Feature
"These demolitions do not feel like progress, they feel like erasure."
On the afternoon of the 6th of August, the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the public housing towers became a theatre of consultation, a stage where Homes Victoria and the Victorian State Minister performed its rationale for demolition. The plan is simple: to demolish 44 buildings, forcibly relocate thousands, and break apart entire communities. This is the racialised logic of the state at work, where the managed decay of public assets becomes the pretext for the displacement of the people who live within them.
For the many Black, Brown, and migrant communities who call the towers home, these buildings are not simply housing; they are infrastructures of survival. They are dense networks of kinship and mutual aid, places of belonging carved out in a city that has always pushed them to the margins. The state’s decision to demolish is not a response to failure, but a calculated act of social engineering—an attempt to erase these communities from the urban landscape.
From this theatre of consultation, testimony emerges that dismantles the official script. In her evidence, Reem, a long-term resident from North Melbourne, offers a powerful intervention. Her speech dissects the state’s logic, exposing how decades of deliberate neglect have been used to produce the very crisis that demolition is now meant to solve. Her testimony is a vital record of this struggle, exposing the demolition for what it is: the continuation of dispossession under the guise of progress.
Hi. I am Reem, and I am a resident of the 33 Alfred Street building. These public housing buildings, or what we call flats, have long been seen by the state as an eyesore, unsafe and not aesthetically pleasing against Melbourne’s backdrop. But to me – to us – as a child of black African Muslim immigrants who was born and raised in Flemington and North Melbourne, these buildings are home and make Melbourne a place I am proud to be a part of. These buildings are places of survival and belonging, especially for people who have always been pushed to the margins. Despite the decades-long government neglect, which was deliberate in order to make these buildings appear unsafe and beyond repair, community and residents still thrived. We support each other through this government’s neglect, through crisis and through deep, orchestrated uncertainty.
The long-term disinvestment and neglect are now being used as justification for demolition. The government is telling us that this is about safety, renewal and increasing housing, but I fear it is about profit for them. This is evident with the government announcing that the three buildings in Flemington and North Melbourne being demolished will not have any public housing stock present. Many have celebrated this announcement, saying it is progress for Melbourne, but these demolitions do not feel like progress, they feel like erasure. I also want to highlight that these demolitions should not be seen in a vacuum. They are part of a legacy of harm, abandonment and violence inflicted by these systems of the state against my community.
In the 2020 hard lockdown, we were locked in without warning or support. No services came. We were the first responders. Residents and volunteers organised health care, food and welfare checks, while loved ones risked COVID and police violence to get supplies in. We built our own crisis response while the state sent police instead of care. We have been racially profiled, overpoliced, surveilled and spoken about like we are a burden rather than people who belong, who have families and who contribute to the wider Victorian community. And this is not happening on neutral ground. These towers stand on unceded Aboriginal land. First Nations people have experienced generations of forced removal, surveillance and displacement, and often in the name of development, public order or progress. The legacy has not ended. Today, First Nations, black, brown, migrant and working-class communities are facing similar patterns of dispossession under new names and new policies.
The announcement of the redevelopment of the 44 towers is the most recent of this. From the outset, this announcement was made without warning. The relocation process also feels rushed and confusing. It has also been coercive and lacked consultation. People are being told different things from different Homes Vic staff. We are being pressured to accept housing that does not meet our needs, far from our doctors, our schools, our mosques and our community-based support networks. There is no consistency and no transparency, and it leaves many of us feeling anxious and pressured. The shift from public housing to social housing is a part of that erasure. It allows the government to quietly dismantle public housing while masking it in softer language, but what is being offered is often privatised, insecure and far less accountable. We know the difference and we feel it – this shift lets the government offload its responsibility to provide long-term, stable housing and avoid direct accountability whilst mitigating risk. This is not a failure of policy, it is a continuation of policy in Victoria and wider Australia that strips agency from black, First Nations, poor and working-class people, so it’s actual policy working as it is intended in this country.
My experience living in these flats was that it really gave me a sense of community, identity and understanding of the world as bigger than myself. I would not be the woman I am now, I would not be so grounded in my values and principles of care, compassion, justice and love, if it was not for the way the people, specifically black women, raised me in these flats. Housing is beyond infrastructure. It is about stability, memory, safety, connection and the possibility to live with dignity. When governments tear down housing without care, without listening and without a commitment to building something just, they are not just removing buildings, they are cutting into the roots of our communities. And every time they do, they make it clear what they value: land, profit, control over the lives of those they have always pushed to the margins. We deserve better than this. We deserve housing that is public, not privatised; housing that is permanent, not temporary; housing that is that is improved with us, not done to us. The government has the resources, the land, the responsibility to invest in real public housing – not demolitions disguised as progress, not social housing that erodes security, but true, accountable public housing that centres dignity, community and care. We are not asking for charity. We are demanding justice for the communities who built these flats, who survived the neglect, who raised generations of children here and who deserve to stay. If the government truly cares about safety, belonging and equity, it starts with protecting, investing and expanding public housing, not erasing it.