Emily* is one of the many residents whose future in the Ascot Vale public housing estate remains uncertain. This enormous public housing complex in Melbourne’s north, which includes 57 freestanding, low-rise buildings spread across fifteen hectares in a well-resourced central suburb, is one of eleven inner-city estates slated for demolition under the state Labor government’s Public Housing Renewal Program.

Within the Ascot Vale estate, the bells and whistles of the state government’s announcement were drowned out by panicked rumours about the immediate eviction of tenants from their homes. Emily remembers the atmosphere of confusion and coercion well. “In 2017”, she recalls, “government authorities came to the estate to meet with us, and the people holding the meeting were doing that thing where they ask, ‘what would you like to see?’, rather than telling you what their intentions were”.

Their intentions, as residents would later discover, were to carry out a massive sell-off of public land and housing to private developers, in exchange for the latter’s commitment to reserve a mere 30 percent of dwellings at the redeveloped sites for low-income residents. These residents would be on tenancy agreements largely managed by non-government organisations in the community housing sector. In other words, the plan sounded the death knell of public housing at the Ascot Vale estate, and foresaw the dislocation of its longstanding community. Not that the government presented it like that to residents.

“[The government] started handing us transfer papers giving you options about where you’d like to go”, Emily recalls. “But somewhere on the form, in teeny tiny writing, there was a sentence about how your location preferences weren’t suburbs but catchments. So if you said Footscray, you could end up where there are no buses running in North Sunshine. If you said Sunshine, you could end up past Deer Park. This happened to at least one person I know. A single mum ended up in Meadow Heights, without a car or ability to drive, with kids needing to go to school, and the closest train station taking an hour to reach by bus.”

For Emily, the worst part of these transfer forms, which many culturally and linguistically diverse tenants signed without access to translators or social support services, was what wasn’t said. “These legal documents didn’t say you’d be returned to public housing—just that you’d be rehoused”, she explains. This predatory behaviour by the Department of Health and Human Services—as it was known before being restructured and renamed, in Orwellian fashion, the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing—prompted Emily and other residents to initiate the Save Ascot Vale Estate campaign (SAVE). They wanted residents and the broader community to understand the privatisation agenda underpinning the state government’s “renewal” program.

Central to understanding how housing is being privatised in Victoria is appreciating the distinction between public and community housing. Conflating the two under the banner of “social housing”, as the government often does, is a conscious strategy to confuse people.

Public housing tenants have the government as their landlord, secure leases, strict limits on the amount of income they can be asked to pay (usually 25 percent maximum), access to centralised services for maintenance and clear recourse to lodge complaints. For community housing residents, by contrast, everything is more expensive, deregulated and precarious. “The [community housing] leases are not life-long, but reviewed regularly”, Emily explains. “Your rent can be up to 35 percent of your income—or in fact much more when you factor in the extra fees for common amenities like lifts, that tenants are often charged. There are more rigid rules. You can’t have people stay over for more than a week without putting them on the lease, for example. There’s no department. There’s no central number you can call for any repairs.”

And that’s not the worst of it. With community housing providers legally obliged to offer only 75 percent of their housing stock to people on the Victorian Housing Register (the housing waiting list), and without strict oversight over the selection process, cherry-picking based on the projected profitability and reliability of prospective tenants is common.

When SAVE activists explained this to Ascot Vale residents at regular information stalls in the local area throughout 2017, 2018 and 2019, there was shock and indignation. The campaign group collected thousands of signatures demanding the state government revoke its plans to demolish and redevelop the estate. “Most people genuinely believe public housing should exist”, Emily notes.

Sustaining the campaign amid the dislocation of residents has proved challenging. Since first announcing its plans in 2017, the state government has bulldozed the public housing blocks on Dunlop Avenue and rebuilt around 200 units in their place. Only 88 of them are slated to be used as community housing—a mere eight more dwellings for low-income people than previously existed on the site. And when measured in terms of bedrooms, the new accommodation will likely house fewer people than before, and certainly fewer families.

The state government, however, repeatedly cites this 10 percent increase in social housing stock on the inner-city public housing estates as an important response to the crisis of housing affordability. But the concrete facts tell a different story. “Eight new units is not impressive”, Emily bluntly remarks.

As of March, 55,000 households were listed on the Victorian Housing Register, more than 30,000 of which were in the priority access category. This means that about 120,000 individuals in the state need housing, the majority of whom need it urgently. And the demand is growing rapidly. In the five years since the renewal program was first announced, the waitlist for social housing in Victoria has increased by 55 percent. A 10 percent increase in social housing stock at select inner city estates is, in this light, a drop in the ocean.

If the experiences of Emily and her former neighbours at the Ascot Vale estate are anything to go by, the state government’s Renewal Project may simply swell the ranks of the Victorian Housing Register.

Adding insult to injury, the state government maintains that the “renewal” of the Ascot Vale estate is primarily driven by concern for tenants’ wellbeing and living conditions. A government spokesperson interviewed by the Age referred to the already demolished blocks as “past their lifetime and no longer fit for purpose”. Tenants, the government says, deserve new, environmentally sustainable units built to meet their accessibility needs.

Emily scoffs at this claim, which comes from the very government that has chronically and, in her mind, deliberately neglected the estate as a part of a slow-burn strategy to eradicate public housing, a strategy she dubs “demolition through decay”. “There are bits of concrete falling down in the stairways of our buildings. They’re very run-down. Some of them have old wooden sash windows, with paint peeling off, which you can’t open”, she explains. Maintenance requests for these and many other issues have been long deferred—if not outright ignored—by the department.

The quiet disappearance of the groundskeepers from the estate is similarly telling. “We used to have about six caretakers who’d come five days a week to do maintenance. They’d come through regularly to dust the public access stairways. They’d report anything major to be fixed”, Emily says. Then, without any warning, “they all lost their jobs, many of them a year before they were going to receive retirement packages”. Now, she says, “some casual workers from a labour hire company come once a week to put the bins out. That’s it. There’s nothing else”.

Managed neglect of the estate, as SAVE activists regularly point out, has laid the basis for the government to argue for its demolition. It makes it possible for the ALP to claim, with some degree of legitimacy, that the estate requires a dramatic transformation.

The question is: whose interests and needs will this transformation serve—existing public housing tenants, the many thousands on the housing waiting list or the profits of property developers that the government is handing land to?

For the activists involved in SAVE, the answer has always been clear. The challenge was to show that another kind of renewal of their homes is possible. Then came Simon Robertson, an architect from not-for-profit research group OFFICE. He approached Emily and SAVE to ask them to participate in a project investigating the economic and social cost of the government’s demolish-and-rebuild approach to social housing.

Robertson and his collective posed the question: why not just refurbish the existing units, keep the existing tenants in their homes, and safeguard Ascot Vale public housing estate for a future in which the need for such housing is only projected to grow? The group’s findings, published in May, compare the estimated costs of demolishing the public housing units on Dunlop Avenue and those of repairing the units in a different, unoccupied part of the estate. They found that the government could save $413,070 per dwelling if it refurbished the Ascot Vale estate, all while saving existing residents from relocation.

When Robertson’s report made headlines, it was mainly because of the wastefulness his collective identified in the renewal program. But this wasn’t a miscalculation on the state government’s part, it was the consequence of its calculated effort to minimise state control over housing, and to open profit-making opportunities for developers.

For public housing tenants, the work of Robertson’s collective provides a framework through which to argue for an alternative to the government’s demolition plans. As Margaret Kelly, a resident of the Barak Beacon estate in Port Melbourne, told the Guardian, “it shows that the government could achieve their stated goals without destroying communities”.

At the Ascot Vale estate, Emily and SAVE have enjoyed a minor victory of sorts. In the wake of the OFFICE report, residents began noticing tradespeople coming and going from the buildings on Ascot Street—a subtle signal that the units, at least for now, might be safe from demolition. The challenge from here is to build the forces necessary to establish a broader consensus around the idea that repairing existing dwellings is one of the first frontiers in the fight against the privatisation of public housing.

For Emily, who grew up in the union movement and one of whose heroes is NSW Builders Laborers Federation leader Jack Mundey, the strategy needed is clear. “I remember how stamping your feet got things done”, she says. “And I still believe boots on the ground is still the best tactic.”

* Name changed

SAVE is hosting a forum on public housing and the future of the Ascot Vale estate, featuring candidates for the lower house seat of Essendon in the Victorian state election. 11am Saturday 12 November, Wingate Community Centre, Ascot Vale. RSVP here.