A year on from the Housing Statement. What’s next?

20 September 2024

Editorial: Jennifer Beveridge, CEO

It’s been a year since the Victorian Government released its Housing Statement, and there’s no doubt that systemic problems in the housing system persist.

As we at Tenants Victoria have always said, there’s no silver bullet solution to fix the rental housing crisis, which has been decades in the making. Every tier of government must therefore redouble its efforts to address this existential issue which, quite frankly, has generational consequences. More of us are renting, and more of us will be renting for life.

As a key community stakeholder and voice for renters, Tenants Victoria has been working with the Victorian Government as it scopes a new set of reforms to protect renters’ rights and resolve tenancy disputes faster. With half a million visits to our website and advising up to 10, 000 renters a year, Tenants Victoria has unique insights from the ground to provide independent advice to the government on:

• Establishing Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria as a mechanism for early intervention for common rental problems, such as repairs and bonds
• Banning landlords from raising rents for 12 months after evicting the previous tenant at the end of their first fixed-term lease
• Banning all types of rent bidding, making it an offence to accept bids, and strengthening penalties against agents and landlords who break the law
• Introducing a scheme for rental bonds so that bonds paid can simply move from one rental to the next
• Extending notification of rent increases from 60 days to 90 days
• Extending the notice-to-vacate period in some cases from 60 days to 90 days
• Standardising rental applications and building privacy safeguards
• Implementing compulsory professional development for agents and property managers

The growing number of renters in Victoria, who currently number a third of the state’s population, look forward to the implementation of the key measures set out in last year’s Housing Statement.

When these reforms are finally in place, they will add ballast to the more than 130 rental reforms implemented by the Victorian Government in 2021, and the state will further secure its place as a national leader in rental reform.

On the housing supply side of the equation, last year’s Housing Statement set an ambitious target to build 800,000 homes in a decade. However, under the current plan, it certainly won’t deliver enough social housing (public and community housing) to meet urgent community need.

The Victorian Government has only publicly committed to delivering 11,225 new social housing dwellings, with a net increase of 10,185 social housing dwellings, from 2023 to 2029.

Social housing provides homes that are genuinely affordable to low and very low-income households. Social housing also helps put downward pressure on the private rental market.

In 2020, the Housing Peaks Alliance, of which we are a member, calculated that the government would have to increase social housing by six thousand per year for 10 years to meet the urgent need for social housing.

Given the ongoing housing crisis, this figure is now likely a significant underestimate of the real need in the community. University of NSW research in December 2022 found metropolitan Melbourne social housing stocks would need to grow by over 8 per cent per year to meet demand. In regional areas, social housing would need to grow by between 5.5-6.5 per cent per year to meet social housing demand.

The Victorian Government needs to urgently set out a path for how it will meet the housing requirements of low and very low-income households. Meanwhile, Tenants Victoria is working with the Housing Peaks Alliance to update modelling the social housing that will be needed.

As a baseline, we believe that the government must set a social housing target. In addition to a target, the Government should also set ‘sub-targets’ for developments flagged in the Housing Statement. This should include a robust social housing target for the use of surplus government land.

Development on unused public land is a unique opportunity to push forward on social housing and that opportunity must be maximised. Planning remains an important lever to get better outcomes on the right kind of supply for people who rent their homes.

Solving the rental housing crisis remains an unfinished project in our state, and we need to maximise every opportunity to make change.