Last week, a Parliamentary Inquiry halted Homes Victoria’s plans to ‘retire and replace’ Melbourne’s 44 ageing public housing towers.[1] This controversial part of the Big Housing Build was announced in September 2023 after the hard lockdown of nine public housing towers in July 2020. The sudden lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic attracted immediate national attention. Residents were caught in the gaze of the daily news cycle and there was new interest in the conditions in the towers.[2] The Victorian Ombudsman reported the lockdown breached Victoria’s human rights legislation in December 2020.[3] In July 2023, not long before retirement of the towers was announced, residents finally settled a class action against the Victorian government over the lockdown.[4]
Built between the 1950s and 1970s, Homes Victoria claims the towers are not ageing well.[5] It argues that old fashioned design standards, periodic failures of services like lifts and plumbing, and a structure that is hard to upgrade to modern standards, means demolition and replacement is the best option.[6]
Opponents of demolitions in the community argue the towers can and should be renovated. They question why the government would demolish much needed public housing during a housing crisis. Residents fear being forced out of the inner city, or into a new tenancy managed by a community housing organisation.[7] Others argue the real aim is to remove all evidence of the 2020 hard lockdown and everything it exposed.[8]
Originating from Victoria’s postwar public housing construction program, the public housing towers are almost unique within Australian cities. Public housing towers were also built in Sydney, but never at the scale achieved in Melbourne. [9]
Before the Second World War, industrial activity was concentrated in the inner city. Driving to work was not an option and most workers chose to live near their work in whatever housing was affordable and available. For those with low incomes, home was often in a substandard building owing to a lack of building standards, accommodation shortages, and often landlord indifference as well.[10] Minimal Council planning requirements meant homes could be next door to industrial plants, or accessed through narrow laneways.[11] Calls from the wider community for change reached a peak during the 1930s when Oswald Barnett, an accountant and committed Methodist, documented inner city housing conditions in a master’s thesis and later an illustrated summary that circulated publicly as a booklet.[12]
After several years of agitation, in 1936 Barnett and a fellow advocate, Oswald Burt, were appointed to the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board charged with investigating housing conditions in inner Melbourne.[13] They found inner city workers living in cramped conditions, sometimes with up to 49 homes packed into an acre, jerry built partitioning of large houses to create sub-lets, and many homes lacking electricity, gas, or indoor plumbing.[14] Barnett and Burt also argued there was a link between living in these homes and higher rates of infant death, polio, and other infectious diseases in inner Melbourne.[15] Following the Board’s 1937 report, the Victorian Housing Commission, now Homes Victoria, was established in 1938. Its mission was to improve inner city housing conditions by building new homes and demolishing, or forcing the owner to fix, any homes declared substandard.[16]
Amid pervasive housing shortages, the Commission built public housing at Fishermans Bend from 1938 and Richmond from 1941, expecting these new homes would be attractive to inner city families.[17] Instead, they learned that many families preferred to stay close to their employment. Shorter commuting times, lower transport costs and cheaper food in the inner city meant many families preferred to stay where they were.[18]
Meanwhile, by 1942 the Commonwealth Labor government was designing an ambitious postwar reconstruction program to provide economic, social and housing security for working-class Australians, and prevent a repeat of the suffering and deprivation of the Great Depression. The new postwar Australia was to have full employment, industrial production, engaged communities and access for all to education, welfare and affordable housing.[19] Establishing the postwar reconstruction program required research, policy development, and decisions about roll-out, especially in areas, such as housing, where the Constitution placed responsibility with the states rather than the Commonwealth.
Barnett and Burt were amongst those who contributed to the Commonwealth Housing Commission held in 1943 to work out a postwar plan for Australia’s housing and urban planning.[20] This proposed a new approach to planning, building, and offering homes for people with low incomes, along the lines of the early projects in Melbourne.[21] The housing program was formalised in the 1945 Commonwealth State Housing Agreement (CSHA). The Commonwealth government funded the CSHA and state housing authorities, like the Victorian Housing Commission, would deliver it. Rent would be based on construction costs, not market rates. Tenants would be asked to pay no more than 20% of their income.[22] The states would introduce modern urban planning practices, such as separating residential and industrial areas.[23]
In 1945, problems with housing shortages were reaching crisis levels. Demobilisation returned around 600,000 people to civilian life over the period of about a year.[24] Housing shortages meant many families were sharing with other families, renting single rooms or living in improvised shelters. Others were living in emergency camps set up in converted military barracks at Williamstown and Camp Pell at Royal Park.[25]
The postwar public housing building program funded by the 1945 CSHA was the first significant opportunity for Victoria’s new Housing Commission to get a major public housing building program going. At first the focus was building new homes in Melbourne’s outskirts and in regional areas.[26] It was several years before the Victorian Housing Commission could start a major inner city renewal program. The CSHA funding arrangements left it to the Commission to fund land purchase and demolition activities for inner city renewal projects.[27]
Urban renewal in inner city areas became the focus from the 1950s to the 1970s. Blocks of inner city homes considered beyond repair were demolished block by block and replaced by medium and high density public housing featuring modern amenities. By 1970, urban renewal projects in Melbourne had displaced local communities from over 111 hectares (275 acres) in the inner city, to create over 8,600 public housing homes, mostly in high rise towers. This was 75% of metropolitan Melbourne’s total public housing supply at the time.
The very fast, high volume production of public housing towers in Melbourne was made possible by an innovative modular construction method that used pre-cast concrete panels, assembled on site and held in place with pre-tensioned cables.[28] This method built on the pioneering use of modular pre-cast concrete to build homes at Fishermans Bend in 1938.[29] The Victorian Housing Commission became focused on its engineering achievements.[30] The 32 storey Park Towers in South Melbourne was, at the time of build, the second tallest residential building in Australia, and the largest building of its construction type in the world.[31]
The communities disrupted by these large-scale projects had no role in their planning and were dubious about the benefits from the beginning.[32] The program relied on professional input from architects and urban planners, but they had mixed views as well.[33] By the mid 1960s, resident associations were forming and actively protesting the high rise building program.[34]
This resistance hardened as economic conditions changed during the 1960s, and reports of challenges with similar high rise projects in the United States reached Australia.[35] By the 1970s public housing tenant complaints about conditions in the high rises added to the growing community resistance to further high rise public housing projects.[36] There were calls for an inquiry into the ‘structural and design faults in the buildings’, hard line tenancy management practices, and generally unsympathetic treatment of residents, many of whom were from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.[37] The high rise towers were increasingly seen as ‘wilderness’ sites of poverty and destroyers of neighbourhoods and affordable places to live in the inner city.[38]
Having shown limited interest in urban renewal since the 1940s, the Commonwealth briefly re-engaged between 1973 and 1975. During these years, the short lived Department of Urban and Regional Development intervened in city planning strategies and modelled a less heavy handed approach to the roll-out of programs like Melbourne’s high rise towers.[39] Momentum for the construction of public housing high rise towers slowed during the 1970s in the face of increasingly well organised and strident resident opposition, advocacy for stronger resident consultation, and developments in planning laws.[40]
Now the landscape has shifted again. Through the Housing Australia Future Fund and other programs, the Commonwealth government is once again helping the states and territories to build more and better social and affordable housing in places close to public transport and services. The plan to add 44 ageing public housing towers to the Big Housing Build demonstrates Homes Victoria is once again focused on a very big and fast program to demolish and replace inner city homes. And once again, inner city residents are concerned about displacement and loss of access to affordable places to live.
More and better social and affordable housing is desperately needed in Melbourne. Government funding programs and supply targets are simply enablers. They help to focus programs that create lots of good homes and a foundation for lots of productive lives. Demolishing 44 towers, dislocating hundreds of residents, and disrupting communities is pointless unless this is the outcome.
Residents are told they should make way for the construction program so that good, new, homes can be built. But a construction program, no matter how well intentioned or well managed, cannot create good homes all by itself. Good homes only happen when the people who will live in them contribute to the vision and help to guide the process.
The question is, will Homes Victoria learn from experiences half a century ago? Will it choose a people-focused path that gives residents and the wider community a voice? Ideally, this would be a path on which residents, their representatives, and other community stakeholders are partners with Homes Victoria. At the very least, it must be a path on which technical expertise supports the community’s vision, instead of crushing it.
[1] Investigation into the Detention and Treatment of Public Housing Residents Arising from a COVID-19 ‘hard Lockdown’ in July 2020 (Victorian Ombudsman, 2020), https://www.ombudsman.vic.gov.au/our-impact/investigation-reports/investigation-into-the-detention-and-treatment-of-public-housing-residents-arising-from-a-covid-19-hard-lockdown-in-july-2020/; Kristian Silva, ‘Victorian Public Housing Tower Residents Agree on $5m Compensation for COVID-!9 Lockdown from Government’, ABC News, 24 July 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-24/melbourne-public-housing-tower-covid-lockdown-compensation/102640898; ‘There’s a Plan to Support Our Community | Big Housing Build’, Homes Victoria: Big Housing Build, accessed 30 August 2025, https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/news/theres-plan-support-our-community; ‘Inquiry into the Redevelopment of Melbourne’s Public Housing Towers’, Parliament of Victoria, accessed 30 August 2025, https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/publichousingtowers.
[2] Ahmed Yussef and Maani Truu, ‘Melbourne Tower Lockdowns Expose What It’s Like to Live Inside High-Density Public Housing’, SBS News, 8 July 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/melbourne-tower-lockdowns-expose-what-its-like-to-live-inside-high-density-public-housing/7lxfh3z0d; Sandrai Fale Carrasco et al., ‘Our Lives Matter – Melbourne Public Housing Residents Talk about Why COVID-19 Hits Them Hard’, The Conversation, 23 July 2020, https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.gsajwk3jp.
[3] Investigation into the Detention and Treatment of Public Housing Residents Arising from a COVID-19 ‘hard Lockdown’ in July 2020.
[4] Silva, ‘Victorian Public Housing Tower Residents Agree on $5m Compensation for COVID-!9 Lockdown from Government’.
[5] ‘1 Holmes Street (Frank Wilkes Court), Northcote | Big Housing Build’, Homes Victoria: Big Housing Build, accessed 30 August 2025, https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/projects/1-holmes-street-frank-wilkes-court-northcote.
[6] Homes Victoria: Big Housing Build, ‘1 Holmes Street (Frank Wilkes Court), Northcote | Big Housing Build’; ‘Frequently Asked Questions | Big Housing Build’, Homes Victoria: Big Housing Build, accessed 31 August 2025, https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/frequently-asked-questions.
[7] Housing Towers Demolition Questioned, directed by Parliament of Victoria, 2025, 2:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGqPdpa5B2Y; Louis Taffs, ‘The Victorian Government’s Destruction of Public Housing’, Text, The Saturday Paper, 21 June 2025, 2, https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2025/06/21/the-victorian-governments-destruction-public-housing.
[8] Taffs, ‘The Victorian Government’s Destruction of Public Housing’.
[9] M. A. Jones, Housing and Poverty in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1972), 72.
[10] ‘Melbourne’s Vicious Slum Rocket’, Smith’s Weekly (Sydney, New South Wales), 15 April 1950.
[11] F. Oswald Barnett and W. O. Burt, Housing the Australian Nation (Research Group of the Left Book Club, 1942), 10.
[12] ‘Booklet Tells of Slums’, Sun News-Pictorial (Melbourne, Victoria), 30 November 1933; Scrutator, ‘Latest in the Book Shops: A Social Cancer, and a Terrible Indictment’, Weekly Times (Melbourne, Victoria), 16 December 1933.
[13] E. W. Russell, ‘Frederick Oswald Barnett (1883–1972)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, 18 vols. (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, n.d.), accessed 4 September 2025, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/barnett-frederick-oswald-5138; Alan Mayne, ‘A Just War: The Language of Slum Representation in Twentieth-Century Australia’, Journal of Urban History 22, no. 1 (1995): 81.
[14] Stuart MacIntyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (NewSouth, 2015), 175–76; Barnett and Burt, Housing the Australian Nation, 9–13.
[15] Barnett and Burt, Housing the Australian Nation, 10–11.
[16] Patrick Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing (Federation Press, 2012), 42.
[17] David F. Radcliffe, ‘Fishermans Bend’, Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society, accessed 14 October 2025, https://www.pmhps.org.au/tag/fishermans-bend/; ‘1941, 1943. Richmond Housing Estate’, Picture Victoria, Yarra Libraries, 31 March 2006, Victoria, https://www.picturevictoria.vic.gov.au/site/yarra_melbourne/Richmond/14890.html.
[18] Barnett and Burt, Housing the Australian Nation, 45–46.
[19] Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 5–6.
[20] Barnett and Burt, Housing the Australian Nation.
[21] Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing, 50–53.
[22] Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing, 98–99.
[23] Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing, 81.
[24] Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 325.
[25] Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 333, 337.
[26] Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 336.
[27] Troy, Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing, 57, 100.
[28] ‘High Rise Pre-Cast Towers: Designing Australia’s Public Housing’, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, accessed 8 September 2025, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/designing-australias-public-housing/high-rise-pre-cast-towers.
[29] ‘Holmesglen Concrete Housing Project: Designing Australia’s Public Housing’, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, accessed 8 September 2025, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/designing-australias-public-housing/holmesglen.
[30] Renata Howe David Nicols, and Graeme Davison, Trendyville: The Battle for Australia’s Inner Cities (Monash University Publishing, 2014), 22.
[31] Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, ‘High Rise Pre-Cast Towers’.
[32]Mayne, ‘A Just War: The Language of Slum Representation in Twentieth-Century Australia’, 102.
[33] John Buchan, ‘Can High Flats Help End Slums?’, Herald (Melbourne, Victoria), 6 September 1952; ‘Row-Housing Seen as Slum Panacea’, Herald (Melbourne, Victoria), 13 August 1951.
[34] Howe, Trendyville, 23.
[35] Howe, Trendyville, 23.
[36] Rivett Rohan, ‘“HIgh-Rise Slums” Cold Comfort for Melbourne’s Poor’, Canberra Times (Australian Capital Territory), 12 December 1973; ‘Housing Disgrace’, Tribune (Sydney, New South Wales), 4 June 1974.
[37] Tribune, ‘Housing Disgrace’.
[38] Rohan, ‘“HIgh-Rise Slums” Cold Comfort for Melbourne’s Poor’.
[39] Kristian Ruming et al., ‘Commonwealth Urban Policy in Australia: The Case of Inner Urban Regeneration in Sydney, 1973-75.’, Australian Geographer 41, no. 4 (2010): 450, 55475196, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2010.519694.
[40] Howe, Trendyville, 93–95.
