there's our catastrophe

A coalition of powerful building unions will launch a campaign urging the Napthine government to build more public housing to reduce waiting lists and create jobs.

The group, which includes the CFMEU and ETU, is preparing a submission for Premier Denis Napthine that outlines unused government-owned sites in inner-city Melbourne that could be transformed into public housing.

please be for real

The state government wants to suspend plans to convert Richmond and Fitzroy public housing estates into an equal mix of private and public developments, as community concern continues to grow.

…

It comes as a coalition of powerful building unions, including the CFMEU and ETU, joined a campaign to pressure the state government to abandon plans to build private developments on estate land.

this is actually good news for once and it’s interesting to me that I’m not really sure how to process that.  it’s a major win — not a windfall, but the result of a massive groundswell of people fighting for public housing.  It’s easy to get sucked into thinking that neoliberal ravages are inevitable and the most we can do is soften the blow.  that’s not actually true and neoliberal developer scumbags rely on our motionless despair to fuck shit up unimpeded.  so like, wherever you are, take a moment to appreciate this win. 

having said that, it’s not over yet, it’s never over, etc.  if you’re in Melbourne you should still come to the rally planned for tomorrow (Sunday) to show community support for public housing.  It’s 2pm at Atherton Gardens Housing Estate, cnr Brunswick St and Gertrude St, Fitzroy. 

(facebook)

The ABC has uncovered details of a secret Victoria Police operation targeting young African-Australians in Melbourne’s inner north.

Operation Molto was conducted by the Flemington Police Station in 2006.

According to the police force’s operation order document, Molto was established to find criminality in young African-Australians living in or visiting the Flemington public housing estate.

“to find criminality”

The ACT government has begun evicting its wealthier public housing tenants, including one household earning more than $230,000 a year.

sounds reasonable, right?  given that we live in a mixed economy rather than, like, a gift economy or full communism or whatever, you presumably have to means-test government benefits at some point. 

but I’m very wary of this kind of means-testing, because:

a) we don’t know the whole story. lots of people have a large income one year and none the next.  lots of people get large incomes one year through one-off flukes that won’t, ultimately, lift them out of poverty.  lots of people have finally, for the first time, gotten a decent-paying job, and are uncertain of their capacity to keep it, and it’s really hard to get back in public housing, it takes years.  a lot of people find it hard to get a private rental no matter how much money they have: people with criminal convictions and Black people have it especially tough.  and these evicted tenants aren’t even super-wealthy, we’re not talking millionaires here.

b) evicting people once they get to a certain level of income creates a poverty trap.  I mean “PUNISHED 4 SUCCESS” rhetoric is mostly fucked capitalist bullshit but it’s true that if you take basic housing stability away when people earn more than a certain amount, you’re effectively punishing them for entering the workforce. you may also be taking away the stability they need to get that work.  I mean jesus, just because someone is thriving in public housing doesn’t mean they no longer need it.  (if your oral contraceptives were working, would you stop taking them?)

c) making people leave their homes is not to be done lightly.  like I said, a stable home might be the foundation someone needs to keep their heads above water.  but even if it’s not, it’s pretty brutal to force someone to leave their community because they’ve become (often very moderately) successful.  there are huge knock-on effects for both them and the people around them.  I talk a lot of shit about “social mix” policies but that’s because they’re about importing middle-class-and-up people to live next to public housing tenants in the hope that middle-class-ness will rub off on them.  whether or not that would be a good thing it rarely happens, transplanted middle-class people keep to their own kind and public housing tenants are often kind of suss on them anyway, it’s just a form of privatisation by stealth. but if people with strong roots in an estate gain access to any kind of resources, that is a totally different story; that can increase the resilience of the whole community.  we spend millions every year on “community building” initatives.  why send that initative so far back in the name of a few thousand dollars? 

d) in australia, public housing tenants pay rent proportional to their income.  so if they’re making above median income, they’re probably paying above median rent for basic-to-poor quality housing.  they’re not freeloading: if anything, they’re subsidising the whole program.  if people are choosing to do that, there’s probably a good reason for it. they may fear the vicissitudes of the private rental market, or may not want to leave their home.  that seems fair enough. 

e) public housing was never originally intended to be a last-ditch safety net.  it was intended to be a good, basic option for working families.  the default, almost like public schools.  in a lot of places public housing is a very high proportion of the housing pool and a large proportion of middle-class people live there.  in Singapore something like 80% of the housing market is public.  more and more, public housing is being treated by policy makers as a form of crisis accomodation.  that’s not what it is. we don’t have enough crisis accomodation either.  but cannibalising public housing to make up that deficiency is shortsighted.  public housing exists to serve a population who might otherwise face homelessness.  if you evict people from public housing, you are increasing the numbers of people who need crisis accomodation.  & even people who have a high income one year can experience homelessness. 

and perhaps most importantly f) this is a vanishingly small proportion of public housing residents.  Apparently to date “43 Housing ACT residents have been served with a notice to vacate as part of the government’s crackdown on middle-class tenants”.  this is not going to free up a significant number of residences.  the waiting list for public housing in every state and territory is years long.  thousands of new dwellings need to be built.  evicting 43 people is not going to make a dint in that.  it’s a public relations ploy, and it’s a fucking scam. 

Documents obtained by The Age under Freedom of Information laws reveal 4053 children from sole-parent families were evicted from public housing in Victoria between 2000-01 and 2010-11.

Thousands more children from two-parent families were also evicted from their homes between 2000 and 2011.

The Department of Human Services documents show sole-parent families made up almost half of the 4687 evictions from public housing in Victoria during that period.