Cabinet plan to boost social housing dumped in favour of developers
Cabinet plan to boost social housing dumped in favour of developers
Cabinet documents reveal a bold social housing plan was abandoned by the Andrews government in favour of measures that help developers.
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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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.