Melbourne

A petition is currently calling for the SLV management and government ‘to withdraw any proposed changes and hold a public meeting, where Victorians can have a say in how their library is run’.

What needs to be debated at such a meeting is as basic as the question: what’s a library for? It would appear that, under the current and immediate past leadership, a core function of this cultural institution includes “programs, scholarships and advice to budding entrepreneurs”. Indeed, Christine Christian donated $2 million to the Library for that purpose.

StartSpace, set up with Christian’s money, provides free membership for what it calls “co-working”, plus, for $350 a month membership, access to the “Loft” with conference and printing facilities, as well as training programs and mentor sessions. When then-CEO Kate Torney announced its opening in March 2020, her statement underlined that “StartSpace functions solely to benefit the community and does not operate for profit”.

Torney also mentioned that “leading international professional services firm PwC” (the company contracted but failing to review Robodebt in 2017) was, at that time, providing a training program on a pro-bono basis.

So, while the professional services of a company implicated in the illegal Robodebt scheme are acceptable, writers contracted to deliver workshops to teenagers were, on the advice of the Board led by Christian, not trusted to deliver their program without breaking the law.

Usual caveat:  "affordable housing" isn't "social housing", which isn't "public housing". Public housing is what's needed. Also what was delivered as mandatory trickle-down housing in Sydney and presented here as a success story is not going to make a measurable difference to the situation.

New analysis from the Community Housing Industry Association Victoria (CHIA Vic) has revealed that since 2016, when the Central City Planning Provisions were amended to include a “public benefit uplift” incentive, developers have secured approval for almost 31,000 new homes. Not one of those has been delivered as affordable housing.

Instead, the voluntary scheme has overwhelmingly favoured commercial office space as the “public benefit” of choice. As reported by this masthead in early 2018, within just a year of its introduction more than 54,000 square metres of office floorspace had been awarded to applicants under the FAU mechanism, while no uplift had been granted for social housing, libraries, kindergartens or other community facilities that were also originally contemplated.

The result, according to CHIA Vic chief executive Sarah Toohey, is proof that voluntary approaches do not work.

"The voluntary developer contribution scheme for the Melbourne CBD and Southbank has not delivered a single affordable home since it was introduced nearly a decade ago," she said.

“What we’ve seen instead is developers opting for office space and other benefits that serve their own interests, while communities continue to miss out on the affordable homes they desperately need.”

The issue is back in the spotlight with the Suburban Rail Loop East planning documents now proposing a similar voluntary uplift framework around new station precincts. CHIA Vic has warned that without mandatory requirements, there is little chance of affordable housing being supplied in these high-demand areas either.

“The Suburban Rail Loop will add tens of thousands of new homes around station precincts but right now it’s not clear if any of them will be social or affordable housing,” Ms Toohey said. “We can’t leave the delivery of social housing in these precincts up to a voluntary scheme that we know from experience won’t work.”

By contrast, Sydney’s long-standing mandatory affordable housing contributions scheme has already provided more than 1500 homes since 1996, with a further 1950 projected by 2036.

Some nice infographics based largely on census data, provided as a turnkey service for local government.

This is delightful, and not only for Ray's very game attempts at pronouncing Melbourne place names (even I hesitate at Prahran). Also mortifying, as he managed to see more of Melbourne in two weeks than I had in my first two years.

The rental vacancy rate across Melbourne rose to 1.7 per cent, up from just one per cent in March 2023 when overseas migration was peaking.

That put rental vacancy rates almost back to the pre-pandemic five year average rate of 1.9 per cent.

Mr Lawless said the rental property sell-off was likely due to a combination of high taxes, low yields, poor capital gains and serviceability challenges from high interest rates.

He said investors tended to chase capital gains rather than rental returns.

"With Melbourne home values down 3 per cent over the calendar year and 6.4 per cent below the market peak in March 2022, it seems that investors have been attracted to the better capital growth opportunities in markets like WA and Queensland."

[…]

Property Investors Council of Australia chair Ben Kingsley said the fall was driven by four main factors — investors selling up due to high interest rates, increased land taxes put in place by the state government to help fund the COVID recovery, tenancy reforms that ended no-fault evictions, and investors who had been in the market for a long time who were now cashing out.

He said the fall in rental bonds was "further evidence that the Labor government has made the lives of tenants in Victoria a lot harder" by causing an "exodus of investors providing private rental accommodation in Victoria".

Mr Kingsley said Victorian renters had only been spared rent rises because of the government's capping of international student numbers.

However, if that cap was removed post-election, he expected rents to rapidly rise.

"I would be very, very worried as a tenant that I'm going to be paying higher rent in Victoria over the near-term," he said.

There's a freaking pandemic going on!

In short:

The government will introduce laws to restrict protesters in Victoria, following a series of anti-Semitic incidents across the state.

Face coverings, certain flags and attachment devices will be banned at protests.

The government will also introduce legislation which would establish protest-free zones around places of worship.

There's a place of worship on practically every block in the CBD!

Premier Jacinta Allan said recent discussions with Victoria's Jewish community in the wake of the recent suspected terror attack on the Adass Israel Synagogue had informed the move.

[…]

"There are too many who want to qualify anti-Semitism or make excuses for it, and I want to make it absolutely clear that I never will."

Yes, well, it really wouldn't do have a precise definition of anti-Semitism, would it? Best to just define it as "anything I don't like". That's appropriately respectful of Jewish people. This is just disgraceful and obviously targeted at the weekly pro-Palestinian rally in Melbourne.

To paraphrase Judi Bari, I hope the Victorian Police catch whoever was responsible for the synagogue fire. And sack them.

In 2023, 27,408 dwellings (1.5% of all homes) were left totally empty over the year, and a further 70,453 (3.7% of all homes) were barely used.

[…]

Empty homes are widely dispersed across the city, but the fastest growth has been in the City of Melbourne, where 10,000 homes are now vacant – equivalent to half the new builds in this area over the last five years.

That many renters cannot afford to outbid the convenience value of an empty property speaks of deep inequality, the root cause of unaffordable housing.

But vacant homes also illustrate how housing supply is at the mercy of speculative incentives. Low interest rates and taxes that favour capital gains over rental income make it rational for some owners to choose the flexibility of an empty home over the cash it could yield.

The residents of dozens of public housing towers in the southern Australian city of Melbourne heard the state government was planning to demolish their homes on the news.

“Everyone found out from the TV, from the news, with the rest of Victoria,” Sara*, a resident of the first group of towers to be knocked down, told Al Jazeera.

[…] 

The government says the renewal will boost “social housing by at least 10 percent”, a modest increase in a city where there is already a huge gap in affordable housing.

According to Australian census data, the percentage of Australian households who rent their home from a state or territory housing authority dropped from 6 percent in 1999-2000 to 3 percent in 2019-2020.

In the state of Victoria, the share of housing classified as public or community housing, is just 2.8 percent.

By comparison, in Paris and Vienna, the share of public housing has increased since the 1990s, with about 25 percent of the population of both cities now living in socially-rented housing.

As you read this, the Victorian Government is rewriting the laws and legislation that govern how the city we live within looks and feels. In 2024, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform Melbourne's design regulations, and to empower our city to become world-leading in terms of both liveability and design. Join Kerstin Thompson (Kerstin Thompson Architects), Andrew Maynard (Austin Maynard Architects), and Colleen Peterson (Ratio Consultants) to hear about the challenges of our current dysfunctional system, and the opportunities we have right now to reform these laws and create the best possible Melbourne. Hosted by YIMBY Melbourne and featuring three leaders from Melbourne's urban planning, architecture, and design industries, this night is one for enthusiasts and experts alike.

Melbourne’s Missing Middle’s signature recommendation—a new Missing Middle Zone—would enable six-storey, mixed-use development on all residential land within 1 kilometre of a train station and 500 metres of a tram stop—building an interconnected network of 1,992 high-amenity, walkable neighbourhoods.
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Melbourne’s Missing Middle envisions Parisian streetscapes across all of inner urban Melbourne, along our train and tram lines and near our town centres. Gentle, walk-up apartments, abundant shopfronts, sidewalk cafes and sprawling parks replacing unaffordable and unsustainable cottages. 
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The Missing Middle is the most desirable, walkable urban form, typified by inner Paris, and it should be legal to build in our most desirable, economically productive areas.