Cabinet plan to boost social housing dumped in favour of developers

www.theage.com.au

The Andrews government dumped an ambitious cabinet-approved plan to lift the proportion of social housing in Victoria by almost two-thirds, opting instead to respond to the housing crisis with a voluntary, developer-led delivery of so-called affordable housing.

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2y ago

Cabinet plan to boost social housing dumped in favour of developers

www.theage.com.au /national/victoria/cabinet-plan-to-boost-social-housing-dumped-in-favour-of-developers-20230922-p5e6qr.html

8 comments

Jesus fuck start eating the rich already this is fucking stupid.

This is very sad if true. We need a crisis level response but even Andrew’s isn’t brave enough to stand up to developers
- Andrews is good on a lot of things, but standing up to developers isn't one of those.
- Isn’t brave enough to stand up to developers? He acts like he’s on their payroll. He’s effectively privatised public housing in Victoria:
  First they spun off Homes Victoria from the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing to manage public housing.
  Then they creates a not-for-profit company called Building Communities and contracted out managing new “social and affordable housing” to them for the next forty years.
  They are now demolishing public housing and replacing it with this “social and affordable housing”.
  In some cases, only one third of the new residences will be “social housing” (supposedly similar terms to public housing but not managed directly by a government department), while the rest will be “affordable housing” which in practice is meaningless.
  Thousands of people are being displaced from their homes, communities, and support networks.
  Calling it “Building Communities” is a bad joke when they’re in the process of destroying communities. It’s sickening. In privatising public housing, Andrews has done what even Kennett wouldn’t dare to do.
  Dan’s been far too eager to help out the property developers and construction companies. The extension on CityLink tolls that Transurban got as part of the West Gate Tunnel project was just too good to be true. Meanwhile, Vic Labor is running up more debt, which will inevitably lead to another Kennett being elected when servicing the debt becomes crippling. But this time, there won’t be anything left to sell off to pay down the debt.

FFS
- Well when the state is balls deep in debt you're only left with weak options
  
  Seriously, where’s the money going? Victoria has the second highest GSP of the states, yet has the lowest spend per capita on health, lowest spend per capita on education, lowest proportion of public housing, and 30% worse debt-to-GSP ratio than NSW. The state is relatively small in terms of area, so Victoria doesn’t have the burden of maintaining infrastructure to keep a sparse population connected across a large area like Queensland and WA do.
  NSW Labor have had their fair share of corruption scandals (e.g. Obeid, Tripodi and Kelly), yet they managed to get through the ’90s and ’00s without running up the kind of debt Victorian Labor has amassed under Cain and again under the series of Labor governments since 1998. Victorian Labor seems to have a unique talent for pissing away money with little to show for it.

I've worked on a few of the most recent social housing projects and, my god, there's such a disconnect with how much the state thinks housing should cost compared to the real cost. In short, the projects end up being criminally under funded for what they expect and you end up with everything absolutely gutted - materials, lighting, security etc.
My tin foil hat and I say that a lot of the state's money goes to stupid infrastructure projects for Transurban to build, leaving pennies for everything else.

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