About 15 years ago, Kerene Pope participated in a state government renewal project in her neighbourhood of Delacombe, a suburb in Ballarat’s west.
“We were trained up to survey the whole neighbourhood, helped the people around here who otherwise didn’t have any jobs or major qualifications and gave people a chance to get out, get to know each other and the neighbourhood,” she says.
The renewal project included a redevelopment of the Delacombe public housing estate, which Pope says “actively involved the community who lived there”. Pope herself has lived in public housing in Delacombe since 2008.
“It did see a lot of improvement,” she says.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
In 2021, the state government announced it was going to deliver more housing in the estate as part of its $5.3b Big Housing Build project to address Victoria’s critical social housing shortage.
It said more than 60 old dwellings in the estate would be demolished, to be replaced with a mix of social and affordable housing.
Relocation was completed in late 2023, with residents uprooted from their neighbourhood but promised first right of return to new homes that would be “energy efficient and environmentally sustainable”.
Two years later, and four years after the plan was announced, building has not begun.
Pope says her neighbourhood has fallen into a state of disarray. Dozens of vacant blocks have been fenced off for months. Others are boarded up. Signs behind the fences read: “More and better homes for Delacombe”.
“The community was trying to improve. They fixed up the park, put new fences on a lot of properties, spent money fixing the gardens – just to knock it all down,” she says.
In June, the state government held public drop-in sessions for a second round of community consultation. Pending planning approval, construction is expected to start in late 2025 and be completed in stages between 2027 and 2028.
A Homes Victoria spokesperson said they were working with residents so that everyone would have opportunity to comment on the project.
But residents say they have been kept out of the loop on some issues. During a site investigation in 2024, contaminants were identified in the soil at four properties. Remediation work has since been completed. It’s the same thing that caused delays in the Virginia Hill public housing development in Bendigo.
Pope says she learned about the soil contamination when she read reports in the local newspaper.
City of Ballarat councillor Des Hudson says the consultation process for the Big Housing Build has taken a top-down approach.
“Residents could be part of committees and shape their future and be part of what the community wanted,” Hudson says.
There were 55,553 new applications on Victoria’s public housing register in March this year. The greatest demand was from single person households. In the Central Highlands district, which includes Ballarat, there were more than 2,800 new applicants on the register, not including transfer applications. Most of the demolished homes in the Delacombe estate are to be replaced with one-bedroom townhouses.
RMIT University Centre for Urban Research director, Prof Libby Porter, who researched the Victorian Public Housing Renewal Program, says the Big Housing Build will not solve the housing crisis in any “real and appreciable way”.
She says replacing public housing stock with “affordable housing” – a term which encompasses public, social or community housing offered at below market rates and targeted at low-to-moderate income homes – was concerning.
“[Affordable housing] is rarely actually affordable, particularly for those who are really struggling in the private rental market,” she says. “After a certain period of time, the properties might return to full market rent or sale. By then, no one has remembered that it used to be public housing and that this was a complete privatisation of public housing and governments are rarely held to account on that.”
Porter says the impact of uprooting families and livelihoods from the neighbourhood was “very real and lasting”.
“It has reverberating impacts that are never measured or accounted for by governments,” she says. “They often have rippling costs into other areas such as health, education – but again, these are never measured.”
Pope, who has six children living in her three-bedroom home, has been waiting for a four-bedroom house for nine years now. But she considers herself one of the lucky ones.
“I’m sitting here and very grateful that I have a house. It may be very small for me but I still have a roof over my head for now,” she says.
“It’s horrible to watch everyone else suffering like that and have a blanket of empty space which should have been filled with houses.”
