Dan Andrews’ housing policy is audacious, striking and destructive

The a number of drafts of an earlier model of this text — AARGGGHHHH WHAT HE’S RESIGNED ARE YOU KIDDING ME — appeared like a kind of homes you used to see across the inner- or mid-city again within the nice sharehouse days. You realize the sort. They’d began out as a California bungalow within the ’20s, with rubble piles for pillars. Then somebody thought Roman columns would look good. At some stage the verandah was enclosed with post-war yellow brick to create an additional room. Then the factor had been faux-aluminium cladded. The lounge was genuine ’20s; the kitchen was ’70s lemon yellow and sky blue. And so forth. Then someday they have been gone, knocked over, vacant tons ready for the house of somebody’s desires. Or slab-tilt shoeboxes.

Why did a chunk on the Andrews authorities’s new housing coverage, now change into his remaining flourish, flip into such a folly — a bit on audacious ambition right here, an extension on neoliberalism there — earlier than I made a decision to demolish the entire thing and begin over? It’s as a result of I couldn’t actually settle for what the plan represented. It’s the simultaneous enactment of ambition by a authorities that’s actually keen to make one thing occur. 

And by that very course of, it’s a new and complete assault on what remained of civic life and social democracy in what was as soon as a spot that had achieved each. With its removing of native planning powers on bigger developments, it offers a killing blow to the concept that communities may form the place they stay, whereas the huge sell-off of public land on which 44 housing towers sit removes any foundation for brand new types of land tenure within the interior metropolis. Rainbow bulldozer? It’s a bit of greater than that — some kind of P-flag six-storey stable rock tunnel boring machine.