TEN$ION - Demolishing class identity in Melbourne: High stakes for a toy city
All film photography by KOMPLEX.
When I refer to the term “public land”, I am referring to the unceded sovereign land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This land is a principle in treaty negotiation listed within the UN Declaration of Human Rights of Indigenous People and further perpetuates that the Australian Constitution is fundamentally racist.
In 2024 we’ve all heard of “ACAB”. The anti-cop sentiment has made its way onto every second person’s upcycled print in Melbourne. The use of clothing to express a person’s identity and political view is most obvious in the city’s cultural hubs. Creatives flock to these perceived centres of culture, living in inner-city share houses and developing attachments to their new communities.
But there’s one thorny issue that juts out: these middle-class kids tend to exploit social media and social climb by harnessing their knowledge of middle-class behaviours and elaborate speech codes. It’s often working-class friends, friends in the housing commission and myself – people who directly experience police harassment – who are sidelined by this discourse, by the oversaturation of PhD-tier jargon in our lives and pop culture’s obsession with moral perfectionism. These music and arts communities explicitly advertise themselves as culturally aware and safe. But in the face of rampant individualism, it’s easy for people like me to feel we’ve been duped. It’s easy to spy a lack of integrity.
Similarly, public housing towers hold architectural significance in Sydney and Melbourne as displays of brutalist architecture. Emerging streetwear brands and artists use these buildings as backdrops in photo shoots and social media posts; in other words, as a marketing tool. Private developers erect new apartment blocks that mimic the brutalist towers, dated public housing flats, and prefabricated modern houses of the outer suburbs and recycle these practical architectural styles in the pursuit of profit. The Australian bourgeoisie has a long history of coercion and no subcultures, however stigmatised, are free from commodification and exploitation.
At the same time, rents are skyrocketing and the very concept, the very importance, of public housing is under threat. Many public housing residents across the country face forced evictions while those on the arduous wait lists for a home face an uncertain future.
It all feels a little, well, wrong.
Nowhere is this question of redevelopment more pronounced than in Victoria. In September last year, the Victorian government announced its plan to demolish and redevelop 44 high-rise public housing towers across Melbourne. Dan Andrews, Victoria’s ex-premier, has stated that the current dwellings are unsuitable for living, although no publicly-available evaluation or evidence supports this statement, and many public housing tenants across Melbourne disagree with the government's reasoning. Activist organisations, led by social housing tenants, are currently raising funds to independently investigate the claim.
This process is not unique to Melbourne. Communities that have overcome adversity and found peace are now being sold out to the highest bidders to accommodate the wealthy classes. Bohemian neighborhoods are cementing their culture across the country. Businesses in these areas often employ newcomers or the middle class, who take up space and opportunities for low-income earners to take on entry-level work. Redfern, Waterloo, Northcote, Flemington, North Melbourne, Carlton. The list is endless.
It is occurring across the country, even in places like the mid-north coast of NSW. Bellingen is one example where housing supply shortages, a booming Airbnb market, and an influx of celebrity residents during the COVID-19 pandemic have, in combination, pushed many long-term locals into homelessness. Between 2020 and 2021, rent in Bellingen rose 48%. This was the highest average rent increase in the country at the time. This is a national and cultural disgrace.
And where are our allies now? We need you more than ever.
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The Matavai and Turanaga Housing Commission towers are a domineering staple in the Sydney skyline. From Redfern and Waterloo streets, these concrete monoliths shoot skywards, a resolute symbol of the remains of working-class and welfare-dependent culture in what has become a playground for the wealthy in the world’s second most expensive city for housing. I know these towers very well.
I was born into a single-parent household in Waterloo. I lived the early years of my life on Phillip Street with my mother, great-grandmother, and members of my paternal family, while my father served one of several prison sentences.
During daylight hours, two telegraph poles cast shadows over our backyard. There were so many pairs of shoes hanging across those powerlines that they covered the whole length. This display wasn’t the work of a local shoe thief or children running amock. It was a code language. In short: these kicks were an advertisement for the availability of heroin, and heroin was everywhere.
Growing up in the 90s in Redfern, evidence of the heroin epidemic was impossible to miss. The streets around my primary school were a known shoot-up spot. In my first year of primary school, we learned how to dispose of used syringes. I was six years old when my teachers left this responsibility to me. You would go to the office, ask for a pair of gloves and a syringe bin, and then go and collect the used syringe and return it to the office.
In 1999 there were 1116 opioid-related deaths in Australia and an increase in drug-related diagnoses of hepatitis C requiring liver transplants. There was no cure for hepatitis C then and the risk of infection was a big concern within the local community. By 2001, a supply and quality shortage was taking effect. Less pure heroin meant users needed ever-growing quantities of the drug and more cash on hand.
My dad was released from prison around this time and we fell further into a spiral of criminality. My parents split (again) when I was six after we had experienced a long period of family violence.
It took thirteen years for my mother’s application for public housing to be successful, so I can tell you firsthand the waitlist for social housing is arduous. But finally, we moved into our flat on John Street behind the Dobell complex in Waterloo.
The area wasn’t always gentrified; for much of the 1900s, amid the “White Australia Policy” and the stolen generations, Redfern was a refuge of sorts for Aboriginal communities.
During the 1960s, Waterloo and Redfern shifted from an inner city slum to a high-density public housing area. It was a subtle but significant change. As Redfern became the centre of an Aboriginal civil rights movement, the presence of state-owned and managed housing ensured the area remained a safe haven for low-income people longer than many other inner-city suburbs. Although Redfern thrived, from the 90s until the early 2000s, a heroin epidemic ravaged densely-populated public housing areas such as Redfern, Cabramatta, and Mount Druitt. As a result, Redfern became mired in serious crime, addiction, and social issues.
Now, NSW bureaucrats plan to turn the Waterloo South public housing estate – the largest in Sydney’s inner city – into majority private housing. In August last year, mere months after the state government election, the new NSW Labor government made an about-turn. Pre-election, local Labor MP Ron Hoenig sent letters to the thousands of Waterloo public housing tenants, telling them they could “stop the sell-off of the Waterloo Public Housing Estate” and “protect” their homes by voting Labor. In August last year, however, Labor committed to the demolition and redevelopment of the Waterloo public housing estate, sparking frustration among tenants and advocacy groups. 1000 people’s homes will go including my old home, all to add a measly 53 extra social homes.
This thinly-veiled cash grab and sell-off of public land is only a very marginal improvement on the former NSW Liberal government’s demolition plan.
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We can observe a culture of longing from all classes in the cities. The middle class mobilises cultural currency to gain individual benefits without facing the same consequences as the lower classes. This gives the middle class the flexibility of wearing slogans related to drug and alcohol use, wearing sportswear brands, creating content for their boutique label out the front of people’s housing commission homes, fetishising petty crime, and glorifying only the benefits of sex work, all without facing the stigma that poorer people do. In a juxtaposing way, the working class emulates high-end fashion as a mini escape from reality. Luxury brands have become staple pieces among certain working-class subcultures as an expression of status.
I often found myself embracing this escape from my day when I started to religiously attend warehouse raves in Sydney’s inner west – events run primarily by men from upper-middle-class backgrounds who moved to the inner west and adopted black sportswear with silver bling. I’d get calls from clients who had seen my ad on backpage so I’d try to change my character to present as upper-class (as well as I could) after finishing a shift at my hospo job. I’d go and meet said person for the session in luxury hotels before websites like RentMen were much of a thing, before it became widely accepted and gentrified by parts of my community. I would change back into lad gear when I returned home to the flats late at night, so I didn’t get rolled.
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“We’ll build a better Victoria together because Victorians deserve nothing less” is at the forefront of messaging by Homes Victoria, the state government department in charge of social housing. This statement is hardly reflective of the current situation. Finding a liveable home has become harder than ever before. The Victorian government claims that housing supply (specifically, a lack of supply) is at the crux of the issue, but the numbers tell a different story. As a country, from 2008 until 2022 the number of households living in public housing has decreased from 331,000 to 286,000. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of homes provided by the four main social housing programs (public housing, community housing, state-owned and managed indigenous housing, and indigenous community housing) from 378, 000 to 418, 000. In short: there are a hell of a lot of empty homes across the nation. In Victoria alone, there are currently 4077 empty public homes.
Here’s the lay of the land: the state of Victoria has the lowest percentage of social housing in the nation (2.9% of homes are social housing). At the same time, Victoria also has the most stratifying conditions for people who have an existing criminal history, only introducing The Spent Convictions Act 2021 in July 2021 – a court process you undergo after ten years of no further criminal convictions to obtain a clean slate. We have a legal system that traps maltreated groups within poverty and the prison pipeline.
Now the Victorian Government is planning to demolish 44 public housing sites and leave vacant blocks of public land for years while the social housing waiting list blows out and housing costs skyrocket. The government wants to transform these public housing towers into apartment blocks with a mix of normal private housing and social housing. The government claims that, when the works are finished in 2051, the redeveloped sites will contain 10 percent more social housing. But this term “social housing” includes both public housing and community housing, the latter of which is operated by third-party, non-government housing providers. Not only does community housing offer less lease security to tenants, but community housing tenants often face rent charged at 30 percent of their income or more, while public housing tenants only need to dish out 25 to 30 percent of their income for rent.
The government’s plan also mandates that these redevelopments will provide in total a minimum of 10 percent “affordable housing”, an even more ambiguous term in the Victorian context, one that warrants scepticism.
I have a friend in Sydney who is paying $1257 a month in female-dedicated affordable housing. Her main source of income is the Disability Support Pension. This is what’s being defined as “affordable” for low-income earners with yearly increases. Rent in affordable housing isn’t based on your income; it’s based on a percentage of what market rents are.
No matter how you look at this situation, this is a form of privatisation. Privatisation in disguise, a political smokescreen.
It’s also dangerous. Tenants, housing activists, lawyers, and architects have all spoken to the media and penned articles pointing out that retrofitting and refurbishing the existing towers, instead of knocking them down, is substantially cheaper and kinder to the environment. It also removes the human toll. Displacement of low-income communities in Victoria has previously caused harm, deteriorating health, suicide, and death.
The friction between social classes is what makes Melbourne unique. To see the city’s diversity disappear will be an irreversible loss. The rapid pace of gentrification and sanitisation in Sydney should serve as a warning, not an example
Through the empty promises made by politicians regarding socioeconomic integration, the bourgeoisie benefits from individual aspiration while the working class and welfare-dependent live through failed collectivism. We have hit a crisis point.
Perceptions are slowly shifting. The Greens have launched an inquiry into the redevelopment plan for the towers in Melbourne and the Waterloo Estate in Sydney is fighting back against current redevelopment plans for that site. But the story of public housing in Australia is one rife with classism. State governments and housing bureaucrats continue to treat public housing tenants as second-class citizens. The disregard for public housing tenants – some avert their gaze while others refuse to take an interest – is a stain in our history books. Public housing is more than just a backdrop for a music video or an influencer’s Instagram grid. The aesthetics of the housing commission should not be a fashion trend. Coming from the housing commission is an identity, but, if you really grew up in one, it’s not an identity that you can dispose of and wear as you wish.
If we continue to treat housing as a toy tossed between investors in a playpen, as a privilege we must earn, the nation’s most vulnerable populations will suffer. It’s about time we started treating housing as a human right.
