Victoria’s planning minister, Richard Wynne, says allowing developers to build the social housing component of new apartment complexes off-site is not exclusionary towards low-income earners.
Wynne said the government would pilot requiring 10-15% of new developments built on land sold by the state government to be affordable housing.
But the housing intended for low-income earners would not have to be within the development, he said, saying there should be an option to put them elsewhere.
“It would be wrong to categorise this as exclusionary,” Wynne told Guardian Australia on Friday.
“In fact, we are offering an opportunity for social housing providers to increase the amount of stock that they own and manage. You want to have flexibility, so if there is a site not very well-linked to public transport services, you might reach the conclusion that the social housing component is better realised off-site.”
It was too early to say whether the social housing would have to be built in the same council area as the development, Wynne said.
“We will give consideration to that, and as I have indicated to the property council and to my friends in the social housing sector, we want to work collaboratively with them to develop a sensible and implementable policy.”
The annual report on government services, released in January, found 92 Victorians were turned away from homelessness agencies every day.
The chief executive of Council to Homeless Persons, Jenny Smith, said that ideally, affordable and social housing would be within the same development as private housing.
“We’re very supportive and excited about state government plans to commence inclusionary zoning,” she said.
“But we do think diverse communities are important too, and it is vital they are made up of people with different incomes.
“While we do have confidence that the government will look to develop social housing appropriately, it would be far preferable to have a mix of private and social housing within the same development.
“Otherwise you risk creating polarised communities.”
An urban design and health expert, Professor Billie Giles-Corti, who is also director of the McCaughey VicHealth Centre Community wellbeing unit, said it was “fantastic” that the government was trying to make social housing more available given the “critical shortage”.
But if those houses were built separately, it was important to ensure they looked similar to the private housing from the outside.
“It’s really important to integrate social housing as much as possible and ensure that it doesn’t look really different or really bad, because that’s stigmatising,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be able to tell that it’s social housing. Importantly, these affordable and social houses shouldn’t be built out on the urban fringe, because that just doesn’t produce good outcomes for the lower-income households.
“What does create good outcomes and opportunity for people is when there are shops, services and public transport available to them.
“It would be a real tragedy if you end up with an inner city where the only people there are high-income earners.”
