We welcome this announcement today as a ground-breaking step towards increasing critical social housing supply to support some of our state’s most vulnerable.
Whilst we welcome commitments around important public housing renewal, we urge Government to be transparent as to who will ultimately be the manager of these properties, in order for this announcement to be as positive as it seems on the surface. Ensuring these new high-rises are public owned and publicly managed is absolutely imperative. As the peak body for people in public housing, we are seeing more and more people requiring our advocacy and assistance as a result of poorly managed issues in the community housing space.
We are calling on the Government to commit to ensuring all new homes on the existing sties to be publicly owned and managed social or affordable housing. If not, this will unfortunately be a missed opportunity to supply enough of the safe and accessible, public housing Victorians deserve.
Further, we urge the Government to rule out the sale of any public land that is currently the site of public housing.
Commitments to introduce additional, permanent funding streams for social housing, inclusionary zoning and additional protections for private renters are very welcome.
We also call for the urgent release of the full Social Housing Regulatory Review. This Review was commissioned at the outset of the Big Housing Build to ensure best practice tenancy management for all social housing renters and to place their voices at decisions made about their lives. As Victoria’s social housing growth rightly continues to grow, the gap between the rights and protections enjoyed by public housing renters and community housing renters widens.
We look forward to working with Government towards delivering on these improvements for all of Victoria’s social housing renters and applicants.