Linda Nicholson has called Clarendon Vale home for more than two decades.
The suburb — and its neighbour, Rokeby — in outer-east Hobart were developed in the 1970s for public housing.
They have long had a reputation for entrenched disadvantage and high rates of crime: from hooning and car thefts, to break-ins and robberies.
Ms Nicholson is volunteering with a local community group, One Community Together, to beautify a park behind the primary school.
"I love coming out, even though I struggle with motivation, I love coming out and just being amongst the trees and seeing the birds flying around. If the sun comes out and you get a bit of sunshine, it feels really great," she said.
The park is a microcosm of the suburb's challenges, with the grass broken by the muddied tracks of trail bikes and a pile of discarded syringes lying near dumped household waste.
The One Community Together volunteers are planting native, bird-attracting plant species and developing a vegetable patch or "tucker garden".
Ms Nicholson wants to see more people using the space for recreation, picnics and exercise.
"I really enjoy being able to make the space more attractive for the community and have a space that all the community want to come out and enjoy," she said.
Group leader Kathryn Cranny said volunteering to improve the park helped give residents a sense of ownership of the space.
"It's bringing people together who've lived in the community a long time but might not know each other," she said.
"It's a sense of achievement. It's socialising. It's getting out of the house. It's making a difference."
Prices skyrocket in two years
Clarendon Vale was surrounded on three sides by bush and farmland until around 20 years ago, when the suburb of Oakdowns was developed on its south-east boundary.
Now, new suburbs are also being developed on its west, north and north-east boundaries.
Collectively, the area has been named Clarence Plains and it is rapidly becoming a popular option for home-buyers because house prices have increased across greater Hobart.
Domenic Carter bought a house and land package in a new Rokeby subdivision with his brother in 2019 and moved in this year.
His builder told him that, if they had been buying in 2022, the price would have been significantly higher.
"We signed the contract and we paid $400,000. If we did it now, it would cost us $650,000 minimum," he said.
The brothers are planning to live in the area for five years.
"It's a very developing area at the moment," he said.
"There's not a whole lot of, like, a community strip or anything like that. We just have these kind of shopping malls, which is not a great place for the community to hang out."
The Clarence City Council is working on a master plan for the area, including public open space, some increase in housing density and new community facilities.
Mayor Doug Chipman — who is stepping down from the council after this month's local government elections — said the area's growth had been significant.
"The population's increased by well over 50 per cent in the last 10 to 15 years," he said.
"We've had over 600 new development applications approved in the area over the last year and we see every prospect that that rate of growth is continuing."
Call to prioritise social housing
Despite the boom in residential development, the number of social or subsidised housing properties in Clarence Plains has remained fairly stagnant, around 500 homes.
Jenny Smith — the chief executive of the Council to Homeless Persons — said affordable and social housing needed to be prioritised.
"These redevelopments — without the structures in place to grow social housing — just mean more homelessness," Ms Smith said.
"We'd like to see a level of 10 to 15 per cent, right around the country, in all developments.
"And that would mean that people who are working, people who are not working, people with different abilities, people with different challenges in their lives, would be living together in healthy communities. That's what we should be planning for."
Ms Smith said federal, state and local governments all needed to work together on the issue.
"The big problem that we have in Australia is that we are yet to think about social housing as infrastructure, as something that we need to be having a pipeline of, that we are building, buying, acquiring every year," she said.
"Gentrification is not a bad thing, in itself. The missing bit is that pipeline of growth."
The social housing provider in Clarence Plains is Mission Australia.
It has just opened a tool library, which is the first of its kind in Tasmania, to equip locals with what they need to carry out basic repairs on their homes for a low cost.
It's also hoped that will encourage connections within the community as people drop in to collect and return tools.
Regional housing manager Stacey McDermott said the stigma in the area was slowing shifting, with its changing demographics.
"With the rising costs of living, across the state, sometimes we see that families that may not have needed to access social housing before are certainly accessing it now," she said.
"It's a slow process but, with new development always comes new demographics, and when you've got new families moving into the area — so a different demographic — what tends to happen is people's perception of an area then changes and, with that perception, comes additional resources, additional supports."
Community consultation on the draft master plan is open until 21 October and can be accessed on the website.
