestment into social housing.
Currently, Victoria requires an estimated 30,000 dwellings at a minimum. When compared to other Australian states, Victoria spent the least on social housing; the 2018 Productivity Commission showed that Victoria spends just $83 per person on social housing, which is less than half the national average of $167 that year.
Our ownership obsession
Earlier it was noted that in discussions of housing affordability and accessibility, social housing is rarely a central focal point. Instead, discussions in the public and political sphere tend to revolve around the private rental market. In the midst of what Tone Wheeler refers to as an ‘ownership obsession’ here in Australia, political attention has been predominantly funnelled into projects such as the current Morrison government’s ‘Homebuilder’ strategy. Policies like these compound a lasting silence and failure to commit to improving social housing for Australians by seeking to provide for current homeowners, or encourage growth in home ownership numbers.
Problematically, the attention given to growth in the private sector seems to have sapped both air-time and funding from social housing. Interestingly, since the late 1960s, home ownership levels have still dropped from over 70 percent to approximately 65 percent in recent years.
Lacking a coherent and lasting policy approach, or even adequate political attention, public housing has shrunk to only 4 percent of Australian dwellings. Meanwhile, we face a growing homelessness crisis bringing rates to approximately 0.4 percent; that’s over 116,000 Australians.
So what have other countries done? Taking a look at a starkly different society, Finland’s pathway to a near-eradication of homelessness has seen their social housing play a central role. There, social dwellings comprise triple of what they do in Australia, making up 13 percent of all dwellings. This has been a product of active political attention on the subject, and a marked investment in the construction of such dwellings. Of course, a country’s path to eradicating homelessness and the creation of social housing dwellings is subject to a plethora of intertwined factors, and cannot be copy-pasted into an Australian socio-political context. Nonetheless, Finland does make a case for the power of investing in social housing.
The social housing stigma: the circularity of public awareness and politics
The political floundering we’ve seen on Australian soil has paralleled, or rather fuelled, a strong stigma blurring our day-to-day conceptualisation of social housing. This stigma’s sense of permanence is bolstered by the presence of looming, brutalist housing estates.
In all honesty, having never lived in a social housing estate, it doesn’t feel quite right to discuss the issue so directly. And yet, this discomfort is a raw, tangible product of stigma.
Like the beginnings of political discourse on race and queer rights, engaging in an active discussion without having personal lived experience on an issue can feel like we’re making an illegitimate contribution. We encourage you to think about whether or not you’d be able to articulate any stereotypes surrounding social housing residents, and to be conscious of them. However, it is exactly this preference to simply avoid the subject that has allowed for political idleness this past half-century.
This circularity between public discourse and political action is central to creating change in coming years. A segregatory perception of those in the private rental or ownership market and those who rely on social housing only deepens with political hesitancy to create solutions. When considering the demographics of Australia’s homeless, we see a disproportionately large percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and people born overseas. If social housing is to remain the way it is today and has been for so long, the passage of time only deepens the physical and mental wedge that isolates some of the most vulnerable members of our society.
A solution: social mixed housing estates that need to be done right
Social mixed housing estates are believed to be one of the most effective ways to move forward in breaking down the physical barriers determined by wealth. However, many current approaches to social housing including recent developments ironically proposed as ‘social mixed housing’ by private developers, still segregate social housing from private developments on a single block of land, such as this development on Rathdowne street in Carlton. This is particularly relevant in inner city areas where land is more scarce. As a result, it limits the human circulation within the area to only those who live in each building, reinforcing the segregation between income classes and pre-existing stigmas simply due to a lack of interaction.
One of the physical proposals to combat this problem is to have social mixed housing estates with a “salt-and-pepper” mix of public and private dwellings within a single development (ie. the same building), while maintaining anonymity of the residents’ status. It creates an integrated living community that transgresses the income barrier. However, these types of housing models are seen as undesirable by both developers and home-buyers due to this stigma. As such, social-mixed housing is not carried out as extensively as this housing model depends on the cooperation of the private market.
Escaping inertia
Certainly, the actionable solutions to decades of political inertia on social housing can’t take place overnight. However, governmental attention is, by nature of democracy, shaped by the voice of its citizens. The radio silence on social housing is simply being translated into political silence at a state and federal level.
How are we to achieve real change and consistent policy in social housing if we can’t even talk about it amongst ourselves?