The Greens have questioned why 44 public housing towers slated for demolition in Melbourne could not have been refurbished, after Victoria’s housing agency chief said maintaining them would be akin to “putting lipstick on a pig”.
Homes Victoria has been forced to defend the government’s decision to rebuild the towers, amid fierce opposition from the Victorian Greens, with the agency saying maintaining the towers would cost $2.3bn over 20 years.
The project, announced by the government last month, will lift the number of residents living on the sites from roughly 10,000 to 30,000. The government says it will lift the number of social homes by 10%, though it is unclear exactly how many of the new units will be public, social and market-rate dwellings. The cost of the project has also not been released.
Speaking at the last hearing of the rental affordability inquiry on Tuesday, the Homes Victoria chief executive, Simon Newport, said refurbishing the towers would be like “putting lipstick on a pig”.
“The program is projected to run for 27 to 28 years. Some of the towers could be 80 years of age,” Newport said.
“The construction methodology, ceiling heights that don’t permit services to run between floors, no heating, no cooling, no balconies, it’s difficult to clean windows. All of those factors were taken into account.”
He said just maintaining the apartments to their current state would cost $2.3bn, roughly $55m per tower, over the next 20 years, though the government has not released that modelling.
“In terms of the sites, they’re done in terms of asset condition. I would point out our tenants are overwhelmingly telling us this,” he said. “It’s taking up to 20 offers to get people to come and move to these towers.”
The towers currently house 5,800 families but he said because they are not suitable for many people with disability, they were often offered several times to people on the waiting list before a suitable tenant was found.
Newport said many of them had issues, such as being retrofitted with sprinklers, which flood the elevators when they are triggered, forcing residents to use the stairwell – which could mean descending 22 floors in some cases.
“Heating and cooling are an issue,” he said. “Those properties were designed in the 50s and built in the late 50s. Their time is well past.”
But the Greens state party leader, Samantha Ratnam, has said the plan could herald “the end of public housing in the state”, with public land being sold off to private developers. She questioned why the government could refurbish some apartments, such as the Atherton Gardens estate in Fitzroy, but not others.
“In recent years several towers across Fitzroy and Richmond have been undergoing extensive renovations, with many floors already completed,” Ratnam said. “Yet now Labor appears to be abandoning this so they can kick out residents, demolish the towers and sell off most of the land.
“The government needs to stop this disastrous plan and take responsibility for ensuring Victorians have secure and genuinely affordable housing by building 100,000 new public homes – not destroying the ones we have.”
A spokesperson for the government said the Greens were “fighting against new housing”.
“Over the past 20 years an ongoing upgrade program has refurbished the apartments in the towers – but the age, overall constraints and condition of the buildings mean they no longer meet liveability standards,” the spokesperson said.
Among public housing advocates, there has been mixed response to the proposal, with the Victorian Public Tenants Association saying it was a step in the right direction but calling on the government to be transparent about who will manage the properties.
The Council to Homeless Persons chief executive, Deborah Di Natale, said the government had missed a “critical opportunity” to tackle the housing crisis.
“We need at least 60,000 new public and community homes to be built in Victoria over a decade. Unfortunately there’s nothing like that in these announcements,” Di Natale said.
