Government. Housing developer.

And the magic suits that make housing a bad investment for a public agency and a great investment for private buyers

A quick note: I will be on ABC’s Q+A show on 25 March for a Housing Special. Should be fun.

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Award-winning public housing completed in 2020 and clad with recycled bricks

The Australian Greens have announced a version of HouseMate as the major plank of their federal housing policy.

Good.

You can read some previous FET articles about why that’s the most direct and effective way to make housing cheaper for non-property owners and avoid picking fights with the majority of households who are homeowners and like their property assets going up in value, not down.

1. Introducing HouseMate

2. How to get land into the HouseMate public homeownership system

3. Did public housing create the Australian dream?

4. Public housing is way cheaper than rental subsidies

5. Property owners hate more supply and competition... even though they pretend to love it

6. Why we need a public housing developer (FET podcast episode)

Some news headlines around this announcement make total sense.

Greens will call on federal government to develop property and sell it for cheap

Others suggest this idea is wild, unworkable, and ineffective. Many are upset.

This article is to ease those minds by showing a few different examples of public housing. Of course, there are bad examples too. Just like there are many terrible, costly, badly designed, and falling down private housing developments and clusters of poverty in private housing subdivisions.

If we could make housing cheaper by changing planning regulations or tweaking a few taxes, I would be lobbying hard for that. I’ve looked around the world over the past couple of centuries and found that public development of housing and below-market-priced allocation to households seems to be the main ingredient for cheap housing.

If you think it all sounds a bit socialist or communist, I would just remind you that Sir Robert Menzies—twice Prime Minister and inaugural leader of the Liberal Party—was a huge supporter of subsidised public homeownership programs and boasted of his government’s track record on that front.

A lot changed from the 1950s to the 1980s.

If you want a glimpse at the level of debate we might now have about universal public housing, try this article I stumbled across from 1989 with the headline “Public housing bursting under too many middle-class bludgers”.

In effect, people hate that public housing is full of very poor people with social problems, but also hate giving public housing to not-so-poor people.

This is my argument in favour of universalism in public housing, which seems to work so well for public roads, schools, and hospitals too.

There is a surprising amount of modern public housing that is not controversial and flies under the radar because it isn’t filled with poor people and social problems. The very fact that a government involves itself in development should be of no concern.

Here are some projects and organisations where governments are now building homes in Australia.

Melton’s Atherstone project

A legacy from Gough Whitlam’s era of active urbanism was that some councils gained large plots of land using grants from the federal government. One such place is Melton, west of Melbourne.

In 2010 Melton City Council entered a joint venture with Lendlease to develop the land—the council provides the site and Lendlease the operations, sharing profits.

The Melton City Council now boasts in its annual report about the millions of dollars of income it makes from its share of profits on the sale of homes in this Atherstone project. The project has allowed close coordination of public services and homes to great effect.

Is this public housing? Or doesn’t it count for some reason?