Public housing residents in Port Melbourne say they have been bullied and left traumatised after the Victorian government abruptly told them they must move out of their homes to make way for the demolition of the 40-year-old beachside Barak Beacon estate.
On 13 December, six representatives from Homes Victoria went house to house at Barak Beacon, giving residents the news that its 89 dwellings were to be replaced by a new development as part of the government’s Big Housing Build. The development, a mix of social housing, affordable housing and a large number of private rentals, would take until at least 2025 to complete.
“They basically said, look, your house is going to be knocked down,” Jason* says. “You’ve got to be out of here. We’re just letting you know. And they just handed me a flyer. I said, it’s almost Christmas, what the hell kind of message is this? Like, we didn’t hear anything about this.”
Since then, residents have been moved out of the estate and scattered throughout nearby suburbs, mostly into housing run by non-government, not-for-profit community housing associations. At least half the residents have left. Others, like Jason, hold on in hope they can make some change.
Jason’s grandmother was one of the first residents of Barak Beacon. A migrant from the Middle East, recently divorced and “very vulnerable”, she moved into the estate when it opened in 1982.
“All my family grew up here – my two uncles, my auntie and my mother,” Jason says. “My uncle passed away in the house in 2016 in his sleep, and my grandmother also chose to come back here in 2019. She was dying at the time … She passed away in the lounge room.”
After his grandmother died, Jason convinced Homes Victoria to allow him and his younger brother, who lives with him, to take over the lease.
“In our culture, it’s the big thing, the home. It matters, and we all stick together,” Jason says.
To him, the fight for Barak Beacon is a fight for his grandmother’s legacy. “I’m glad that she didn’t get that knock on the door. She would have gone crazy.”
The residents weren’t the only ones taken by surprise. The mayor of Port Phillip city council, Marcus Pearl, said the council only learned about the project earlier this year, as did Clifford Hayes, an upper house representative for the Southern Metropolitan region, which covers Port Melbourne.
“I don’t think the government has been very good about communication on this or many other projects that people are upset about,” Hayes says.
‘Local groups and councils are not being listened to’
The Barak Beacon development is part of the second stage of the Ground Lease Model Project, in which the state government leases land to a private consortium to build, operate and maintain housing for 40 years, after which it is returned to public ownership. The government claims that 1,400 new dwellings will be built on four sites but would not comment on how many would be at Barak Beacon, or how many would be reserved for social housing.
Previous developments as part of the Big Housing Build – and its predecessor, the Public Housing Renewal Program – have increased social housing dwelling numbers by about 10%, although in many cases reducing the number of bedrooms.
The waitlist for public and community housing in Victoria has ballooned by 55% in the past five years, almost entirely in the area of priority need, with 54,945 households on the list in March.
A 10% increase in dwellings at Barak Beacon would add only nine apartments to the state’s social housing stock.
Hayes, a former mayor of Bayside who won his seat for the Sustainable Australia party at the 2018 election, is deputy chair of the Legislative Council committee overseeing an inquiry into Victoria’s planning scheme. The committee tabled its interim report in August, which noted that in order to facilitate the Big Housing Build, the Andrews government had amended the Planning Act to bypass the need for council involvement or community consultation in developments.
“People are not taken into account in the planning scheme,” Hayes says. “It’s undemocratic. Local groups and councils are not being listened to.”
Many submissions to the inquiry, including from local councils, expressed concern about the lack of transparency in the planning process and the erosion of the public’s right to appeal against development decisions.
On 23 June, the government opened a three-week public consultation process on Barak Beacon, consisting of an online 14-question survey. The questions were phrased as if the new development was a done deal, and indeed by the time it opened, many of the estate’s residents had already been relocated. One resident’s responses included the line: “This is not a genuine attempt at public engagement but a disingenuous push poll.”
The Victorian Greens leader, Samantha Ratnam, who is also on the committee examining the Planning Act, says the government is “prioritising the interests of the private developers over residents”.
“The more we look into it, the more disastrous we find that it is, because essentially you’re privatising public housing land, when we should be actually keeping that to build a lot more public housing.”
A spokesperson for Homes Victoria said the department was “committed to a thorough consultation process on this project and the feedback we receive from the community and our stakeholders is used to help inform our project decisions”.
Uprooting a community
Margaret Kelly learned of the planned demolition of her home of 23 years through the mail.
“I did get a knock on my door but they weren’t patient enough to wait for me to get to it,” she says. She relies on mobility aids as she manages myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). She says the letter “quite literally put me into shock”.
Kelly moved to Barak Beacon from an estate in South Melbourne. “It was like being dumped on the moon,” she says. “There was this great big wasteland over the road. And I had no idea where I was. But it turned out to be fantastic.”
Her ground-floor apartment, which she shares with her elderly dog, Patchett, has a large courtyard full of plants.
Kelly says Barak Beacon has a strong community sensibility, which she attributes to its proximity to Garden City, the first public housing estate in Melbourne, constructed between 1926 and 1948.
“There were families who had been here for generations,” she says. “It was just this incredible culture of support. You got off the bus with your groceries and somebody said, ‘Give me a bag’, you know? It was just not like anywhere I’d ever lived in Melbourne.”
A neighbour, Jeannie Erceg, was moved to Barak Beacon from a public housing estate in Prahran, which was demolished in 2019 for a similar rebuilding project that has not yet been completed.
“I was led to believe that this would be my forever home,” Erceg says.
Erceg’s three-bedroom apartment faces the beach. Like all the residents, she was told she would have the right to return to Barak Beacon when the redevelopment is completed, but she doesn’t believe she will be given an equivalent property.
“It wouldn’t be exactly where I am. Because I’m across the road from the beach. And I said, obviously they would build private apartments across the road from the beach and have the public housing at the back.”
Most of her seven children have left home now, but Erceg remains the primary carer of her youngest, who is disabled, and expects another one of her children to move back in with her imminently. Erceg says none of the properties put forward as options for her to move into have been appropriate, and she says she has been urged by the relocation team to accept houses sight-unseen.
A common feeling among those residents resisting the demolition of their homes is that they have been deliberately offered substandard properties.
Homes Victoria did not respond directly to that allegation, saying only that support for residents included “identifying accommodation suitable to the residents’ needs, close to family and supports, covering reasonable relocation expenses, as well as providing site progress updates and broader support for any unforeseen issues”.
Kelly says: “They say, ‘we’re going to accommodate all your needs’. But I think, God, they’ve never been interested in doing that before. So why would I trust them?”
She has been trying for months to object to the new development, but feels blocked at every turn. “No matter who you write to, the only people you ever get to talk to are the relocation team. And it has certainly made me feel helpless, as if I’ve got no voice.”
* Name has been changed
