A Statement on the Racial Politics of Public Housing: Melbourne towers’ lockdown
11 July 2020
For the general public, the hard lockdown of high-rise public housing estates in Melbourne has brought the racial politics of Australian housing policy into sharp focus.
For many of those that were held in detention, their incarceration follows a long history of policy-led white supremacy that exists in Australia.
The primary role of social policy in settler-colonial settings, is to maintain social relations to property. In Australia, those social relations are racialised. For the settler-colonial state to impose its future, it will struggle against anything that does not uphold settler possession of property.
First Nations people have lived with and struggled against the various modes of oppression under settler-colonialism for generations. There has always been the understanding that housing is an instrument of racial oppression. As Tanganekald legal scholar Irene Watson once observed, the housing crisis for sovereign First Nations began in 1788.
People who live in public housing in Victoria, are more likely to be people impacted by colonial and racial violence / injustice. Public housing should be places where any resident should feel safe. But they should also be spaces where residents do not live in fear of arbitrary detention, police brutality or the violence of displacement that is currently being rolled out under renewal programs.
The SPHC are staunchly anti-racist. We stand against racial and colonial oppression. We fight against it when we see it being deployed through housing policy, especially public housing redevelopment programs. We see the struggle for housing justice as intrinsically linked to anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle. We therefore acknowledge and commend the work of local groups who responded so fast to their community’s needs, particularly Voices From the Block, RISE and AMSSA.
Unfortunately, at the Flemington Estate, three-story buildings have already been demolished. At the Abbotsford Street Estate in North Melbourne, near the locked down towers, a cluster of three-story buildings sit empty and half-gutted. It is the same at Dunlop Ave Ascot Vale, Walker St Northcote, Oakover Rd Preston, Gronn Pl Brunswick West and estates in Heidelberg West.
At all these sites, racially and ethnically diverse residents have been forcibly relocated to be replaced by mainly private housing built for investors and homeowners. Only marginal increases in public housing stock will be achieved, most likely separated from private stock. Government policy is ensuring stigmatisation remains in place.
The units demolished were 2-, 3- and 4-bedroom dwellings. They will be replaced by 1- and 2-bedroom units, effectively excluding families from returning to site. Migrants from non-European countries who live in public housing have larger families. The renewal program effectively whitens these spaces.
Adding to this travesty is the intention to transfer public housing management to opportunistic community housing businesses whose rental policies charge residents up to 30% of income – the officially recognised threshold of housing cost stress. In public housing, residents pay 25% of income and have tenure for life.
Around the world, public housing redevelopment has been used to explicitly target Black communities and people of colour. In the US, public housing redevelopment programs have been used for what was called ‘de-ghettoisation’ – intentionally dispersing inner-city Black populations by introducing middle-class white people. In the Netherlands, laws were passed in the last 10 years giving authorities the power ‘to refuse unemployed or underemployed households to locate in rental housing in neighbourhoods deemed to have too high a concentration of low-income’. In Germany, renewal and social mix policies have resulted in ‘moving-in bans’ that prevent too many ethnically and racially diverse people from living in the same area.
The Andrews government’s redevelopment projects in Melbourne are racist. They speed up gentrification, displace ethnically and racially diverse people, and deepen the privatisation of unceded First Nations lands.