One of Victoria’s largest community housing providers has been accused of leaving apartments empty for more than a year and failing to address maintenance issues raised by tenants, including broken windows, missing floorboards and dead possums left to rot.
The claims come as housing advocates warn of widespread problems with community housing, including poor standards and a lack of transparency.
In August 2023 the social housing provider HousingFirst took over the stewardship of Glenloch Homes, which provides independent living for 163 aged pensioners across six sites in the south of Melbourne.
Pam Young has been a resident of her building for 12 years and is part of the Glenloch Tenants Association Incorporated. The association conducted an audit across five sites and found at least 16 apartments had been left empty – 14 of which had been empty for more than a year – despite more than 50,000 households remaining on Victoria’s waitlist for public and community housing amid a rental affordability crisis.
“From [the time HousingFirst took over] every time a place became empty, they just put new carpet in, painted them through, locked the door, and they’ve been left empty,” Young says.
When HousingFirst took over the properties, Young’s rent went from $296 to $436 a fortnight.
Glenloch Homes was established as a charitable trust in 1891 with private money. Residents had to be aged over 65 or disabled, and did not have to be on the social housing waitlist to apply. If successful in their application they were given a home for life. Rents were calculated on CPI, so remained low, only going up several dollars a year.
HousingFirst calculates rents via household income and the market value of the property. Rent is not meant to go beyond 30% of a tenant’s income but the calculation excludes any rent assistance from the government.
After Young’s rent was increased she asked if she could move from her studio apartment into one of the empty one-bedrooms but was denied.
“A couple of people who live here already have asked to shift into them,” she says.
“They’ve said no, they can’t do that because they can only work with people on the Victorian Housing Register, none of us are on the register.”
The Department of Families, Fairness and Housing does not keep a record of vacancy rates among community housing providers.
Tenants in other HousingFirst buildings have also raised problems. Brittany Jane is an advocate who is helping a tenant, a single mother with two children aged 13 and nine, in Elwood get maintenance issues addressed.
Jane, who was given authority to speak on behalf of the tenant, says there was a laundry list of issues with the apartment – broken windows, broken and raw floorboards, missing skirting boards, dead possums left to rot on the outside roof, and water damage on the inside roof.
In December last year she threatened to take the provider to the Victorian civil and administrative tribunal (Vcat) because there was peeling paint – which she claimed had lead in it – in the tenant’s apartment.
“They took some scrapes away for testing but refused to give us the answer,” Jane says. “We asked three or four times what their results were.
“They did not respond. So we bought our own testing kit, which came back extremely positive.”
Last week the tenant paid almost $2,000 of her own money for her and her two children to stay at a hotel for seven nights while the paint was fixed, but Jane says she has seen it is also peeling in other apartments in the building.
“Another tenant was told the reason her sink keeps blocking is because the pipes are so old they’re rusting shut,” she says.
She says HousingFirst has refused to do most of the other repairs. When asked if the windows, which are cracked and do not open properly, would be fixed, HousingFirst replied in an email, seen by Guardian Australia, that it could “be looked at next financial year”.
Last week the tenant took HousingFirst to Vcat to get the windows and broken floorboards fixed. The tribunal ordered the social housing provider to fix the issues, but Jane says it shouldn’t take that much.
“Everyone deserves a safe and secure home regardless of income and it shouldn’t take this much effort to ensure that,” she says.
“We both have disabled kids and it’s taken us hours and hours together to manage the paperwork required to even get a Vcat hearing. Absolutely worth it but also extremely stressful and emotionally taxing.”
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In a statement, HousingFirst said the apartments at Glenloch had been left empty because “a history of unsustainably low and inconsistent rents at Glenloch before we took over stewardship in August 2023 had adverse consequences” including sub-optimal maintenance. HousingFirst was addressing the issue, the spokesperson said.
The not-for-profit had more than 2,000 dwellings, a number that had expanded by 80% in seven years. But with that growth “comes challenges in meeting the needs of all residents”, the spokesperson said.
“Construction cost increases and economic circumstances has also been a challenge for everyone in the private and community sectors. Transitioning residents from old homes to new homes can also be a challenge for some residents,” they said.
“Ensuring the organisation remains on a firm financial footing to invest in more homes whilst dependent on by-definition low social housing rental income is challenging.”
Last year an independent review into social housing – which includes both community and public housing – found many properties across Victoria were in poor quality because the low turnover of social housing meant many had not been upgraded.
The review panel recommended the state government force providers to implement minimum standards by 2027.
On top of this, the review found tenants struggled to have maintenance problems addressed, waiting a long time, and in many cases did not know their rights.
“Tenants in community housing who had problems with repairs and maintenance were generally unaware of their rights and felt powerless to pursue issues of concern to them,” the report said.
Lloyd Murphy, a lawyer at free legal service Southside Justice, says the majority of housing issues the service dealt with involved maintenance requests.
“[Residents] get told, ‘No, that’s your problem,’” he says. “And there’s so much pushback from community housing providers on getting any repairs done.”
He says he had a case where a five-level building, with about 50 units, had not had heating for two years, another with a cockroach infestation, and recurring problems of large rent increases.
Murphy says there was a culture of blaming residents “as much as possible” for problems with the property and there was a lack of transparency – surrounding factors like vacancy rates – that made the effectiveness of community housing harder to track.
“I think this leads to the bigger conversation about the government’s privatisation of public housing into these community housing providers where the kind of accountability is not at the same level as it is for Homes Vic,” he says.
Public housing is owned and managed by the state government while community housing is managed, and often owned, by not-for-profit organisations.
Murphy wants the government to give the Victorian Housing Register, which regulates community providers, more teeth.
A spokesperson for the government would not answer questions about if it would implement the recommendations of the 2024 social housing review.
“We are pulling every lever at our disposal to house vulnerable Victorians in safe, secure and affordable homes – over the last five years allocations of families and individuals into social housing has increased by 41%,” the spokesperson said.
“We know we need to build more homes, which is why we’re getting on and building more than 13,300 new social and affordable homes right across Victoria through our record-breaking $6.3bn Big Housing Build and Regional Housing Fund.”