‘Beach views not just for the rich’

In December 2021, Victorian government officials went door to door at the Barak Beacon public housing estate in Port Melbourne to tell residents they had to leave. By the time resident Margaret Kelly, who uses a mobility scooter, reached the door, they had already left. Later that day, there was a letter in her mailbox telling her she was going to be “relocated”.

Now, Margaret is the last resident at the estate, and the Andrews government has already started demolition work. It’s a stone’s throw from the beach and only minutes from Melbourne’s CBD. Its nine medium-rise walk-up blocks were completed in 1982.

“It was designed not just for houses but to build a community”, Margaret explained at a recent Victorian Socialists housing crisis forum.

Precious little is left of that community now. Only a few weeks after they came knocking on Margaret’s door, housing department officials started pressuring residents into going by implying they would get a worse relocation offer if they held out.

“It was disastrous for people ... it absolutely panicked them.” The residents have all left except for Margaret, who refused to be bullied out of her home for over twenty years. In response, the government got a possession order to have Margaret forcibly removed on 7 August.

These standover tactics are being used in the name of the Andrews government’s Big Housing Build, a $5.3 billion program announced in 2020 and touted as “the largest social and affordable housing program in Victoria’s history”. The truth—as Louise O’Shea wrote in Red Flag at the time of the announcement—is much bleaker, at least for people who think housing should be a right.

Daniel Andrews is not one of those people.

Between 2018 and 2022, the state’s public housing waiting list swelled by 45 percent, from 44,000 applications to 64,168. So how does this stack up with the government’s claim to be building “thousands of new homes for Victorians in need” through the Big Housing Build?

In reality, the project is a scheme to hand out prime public land to private developers and shift existing public housing tenants into more precarious, privately managed “social housing”. Barak Beacon is just one of many public housing estates facing this kind of “redevelopment”. In Northcote, for example, the Walker Street public housing estate was demolished in 2020 to make way for private apartments set to fetch up to $3 million.

It’s clear why developers are keen to get their hands on Barak Beacon, or more precisely, the land underneath it. The median price for a two-bedroom house in Port Melbourne is $1.75 million. One house opposite the estate sold for $2.3 million in 2021. These figures—not ballooning public housing waiting lists—are what guides Labor government policy.

Margaret Kelly’s determination to fight against Labor’s smash-and-grab is heroic. Housing activists have joined her to protest outside state parliament in recent weeks, and there are currently daily vigils from 3 pm to 5 pm at the estate.

Solutions to the housing crisis aren’t hard to find. Margaret has a straightforward one: “Build a hell of a lot more public housing”. But we won’t get that without a fight, and that means campaigning, like Margaret, to defend what’s left of Victoria’s dwindling public housing stock.

One slogan that’s come out of the campaign makes an important point: “Beach views not just for the rich”. Public housing shouldn’t just be abundant; it should be beautiful.