Housing Crisis in Melbourne's West

By definition, public housing is a “type of long-term housing that is available for people to rent,” with the aim of providing long term, secure and affordable housing to low income families and individuals. However, 6.9 percent of households in Melbourne’s West are not appropriately housed, translating to approximately 20,000 households.

The Government’s $5.3 billion Big Housing Build will fall short of the 60,000 homes required to support Victoria’s lower income population and will instead provide only 9,300 homes.

According to the June quarter rental report from the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing Victoria, rents continued to climb across Melbourne’s western suburbs in the June quarter.

Availability of lettings, that is the turnover in existing rental housing or new additions to the stock of rental housing, has fallen 14.5% in suburbs such as Williamstown, Newport, Sportswood and Yarraville over the past year, from 8,098 in June 2022 to 6,923 in June 2023.

Meanwhile, Outer Western Melbourne has seen the weekly price of a 2 bedroom house rise at a 10.5% median, from $380 per week to $420 per week over the last year, with Williamstown, Newport and Spotswood among the areas worst affected.

The reasons for the rental squeeze are being felt across Melbourne, said Victorian Premier Dan Andrews on ABC Radio Melbourne. “There’s between 30,000 and 40,000 homes that are being Airbnbed or [put on] other platforms,” 

“They’re not available for someone to lease, to rent, on a longer-term basis. That’s a real thing.”

Andrews’ comments came shortly before his recent resignation, and after his state government announced its long awaited plans to address the rental crisis, implementing cuts to councils’ planning powers and plans for an extra million homes to be built in the suburbs of Melbourne by 2050.

In a submission to the Inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis in Victoria, Lachlan Simpson drew from his experiences as both a renter and a landlord to highlight the “lack of regulation and policing of the real estate industry, and the lack of options available for recourse when the industry behaved poorly.”

“Their payment model - a percentage of the rental price - also puts them in a position to maximise the rent on any property. They are disincentivised to make housing affordable,” he wrote.

Techno Park Drive is situated in Williamstown as part of the Hobsons Bay Council. Residents have been living here for over 30 years and now face a forced eviction due to industrial zoning rules, with the council believing it is unsafe for residents to stay here given its purpose as a fuel storage site. Residents are pleading with the council to reconsider their zoning rules so that they can stay in their homes.

On the actual day of the barbecue, the Techno Park community, (residents and supporters) united to voice their support for the cause. The prevailing sentiment among residents seemed to be uncertainty. Many questioned whether enough was being done to stop their eviction. Their concerns have both a logical dimension, centered on the importance of maintaining their residences/how unfair it is, and an emotional one, given that a significant portion of the residents include low-income earners, pensioners, and migrants. It's worth noting that our interactions were primarily with individuals from Block 11, so we can’t speak for the entirety of the Techno Park residents. Nevertheless, the residents have forged strong bonds with one another, as evident from the barbecue event, fostering a profound sense of solidarity, unity, and an unwavering determination to resist eviction

Techno Park Drive and its residents’ struggle to survive

Pete Whelan

It’s Sunday - a sun-drenched October afternoon in Williamstown, and the community are out in force. The hum of conversation mingles with the sizzle of sausages and lively sets from local bands, all in support of the residents of Techno Park Drive.

This past May, the residents of Techno Park Drive received notices from the Hobson’s Bay City Council advising them to vacate their homes immediately, or else face legal action. 

The council’s grounds for eviction was Techno Park Drive’s industrial zoning due to its location adjacent to a ExxonMobil fuel storage site on Kororoit Creek Road, regulations that had been in place for over thirty years but not enforced until May. 

The Techno Park Drive community and their supporters were quick to inundate Hobson’s Bay council meetings to voice their concerns over the sudden nature of their evictions. Why take this measure now when the community in Techno Park Drive, known to council (who had even accepted payment for residential pet permits from some residents), had existed in relative harmony with their industrial neighbours for decades?

“Council’s decision to threaten people with eviction and legal action now, in a time of housing crisis, is heartless, bureaucratic, arbitrary, and wrong,”  reads the community’s change.org petition protesting the evictions , with 14,500 signatures to date. “It has caused tremendous harm to people and caused them to fear losing their homes.”

 The petition  advocates for Hobson’s Bay City Council to use the  precedent set by the Yarra Council in 2015 , which saw a neighbourhood in Abbotsford re-zoned to “mixed-use” rather than evict its residents.

“I have my office here. So I'm legal to be here, being part of industry. But everyone else, according to the zoning, is illegal, which is stupid,” said John Link, 63, owner of Link Pumps and landlord of Block 11 at Techno Park Drive. Link’s car shed has become a meeting place for the community as they navigate the conflict together.

“I'd like to see them change the zoning as they did in some of the inner suburbs. Like apparently they put a thing called an overlay on it, which they're allowed to do. And so if it was changed to mixed use, it would suddenly become legal,” he said.

Councillor Daria Kellandar was in tears at a Hobson’s Bay City Council meeting when she forwarded a motion to accept the petition on Tuesday, July 11.

“I’m not going to accept this as being OK because it’s not OK,” she told the public gallery. “We’re in the midst of a housing crisis and a cost-of-living crisis,” she said as protesters chanted “Once a home, always a home. Save Techno Park” in the car park.

Hobsons Bay sustainable communities director Penelope Winslade told the meeting it was ‘not practical’ to rezone the land due to its proximity to the ExxonMobil facility, classified as a Major Hazard Facility, or MHF.

“It’s technically possible to rezone the land, but in a practical sense, it’s extremely unlikely that the state government would agree to a rezoning of this land because of its proximity to what’s known as a state-significant petrochemical site,” Winslade said.

The next council meeting was moved online at the last minute. “Going ahead with an in-person meeting at the Civic Centre risked exposing the community, councillors and Council staff to an unpredictable, stressful and potentially volatile environment,” Mayor Cr Tony Briffa’s statement.

“There appeared to be more cop cars than other vehicles in the car park,”  Westsider correspondent Josie Vine wrote in her Roads, Rates & Rubbish column.  “About 150 people were milling around the chamber in the dark. Some had brought their pet dogs, kids were climbing the sprawling tree on chamber lawns, and the Green Left Association had turned up handing out its newsletter.”

Some residents aren’t optimistic about rezoning, or the suitability of Techno Park Drive for a non-industrial purpose.

 “If you realised what was underneath it, you wouldn’t want your kids playing there,” Geoff Mitchelmore, former senior scientist in the oil and gas industry and volunteer on Mobil’s community liaison group for the past 20 years  told the ABC .

“I would say that whole area, particularly where the refining took place would be really, really heavily contaminated, and I doubt whether they would ever be able to completely remove all of the contaminants,” he said.

In a letter to Local Government Minister Melissa Horne and Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny, City of Yarra Cr Stephen Jolly urged Hobson’s Bay City Council to consider mixed zoning, writing, “many homes in Hobsons Bay sit within the ‘inner advisory area’ of MHFs, including a new development at Waterline Place in Williamstown, where a 3-bedroom apartment is on the market for 1.75 million dollars.”

The Council's newly unveiled draft industrial land management strategy also projects an increased scarcity of industrial zoning between 2030 and 2040, and aims to maintain its industrial zones to capitalise on this shortage.

Meanwhile, the future of Techno Park Drive hangs in the balance.  We personally think that the state government will step in at the end and say solve it,” said Matt Robinson, Techno Park Drive resident for four years. ”Otherwise, we will.”