The United Nations’ special rapporteur on adequate housing, Koldo Casla, usually deals with slum demolitions in third-world countries. Last month, he took aim at the Victorian Labor government, claiming its demolition of Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers and the “forced evictions and mass displacement of approximately 10,000 residents” could be a violation of their human rights. This follows a Victorian parliamentary inquiry in December, which called for an immediate pause to the demolitions, and a class action against the demolitions filed by Inner Melbourne Community Legal (IMCL), which has been granted special leave to appeal to the High Court on 7 October.
Despite growing challenges, Premier Ben Carroll is ploughing ahead with the demolition of Melbourne’s public housing towers. Of course, Labor doesn’t characterise what it’s doing as “eviction” and “demolition”, but “renewal” and “redevelopment”, which it claims will increase the number of residents on the estates from 10,000 to 30,000, and replace towers that have “reached the end of their useful life”. There is no truth to this.
If Labor’s multi-billion-dollar project is aimed at addressing the waiting list for social housing, it’s missing a couple of zeros. Only 11,000 of the new residents will be in social housing, an increase of just 1,000. As of June this year, there were 58,021 people on the Victorian Housing Register’s growing waiting list, of which 33,253 have been assessed as “priority”—mostly those who are currently homeless or experiencing family violence. The redevelopments will mean that just 1,000 more people will have places in social housing ... by 2051.
The redevelopment won’t help others affected by the housing crisis, either. The other 19,000 residents of the new mixed-tenure developments will live in a combination of build-to-rent, a model that the Age has found to be between 20 and 70 percent more expensive than the market rate, and “affordable housing”, which is not that affordable and does not provide long-term security, as exposed by a recent Four Corners investigation.
The North Richmond public housing precinct is a telling example. In September, the state government briefed the City of Yarra on its plans for the tower at 139 Highett Street. The Age reported last month that the tower, which currently has 220 public housing units, will be replaced with a development that has only 150 social housing units and 650 build-to-rent units.
Simon, who grew up in the North Richmond precinct after his parents emigrated from Vietnam, is one of the residents affected. After the latest announcement about the precinct, he attended a community meeting of public housing tenants who demand the towers be refurbished rather than demolished. He told Red Flag that his parents, a labourer and kindergarten worker, were both poorly paid. Living in the public housing tower allowed them to escape the anarchy of the private rental market. “We knew what the rent was next week and didn’t have to worry about eviction or not being able to afford food. I could attend school and university without many issues. That security meant you could plan your life”, he said.
“Social housing” is an umbrella term that covers both public housing, run by the government, and community housing, run by not-for-profits. When Labor talks about social housing, it usually means community housing—so its claim to be replacing 10,000 public housing places with 11,000 social ones actually represents a huge cut in public housing.
Public housing rent is capped at 25 percent of a household’s income or the market rate, whichever is lower, while community housing providers can charge up to 30 percent. However, community housing organisations (CHOs) are entitled to 100 percent of any tenant’s Commonwealth Rent Assistance and can charge extra fees on top. In its submission to the inquiry, IMCL notes that some of its clients pay up to 50 percent of their income to a CHO through “rent, utilities, lift fees, concierge and management fees”. Community housing residents also have fewer rights than public housing residents; West Heidelberg Community Legal found that “long-term community housing tenants were 3 to 5 times more likely to face eviction than public housing tenants”.
Worse still, unlike the government, CHOs don’t have to allocate places based on need, which means that the more the social housing waiting list is serviced by community rather than public housing, the more that people with the greatest need who have complex problems such as alcohol and drug dependency may end up in perpetual limbo, constantly having their place in the waiting list taken by someone who will make fewer demands on the provider and will pay more rent.
The human cost of the demolitions is horrific. In testimonies to the parliamentary inquiry, residents reported how the whole process has made them feel powerless. Many first learned that their homes would be demolished through the media, after then-Premier Daniel Andrews made a public announcement. “[We] heard it like everyone else on the news”, one resident said. “It was shocking.” Another said that they felt they were not being treated “as a human being”.
The towers sit at the heart of Melbourne’s most diverse and most marginalised communities, particularly those from the Horn of Africa, as well as others from Vietnam, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere. Reem Yehdego, a resident of the North Melbourne precinct, told the inquiry that the demolitions “feel like erasure”, and that residents were being coerced into relocation “far from our doctors, our schools, our mosques and our community‑based support networks”. IMCL reported to the inquiry that, in meetings with Homes Victoria, their clients have been repeatedly told their family unit may need to split into two homes because of the small size of available homes, and that if they refuse two offers of this sort of alternative housing, they will be evicted.
This is not the first “redevelopment” program. One woman spoke of her nan’s experience being relocated in her 80s from Huttonham Estate, Preston, which was demolished in 2011:
“She became extremely lonely. Her community was gone. Her neighbours were gone. She had lived in that house for over 40 years, raised her children there—it was sentimental, important. It was the family gathering spot, imbued with memories from three generations. My mother and her siblings all agreed that after she was relocated, her dementia symptoms worsened ... There was only so much we could do to support her—we could not hire carers; we are working class. We are working class and need to work. How did you expect us to support her?”
In January, the government announced a second tranche of public housing tower demolitions. All seven towers house people over 55. I visited Kenneth Coldicutt, a resident at 94 Ormond Street in Kensington. If Housing for the Aged Action Group hadn’t helped him get a place there, he said, he would have likely remained homeless. Sitting on a sunny bench outside the estate’s community hub, he says he is furious about Labor’s decision.
“They want to wash their hands of public housing”, he said. But more enraging is “the way they’ve targeted the most vulnerable, the most frail, the most marginalised people”. There are three residents he knows of in his tower who are over 90, “and at least one person with terminal cancer who is in no fit condition to move”.
Ken is a member of Ormond St’s five-person residents’ committee. For months, he doorknocked his tower with help from 44 Flats United, a campaign group, to draft a list of demands and elect a committee to negotiate with Homes Victoria. They sent a letter to Homes Victoria at the end of August and have still received no response. They want Homes Victoria to begin cleaning the windows, which are so dirty that “natural light is blocked on many floors”. And they want a systemic plan to eradicate bedbug, cockroach and rat infestations that have plagued the tower.
“A more cynical person than myself might say that they’re using the rats and the cockroaches to speed up the process of relocating people”, Ken said as he gave me a tour of the rat holes and the stained vinyl floors where they last battled the cockroach infestation. His remarks echo one of the major themes of the parliamentary inquiry—the allegation that the government has engaged in managed decline, waiting for the towers to deteriorate to justify their demolition. Ken thinks they could all live there for another couple of decades, if the towers were properly maintained, “which they haven’t been for a very long time”.
This comment takes us back to Labor’s claim that the towers have to be demolished. You would think evicting 10,000 people would be a last resort, after all other options were exhausted. But Labor didn’t even begin to investigate other options. It commissioned a report from MGS Architects, investigating the possibility of refurbishing (rather than redeveloping) the towers to bring them in line with modern standards. It received this report in September 2024, a full year after it announced the demolitions. It then buried this report for the entire parliamentary inquiry (no doubt because it found refurbishment both possible and in the public interest), along with 146 other documents relating to its decision, claiming executive privilege over all but twelve.
So why is Labor doing this?
Speaking to North West City News in February, University of Melbourne urban geographer Kate Shaw said the government is trying to shift responsibility to not-for-profits, even though “it’s becoming increasingly clear that community housing organisations are financed by large companies that expect a return on their investment”.
The redevelopments follow the latest version of Labor’s model of public-private partnerships, which are just vehicles to involve profit-seeking businesses in public projects. What does this look like? One example is the “not-for-profit” community housing provider Together Housing (Victoria), which was awarded $206 million by the federal government’s Housing Australia Future Fund as part of a consortium of developers and CHOs redeveloping and managing public housing estates. As the ABC revealed, Together Housing is controlled by Tetris Capital, an investment firm with $3.7 billion in assets.
State and federal Labor governments are throwing money at developers, investment firms and dodgy charities, which get tenants’ rent assistance, subsidies and, to cap it all off, a 40-year lease of the public housing estates. Business feasts while the most vulnerable are left out in the cold.
“The government is trying to erase the idea that the state has any responsibility to meet the needs of its working class”, Simon said. “The whole point is you’re on your own.” Built between the 1950s and 1970s, Melbourne’s housing commissions have been the most visible monument to public housing in Melbourne.
Destroying the towers divests the state of its responsibility to provide, and pays dividends to Labor’s corporate mates. The result is that the most vulnerable people—migrants and asylum seekers, victims of homelessness and family violence—will be left to the vicissitudes of the private market, to rent hikes, mould and domineering landlords.
If you look past the dirt on Ormond Street’s unwashed windows, there is a magnificent, unobstructed view of the city. The eucalypt-framed skyscrapers go gold in the sunset. When Ken first arrived in his apartment, he remembers feeling it could never last—developers would look for any way to get their hands on the land and the view. It’s heartbreaking that the world has proved him right, that the working-class instinct that “this might be too good for me” has been borne out.
But it isn’t too good for Ken, or anyone else. We all deserve to be freed from the housing market. We deserve high-quality, sustainable public housing. We deserve houses next to parks and playgrounds, and we deserve the security to know where we’ll be living in one year, or ten. We all deserve a view.
