Tenancy culture studies: the National Public Housing Museum (Chicago)

Having last year observed the centenary of the public housing system in New South Wales, including with an Institute of Tenancy Culture Studies tour of significant public housing sites in Sydney, we bemoaned Housing NSW's neglect of the centenary and the forgetting of our public housing history.

By contrast, in Chicago, Illinois, the history of public housing is being remembered and celebrated, in the new National Public Housing Museum.

In its own words, the Museum

promotes and fosters the deep cultural understanding through artifacts, photos, archival documents, social history, public policy, and other material objects spanning seven decades. It is the first institution dedicated to interpreting the experience of public and social housing and the illumination of resilience of poor and working class families of every race and ethnicity.

The Museum is to shortly find a permanent home in a conserved building that was part of the Jane Addams Homes, Chicago's first federally-funded public housing project. Take a virtual tour:


Congratulations and best wishes to all involved in the inspiring work of National Public Housing Museum.

Tip of the hat to Robert Mowbray.

Tenants' advice over the holidays

As we count down to the end of the year on the Brown Couch, many of our friends and colleagues from the Tenants Advice and Advocacy Services (TAAS) have already loaded up the caravan and are on their way to a well earned break.

But don't worry - they'll all be back in early 2013, refreshed and ready to lend their expertise to tenants in need of a tip.

If you run into trouble in the meantime, and you need to know your rights, there will still be a couple of options available.

First, there's the Tenants' Rights Factsheets on the TAAS website.

Or, for more detailed information, you can access the Tenants Rights Manual online.

Then there's a limited Christmas Hotline, for urgent matters that just can't wait -

8117 3750

or

1800 251 101

We sincerely hope you don't need to make use of any of these services.

****

That's it from the Brown Couch for 2012 – a year to remember. It was, of course, the centenary of the New South Wales public housing system. We commemorated this with a series of posts that presented a potted history of the system, occasionally reflected in the goings-on of the day. And what, you may ask, did Housing NSW have to say on this most significant of anniversaries?

(Crickets!)

Nothing. Not a word. It should have. Many workers and tenants over the last hundred years have put a lot into public housing, and a centenary is an appropriate point at which to acknowledge it. And to forget the history of the system is to fail to understand all the dimensions of our present housing problems, and how things may be done differently and better in the future. (By the way, see how Victoria is commemorating the 75th anniversary of the public housing system there.)

This year we also had news that the NSW State Government proposes to repeal the 1948 Act, so upwards of 600 elderly tenants might worry if this is the last Christmas they'll spend in what have been their homes of many years. More happily, this year also saw long overdue law reform for boarding houses, and boarding house residents can look forward to having decent occupancy agreements and access to dispute resolution early in 2013. Hopefully other marginal renters won't have to wait much longer to be extended such a reasonable measure of justice too.

See you next year. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday season.

****

TAAS closure dates
Blue Mountains	24 December - 1 January
Central Coast	19 December - 4 January
Eastern Sydney	20 December - 7 January
Hunter Valley	21 December - 1 January
Illawarra & South Coast	24 December - 4 January
Inner Sydney	24 December - 4 January
Inner Western Sydney	24 December - 9 January
Mid Coast	24 December - 1 January
New England & Western NSW	24 December - 4 January
Northern Rivers	21 December - 9 January
Northern Sydney	24 December - 2 January
Southern Sydney	21 December - 4 January
South Western NSW	24 December - 1 January
South Western Sydney	24 December - 2 January
Western Sydney	24 December - 1 January
Koori TAAS closure dates
Greater Sydney	21 December - 4 January
North & North Western NSW	21 December - 9 January
Southern NSW	21 December - 4 January
Western NSW	21 December - 4 January
Resourcing body closure dates
Dtarrawarra	21 December - 2 January
Parks & Village Service	24 December - 1 January
Older Persons’ Tenants’ Service	24 December - 1 January
Tenants’ Union	24 December - 2 January

Tenancy culture studies: Robert Menzies' 'The Forgotten People' (part 2)

In part 1 of our study of Robert Menzies' 1942 radio speech 'The Forgotten People', we observed how Menzies defines the allegedly forgotten Australian middle class through the metaphor of 'homes' – 'homes material, homes human, homes spiritual' – and suggested that we can learn a bit about the housing policies both of Menzies' era and of today by reflecting on what Menzies had to say under these headings. 

So we discussed Menzies' idea that 'homes material' were homes privately owned and financed – albeit with very considerable assistance from the state. Under Menzies, this assistance came in the form of loans on very generous terms from the War Service Homes Commission to ex-service personnel, and through the partial-transformation of the public housing system into an instrument of owner-occupier assistance, with 30 per cent of Commonwealth funds under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement being redirected to building societies and similar institutions, and a huge program of sales of dwellings – such that by 1969, the NSW Housing Commission had sold about a third of all the dwellings it had ever built.

Each of these forms of assistance contributed mightily to the achievement of a home ownership rate of 71.4 per cent in 1966 – the year Menzies resigned.

Now (coincidentally, on what would have been Menzies' 118th birthday) we consider 'homes human' and 'homes spiritual'.

*

Following 'homes material', says Menzies:           

Then we have homes human. A great house, full of loneliness, is not a home. "Stone walls do not a prison make", not do they make a house. They may equally make a stable or a piggery. Brick walls, dormer windows and central heating need not make more than a hotel. My home is where my wife and children are. The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilized man; the instinct to give them a chance in life - to make them not leaners but lifters - is a noble instinct.

If Scotland has made a great contribution to the theory and practice of education, it is because of the tradition of Scottish homes. The Scottish ploughman, walking behind his team, cons ways and means of making his son a farmer, and so he sends him to the village school. The Scottish farmer ponders upon the future of his son, and sees it most assured not by the inheritance of money but by the acquisition of that knowledge which will give him power; and so the sons of many Scottish farmers find their way to Edinburgh and a university degree.

The great question is, "How can I qualify my son to help society?" Not, as we have so frequently thought, "How can I qualify society to help my son?" If human homes are to fulfil their destiny, then we must have frugality and saving for education and progress.

In this flighty and allusive passage, Menzies ambiguously connects homes and family life: it can be read to suggest that he means to exclude tenants from feeling the 'great instinct' to be home with partner and children and to give them a chance in life. We'll leave that to one side and assume that both homeowners and tenants love their children. (By the way, on the most recent figures available, about 60 per cent of households renting are families, and about two-thirds of them have dependent children).

But let's take 'homes human' as a point from which we might view Australian home-ownership in generational perspective. We're guided here by Judith Yates's short 2007 paper, 'Affordability and access to home ownership: past, present and future?', which starts with the generation of homeowners and prospective homeowners addressed by Menzies.

In the 1950s and 60s, the median house price was 3-4 times the average income, and such an income was more than enough to service a loan for the median house price – so theoretically there was no gap that had to be covered by a deposit from the purchaser's savings. Housing interest rates were regulated by the Government, and about 30 per cent of all housing loans were subsidised by governments, too, through the CHSA or the War Service Homes Commission. The economy was growing, unemployment was low and, we've seen, home ownership was accessible to a large majority of the population.

Since then, the rate of home ownership has declined (it's now 68.1 per cent). Not by very much overall, but that's because only Menzies' homeowners and their homeowning children – the baby boomers – have lived longer than previous generations. Amongst younger households, rates of home ownership have fallen signficantly.

 (Source: Yates)

This is not just a matter of preference. On Yates's measures of affordability (the median price/average earnings ratio) and accessibility (the number of years of average earnings saved to cover the 'deposit gap'), home ownership has become less much less accessible and affordable over time.

 (Source: Yates)

What happened? First, in the 1970s, the golden years of postwar growth ended; state interventions in the economy came to be seen as the cause of rigidity, transmitting merely inflation and not productive adjustments. Deregulation and, at least at first, higher interest rates followed, and the deposit gap opened up. For those setting up house now – the baby boomers, the children of Menzies' home owners – the accessibility of home ownership became a little less equal. The housing system had always made winners and losers, but now the stakes were somewhat raised.

Since then, over time and at various points, government support for home ownership has changed and became support for homeowners, to the detriment of those wanting to get into home ownership and ultimately for the incidence of home ownership generally.

In particular, in the mid-1980s, there was the tax reform of the Hawke Labor Government. One part of the reform was a capital gains tax – but not on owner-occupied housing, thus making housing privileged amongst assets and encouraging those with money to spare to spend it on their own housing. Capital gains tax would be payable by landlords on their rental housing, but where owner-occupiers with money to spare go, speculator landlords will follow. Another part of the reform would have quarantined speculators' deductions for negative gearing to rental income only; however, after a campaign of shrieking and wailing by landlords and agents, this entirely sensible restriction was abandoned and a further spur to speculation given.

In the 1990s, interest rates declined – but with tax policy set on encouraging speculation, this lead to bigger loans and higher house prices. Then, around 2000, there was the tax reform of the Howard Coalition Government, one part of which was the halving of the rate of capital gains tax: in other words, any money made speculating on asset prices would henceforth be taxed at half the rate of any money made through work or saving at the bank. Where previously the alchemy of negative gearing transmuted income into capital, so that the speculator's tax liability was deferred (to such time as the capital gain was realised), now the speculator's tax liability was deferred and halved. Encouragement to speculate was turned up to 11.

With an eye now turned to retirement, baby boomers levered, on the basis of their own substantial housing equity, a shedload of money into the housing market, bidding up each other and owner-occupiers too. Look at all the borrowed money tipped into housing.

(Source: RBA Table D2)

So much of that money has been sunk there in the hope or expectation of a speculative pay-off: that someone, some time, will come along and pay even more. We should admit that there must be a spectrum of dreams and emotions represented here: some speculator landlords are just rampantly greedy, while others have seen rising prices and worried for the housing futures of their children – so they've borrowed up and bought in too. Of course, in doing so they've contributed to the present problem of unaffordable homeownership, and distorted the rental market to the disadvantage of low-income renters, undermined the tax base, and voted for the reduction of public housing from being, in the first place, an alternative to homeownership, to Menzies' handmaiden to homeownership, and then to a marginalised poverty trap, to boot! These speculators might love their children, but they've been less than kind to other people's children.

Back to Menzies, briefly now:

And finally, we have homes spiritual. This is a notion which finds its simplest and most moving expression in "The Cotter’s Saturday Night" of Burns. Human nature is at its greatest when it combines dependence upon God with independence of man.

We offer no affront - on the contrary we have nothing but the warmest human compassion - towards those whom fate has compelled to live upon the bounty of the State, when we say that the greatest element in a strong people is a fierce independence of spirit. This is the only real  freedom, and it has as its corollary a brave acceptance of unclouded individual responsibility. The moment a man seeks moral and intellectual refuge in the emotions of a crowd, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a cipher. The home spiritual so understood is not produced by lassitude or by dependence; it is produced by self-sacrifice, by frugality and saving.

For many years now, the dominant principles of the housing market have not been 'frugality and saving' – quite the opposite. Wild borrowing and something-for-nothing speculation have driven it to its present point, where it no longer provides ownership on reasonable terms for most low-moderate income households. Sixty per cent of low-middle income 25-44 year-olds are out of homeownership – and so too are 45 per cent of low-income 45-64 year-olds (these figures from research by Baker and Flood). Of those lower income households (ie lowest 40 per cent) who have gotten into homeownership – probably because they've figured that they should buy now before affordability gets worse – nearly half (48 per cent) pay more than 30 per cent of their income in loan repayments; more than one quarter (27 per cent) pay more than 50 per cent (these figures from the National Housing Supply Council).

Certainly these housing-stressed households will feel that they are making painful sacrifices, but there's considerable doubt as to whether they're actually 'saving' at all. Same goes for the outright speculators. Over the past couple of years there have been signs that the ground is shifting beneath our high house prices, built as they are on foundations of debt that continually need to be reinforced with more debt. That 'emotion of the crowd' – the mixture of hope and fear that prices will keep going up, because someone, some time, must come along and pay more – has been shaken, and with it the actual prospect of such a pay-off.

 (Source: RBA Table D6)

It may be that those with the best claim to be living in Menzies' 'home spiritual' of responsibility, frugality and saving, are tenants.

Tenancy culture studies: public housing road tours

It's hard to believe now, but there was once a time when the NSW State Government published tour guides to public housing estates.

The NSW Housing Commission's 1947 booklet, Homes for the People, featured a handy map and directions for five road tours of public housing developments throughout Sydney. Tour 1, from Pagewood to Beverly Hills in Sydney's southeast, was a relative doddle at 42 miles in two-and-a-half hours; to do the lot, the truly dedicated tourist would cover, over 18 hours, 282 miles of public housing, from Hornsby in the north to Liverpool in the west.

The guide proudly pointed out 'items of note', such as 'experimental cottages' in Esme Avenue, Chester Hill; the 'small unit homes (one child families)' in Juno Parade, Greenacre; and the building technologies and materials employed: timber frames, steel frames, concrete, fibro....    

It was a proud publication, and rightly so. This was the era of the first Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (1945-56), in which renting in public housing was conceived of as a decent and genuine alternative to home ownership, and the Housing Commission built one in every six dwellings built in the State.

Nowadays Housing NSW prefers its properties to be un-notable, even invisible. (Aside from the tour guide, here's another sign of the times: Housing NSW annual reports used to be full of pictures of buildings – but no people; now, there's lots of smiling faces, but no buildings.) However, public housing estates remain places where one can find some important firsts in architecture and planning and many admirable – even successful – endeavours in building better homes for the people.

Here's a few of our favourites.

1. Daceyville. See where the public housing system in New South Wales began. 'There, that is how Australia builds its garden cities' – that's what John Rowland Dacey predicted future tourists would say of the estate, and both the buildings and layout of the estate show the state of the art of early garden suburb planning. Strong radial avenues and short curving streets give the estate a symmetrical, very mannered appearance (the layout of later garden suburbs and neighbourhoods would be more closely determined by the topography); but if you look down Cook Avenue, says estate historian Samantha Sannayah, you can see that the western side of the estate, built to the earlier plan of garden suburb originator John Sulman, is more formal, while the eastern part, built to the later revised plan of Housing Board architect William Foggitt, is 'curvier, and friendlier'. The dwellings, notes another historian of the estate, Robert Freestone, are 'a blend of English cottage and Californian bungalow forms unified by verandas and Federation joinery details'; the earliest are semi-detached but built to resemble a single large house; later dwellings are detached per the suburban ideal; but then the very latest – from the 1980s – employ the large house form again.

Items of note include the first planned cul-de-sac in Australia: the tear-shaped addition by Foggitt to Colonel Braund Crescent.

2. Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Rocks. Actually, even before we had a public housing system, we did have some public housing. The State Government first acquired rental housing almost accidentally when, after an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1901, it resumed the wharves and adjoining areas of Millers Point, Dawes Point and the Rocks. Walk through Millers Point and Dawes Point and see grand and more modest houses from the late nineteenth century, and working class boarding houses, flats and terraces from the early twentieth century. Pause at Clyne Reserve and survey the wharves below and to the south, soon to be redeveloped as Barangaroo, and worry for the future of this special public housing place.

Next, duck under the Bridge at Cumberland Street and behold the Sirius apartments, from the Housing Commission's brutalist period in the 1970s. Awesome.

3. Riverwood. If you go to Millers Point and Daceyville for early twentieth century public housing, try the estate at Riverwood, 18 km southwest of Sydney, for the mid-twentieth century and beyond. The Riverwood estate presents an extraordinary sample of the various types of housing built by the Housing Commission after the Second World War: some detached cottages (mostly sold to residents); walk-up blocks of 2- and 3-bedroom flats; 'pensioner housing' (bedsits); some terrace houses; and the two 1970s high-rise towers, Jefferson and Lincoln. (All the streets, which are distinctively curvy in the suburban grid, are named on an American theme too, after the American army hospital built on the site during the war. None of the hospital buildings, at one time used by the Housing Commission for emergency housing, remain on the estate.)

You can also see the result of later programs for the 'improvement' of public housing estates – in particular, the addition in the 1990s of gatehouses and balconies on the blocks of flats, and the fencing of previously common grounds – and the beginnings of one of today's large public-private redevelopments, as blocks of flats and bedsits at the estate's northern edge make way for Riverwood North, which promises to build an equivalent amount of social housing, along with rather more units for sale to private owners. Finally, there's also the excellent Riverwood Community Centre, which got started in the 1970s under the Australian Assistance Plan of the Whitlam Government. 

There's many more places of note, of course. Still looking just at Sydney, there's Redfern and Waterloo. There's the Erskineville estate, which predates the Housing Commission (built in the 1930s by the Housing Improvement Board) and survived a proposal to redevelop it in the early 2000s, thanks to a spirited campaign by tenants and their neighbours. There's the Strickland flats, in Chippendale, a rare example of social housing built by local government (the City of Sydney, in 1914). There's Cartwright, part of the Green Valley estate, which was built in 1963 as the Commission's first instance of 'Radburn-type planning'. (The Commission explained in its annual report: 'basically the plan provides for pedestrian movement along a pathway system segregated as afar as possible from vehicular traffic. All mail and other household deliveries, garbage collections, etc will be made by means of short cul-de-sacs at the rear of the dwellings, which will also provide facilities for parking.... The adoption of Radburn-type planning for this neighbourhood was received enthusiastically by the public generally, and in particular, was favourably commented upon by many planning authorities.')

Many successful endeavours in providing better homes for the people... and some not so successful. But even in those places you'll see the endeavours of tenants and other residents and workers to get hold of the facilities and resources that planners and markets didn't deliver. There's lots to see and admire out there. 

 

Whitlam and housing

Sunday was the fortieth anniversary of the election of the Whitlam Federal Labor Government.

Like us at the Brown Couch, Gough Whitlam himself has always enjoyed pondering the significance of anniversaries. On the commencement of the 1972 campaign he observed, characteristically:

December the second is a memorable day; it is the anniversary of Austerlitz. Far be it from me to wish, or to appear to wish, to assume the mantle of Napoleon, but I cannot forget that the second of December was the date on which a crushing defeat was administered to a coalition – a ramshackle, reactionary coalition.

In a previous post we mentioned briefly how housing and urban policy had, late in the long period of Coalition government, fallen into a state of disrepair, notwithstanding the efforts of Housing Minister Annabelle Rankin. Over the three short years of the Whitlam Government, housing and urban policy enjoyed a much higher priority.

Whitlam's most ambitious initiative was the creation of a new Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD), conceived of as 'virtually co-equal with the Treasury', to coordinate the  allocation of urban resources by all levels of government. Under Minister Tom Uren, DURD programs included the establishment of the State land banks (Landcom in New South Wales) to better manage suburban development; funding for suburban sewerage; and the development of Area Improvement Plans that brought together and directly funded local governments to plan and work on local and regional infrastructure.

Early in its first term, the Whitlam Government also negotiated a new Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (CSHA), which made a few notable changes to public housing policy. Whitlam had gone to the election critical of the recent decline in building activity by State public housing authorities, and promising instead to 'request each State authority to estimate the funds it will require to reduce the waiting period for houses to twelve months.' The 1973 CSHA didn't quite do that (fastforward to the present and see how far waiting lists have run out here), but it increased funding, reigned in sales of public housing dwellings, and stabilised the level of construction for a time.

The new CSHA also slightly shifted the target of public housing policy. Traditionally directed at working class households, and exclusive of very poor and vulnerable persons (you could be knocked back by the Housing Commission's allocations committees if you didn't keep your current house well, or had too many children), State housing authorities were henceforth required to make not less than 80 per cent of public housing allocations to households whose incomes were not more than 80 per cent of the average. This attempted to balance responsiveness to households in need with the system's need for higher income households.

Apart from the CSHA, DURD purchased and rehabilitated old dwellings at Glebe and Woolloomooloo for public housing, and demonstrated an alternative approach to redevelopment at a time when the NSW Housing Commission was at the height of its enthusiasm for 'slum clearance' and high-rise construction. The first programs for Aboriginal housing on principles of self-determination were commenced. And under its Australian Assistance Plan, the Whitlam Government established Regional Councils for Social Development and funded other local, non-profit organisations to employ community development workers and improve the social fabric of public housing estates and other disadvantaged areas.

Finally, the Whitlam Government initiated the first steps towards tenancy law reform, by expanding the scope of the Inquiry into Poverty (originally commissioned by the McMahon Government) to include a report, by Adrian Bradbrook, into the landlord-tenant relationship, which set out the basic model of residential tenancies legislation subsequently enacted by (with considerable differences in the details, and delays in the commencement) by the State and Territory Governments.

No subsequent Federal Government has been so active in housing and urban policy. If you live in or visit a place like Claymore (which we visited recently with IUT Secretary -General Magnus Hammar), where residents and community workers meet around a table in a community laundry to connive at ways of getting and keeping basic facilities and resources like decent houses, footpaths, parks and playgrounds, and the occasional bus-run to shops that don't rip you off, you'll see the continuing relevance of Whitlam's agenda. Both sides of politics should see that it's time for a strong and just housing and urban policy again.

Women in public housing history

In our commemoration of the centenary of the NSW public housing system, we've noted the roles played by John Rowland Dacey, Jack Fitzgerald, Bertie Stevens, Bill McKell, Robert Menzies* and Frank Walker... and to a man, all of them are men! This won't do, because women have played a big part in the history of public housing. Here we note three of them.

(Annabelle Rankin, Federal Minister for Housing 1966-1971)

First, a bit of background. Although the NSW public housing system got started in 1912, its operations were very stop-start and experimental, and its institutions very unsettled, until the 1940s. It really became an enduring part of the policy landscape – and the landscape of our cities and towns – after 1945, when the Commonwealth began funding State Governments to build and operate public housing under the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (the CSHA).

The involvement of the Commonwealth in public housing was a core recommendation of the Commonwealth Housing Commission (the CHC), a board of inquiry appointed in 1943 by Ben Chifley, as Minister for Post-War Reconconstruction, to report on '(a) the present housing position in Austrralia, and (b) the housing requirements of Australia during the post-war period'.

The CHC's inquiry was a huge undertaking, hearing 948 witnesses, visiting 53 towns across every State, and producing in 1945 a thumping 327-page report. This report was a comprehensive statement of the state of the art of mid-twentieth century housing policy, with 95 major recommendations, including Commonwealth finance for State public housing authorities, the creation of State planning authorities and town planning legislation, Commonwealth involvement in building technology research and training, even land nationalisation. It also set out a statement of principle for housing policy that still rings true:

We consider that a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need but the right of every citizen – whether the dwelling is to be rented or purchased, no tenant or purchaser should be exploited for excessive profit.

Two women were instrumental in the work of the CHC. Mary Ryan was a member of the Commission. An unappointed social worker, Labor Party activist and resident of Portland, in Chifley's electorate, Ryan had trained and worked as a nurse and, before that, as a domestic servant. In fact, even before going out into domestic service she had run a household: from the age of 13, she ran the house for her parents and five siblings after her mother recovered from the loss of two other children. The experience made her an advocate for improved housing conditions, particularly in relation to the services and utilities provided in them, and the community facilities provided without. This interest was reflected in the CHC's recommendations for the planning, financing and provision of community facilities in conjunction with public housing.

Mary Willmott Phillips was secretary to the CHC. In contrast to Ryan, who never attended high school, Willmott Phillips held an economics degree from Sydney University and was one of the first tertiary-educated public servants in Canberra. She was also one of the first married women in the Commonwealth public service (her husband, J G Phillips, was an economist in the public service and later Governor of the Reserve Bank). Pat Troy, in his history of the Commonwealth's involvement in housing policy, describes Willmott Phillips's work for the CHC:    

She worked closely with [Director General of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, H C 'Nugget'] Coombs undertaking, commissioning and assembling research material for the CHC, managing the often turbulent relations with some of the CHC's advisory committees, the other Commissions, government and other agencies, generally keeping the CHC on the rails. She revealed exquisite diplomatic skills in dealing with some of the more egocentric 'experts' she encountered and also drafted much of its final report. The completion of the report on issues of such complexity and magnitude in the brief time available was largely due to her organisational skills and clarity of vision.

These two women not only helped ensure that the interests and views of women in relation to housing were considered in public housing policy making, they helped ensure that public housing policy happened. The CHC's recommendations were reflected – albeit imperfectly – in the first CSHA, which built almost 100 000 dwellings for public rental – that's one in every seven dwellings built in Australia in the 10 years from 1945. (Almost 38 000 dwellings were built under the first CSHA in New South Wales, about 18 per cent of all dwellings built here.)

Our third female pioneer in public housing policy came almost a generation after the CHC and the first CSHA. Senator Dame Annabelle Rankin (pictured above) was appointed Housing Minister by Harold Holt when he became Prime Minister on the retirement of Menzies on Australia Day 1966 – making Rankin the first woman to be appointed to a federal ministerial position that administered a department.

At the time of Rankin's appointment, the CSHA was in its third version and was just about to expire. It and the second CSHA, as we've discussed previously, were quite different from the first, having diverted a large part of the Commonwealth's funds – and the State housing housing authorities' dwellings – out of public housing and into owner-occupation. Meanwhile, other tensions and challenges in housing policy were opening up. Land price inflation, driven by speculation and the Government's encouragement of owner-occupation, was accelerating, and making the business of building public housing increasingly expensive. More flats were being built, both by the private sector (spurred by land price speculation, facilitated by the advent of strata title) and by the State housing authorities (motivated in part as a defence against the rampant sale of public housing houses). On the issue of slum clearance, there were several views within the Federal Cabinet: one was that the Commonwealth should encourage and support the redevelopment of inner-city slums into high-density public housing, the better to concentrate presumably Labor-voting tenants in a relative few electorates; another view (Rankin's) was that slums should be redeveloped into housing marketed to higher-income households, and the proceeds used to build outer-suburban public housing estates; yet another view was to do nothing in particular and leave it to the States. 

Rankin approached her role as Housing Minister with the objective of developing a wider housing policy within the Commonwealth Government. In particular, she sought to give the Department of Housing, which at that stage really just administered grants, a wider research and policy advice function. This meant employing some policy officers – something Rankin sought permission to do, literally for years, against the resistance of officers of the Treasury, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Public Service Board. In Troy's history, a section titled 'the Office of Circumlocution' details the extraordinary (or sadly, perhaps not so extraordinary) lengths that senior bureaucrats went to to frustrate the development of expertise and policy advice outside the traditional centre of power in the Treasury. Troy observes:

Housing and urban issues were becoming matters of social and political interest at the time. Whitlam was beginning to make political capital out of the housing, planning and development failures that were increasing obvious int he major cities. Rankin sensed this but was unable to carry her colleagues with her.... The history of the Commonwealth's involvement in housing and urban policy issues might well have been different had Treasury not been so obdurate in its opposition to the ambitions of [Rankin].

That's just three women who have made a contribution to the history of public housing. Following Rankin there have been other female Housing Ministers; there have also been, and are increasingly, many women in executive positions in public housing bureaucracies, and in local public housing offices (where they are almost certainly a majority). Women are running the peak community organisations for the social housing system, and so many of the local organisations and residents' groups, and are generally keeping the whole thing going.

* Fans of part one of our critique of Menzies' 'The Forgotten People' – yes, both of you – will be excited to learn we haven't forgotten and will return with part 2 soon.

Tenancy Culture Studies: Redfern and Waterloo

The Sydney Morning Herald must also be celebrating the centenary of public housing in New South Wales - they've recently published a cracking piece in their "Sydney Magazine" that talks at length about that great part of Sydney that owes its character to a high concentration of public housing tenants - Redfern and Waterloo. It's by Stephanie Wood and it's called "There goes the neighbourhood".

Now, we're not going to try to retell this story. There's no need. Wood has done a superb job of uncovering the historical significance of public housing in southern Sydney, and tracking it's growth and evolution over the course of many years. She does this by talking to the very people that public housing is made up of - tenants, the people who live there.

Many of the people Wood has given a voice to have lived in the area for years. By introducing us to them, we are provided with new insights into world that is often maligned, and rarely understood. But we're also given a pretty raw account of some the tensions that are yet to play out in the back yard of Australia's biggest central business district.

We enjoyed it thoroughly, and we recommend it to you. You can also find it online.

Tenancy culture studies: community housing centres

As well as being the centenary of the public housing system in New South Wales, 2012 is the National Year of Reading, an initiative of Australian libraries to promote basic literacy and a 'reading culture' in every home.

This coincidence got us thinking: what's the first appearance of public housing in Australian literature?

The earliest one we know of is a peculiar one; it's in Ruth Park's tenurially significant 'Poor Man's Orange', first published in 1949. (Another coincidence: today's the 95th anniversary of Park's birth). This novel and its predecessor, the equally tenurially significant 'Harp in the South' (1948), tell of the tribulations of the Darcy family and their neighbours in the rental housing of post-war Surry Hills – housing that was run-down and in short supply. Rent controls were in force, but if a person lost their tenancy, they were in strife.

Through one of her characters, Mr Casement, Park describes ‘the terror of most of the evicted people... that they would be sent to squalid housing settlements where worse slums had been created than any the Council had pulled down’:

‘Them little army huts,’ thought Mr Casement in panic, ‘and people fighting and screaming and banging on walls, and pinching the washing, and Jessie expecting me to go in and tell ’em off. I just ain’t up to it these days.’

Mr Casement is terrified of the 'community housing centres' operated by the NSW Housing Commission in the first two decades of the post-war period. At the end of the Second World War, the Housing Commission came into possession of a number of ex-military sites, which it put to use as temporary accommodation for people in urgent need of housing.

The largest of these sites was an ex-US Army hospital at Herne Bay, where the Housing Commission converted the long hospital buildings to flats by throwing up partitions across their lengths and installing toilets and showers.   

This was not the most comfortable accommodation: those partitions did not extend to meet the pitch of the roofs, so you could hear, smell and, if you stood on a box, see everything that happened in the flat next door. And it was high-density: the Herne Bay centre comprised 1096 flats (with one to six bedrooms each), and housed about 6000 people. (By contrast, the public housing estate that stands on the site today – which includes two high-rise buildings – houses between 2000-3000 people.)

The provision of emergency temporary accommodation for public housing applicants was not the only function of the community housing centres. They also allowed housing officers to observe the conduct of applicants, and check if they maintained regular rent payments and satisfactory standards of housekeeping. Those who didn't (in pretty challenging circumstances) would be evicted, or just crack up and leave, and so would not proceed to an offer of proper public housing. In this way, the community housing centres were a variation on the model of 'experimental colonies' for 'difficult' tenants instituted by Dutch housing authorities in the 1930s, which operated on disciplinarian lines (surrounding walls, 11 pm curfews); these experiments had excited interest, but no formal emulation, in housing authorities around the world.

The accommodation provided by community housing centres reduced over time, as the sites were gradually redeveloped as public housing estates; the last of the 'horror huts' were gone by the mid-1960s. In the case of Herne Bay, the authorities and local citizens sought also to remove the infamy of the community housing centre by renaming the suburb – in 1958, it became Riverwood.
   

Tenancy culture studies: Robert Menzies' 'The Forgotten People' (part 1)

While we've been observing the centenary of the New South Wales public housing system, another important anniversary passed us by: the 70th anniversary of the broadcast of Robert Menzies' seminal radio speech, 'The Forgotten People'. As far as we can tell, this anniversary also went unobserved in the media – forgotten, as it were – which is a shame, because the speech is one of the founding texts of a major political party and a significant piece of Australian political history and culture. (There are echoes of it in the speech delivered by current Liberal leader Tony Abbot to last week's Federal Council, but no express acknowledgement of the anniversary.)

(Robert Menzies)

The historian Judith Brett published a comprehensive critique of 'The Forgotten People' twenty years ago; we'll not attempt anything like a replication of her work here. For our own purposes, over this and a second post we'll consider the significance of 'The Forgotten People' in narrower terms – those of housing. The speech presents a number of points from which to reflect on housing policy, both during Menzies' prime ministership and now.  

*

On 22 May, 1942, Robert Gordon Menzies delivered 'The Forgotten People' as one in a series of radio speeches for broadcaster 2UE. It was not a great time for Menzies. Previously, things had gone very well for the golden boy from Jeparit, in country Victoria. While still in his twenties, Menzies made constitutional law as counsel in the Engineers Case; in his thirties, he commenced his parliamentary career (first with the Nationalists in the Victorian Parliament, then with the United Australia Party in the Federal Parliament), rising swiftly to the office of Attorney-General (1934); at the age of 44 he was Prime Minister of Australia (1939).

Things started going wrong after the 1940 election, when the UAP was returned with a minority government. In August 1941, bitter at disarray in his own party and in its coalition with the Country Party, Menzies resigned as Prime Minister. The government (under a Country Party Prime Minister) fell seven weeks later, replaced by John Curtin's Labor Party. With the UAP preferring a Country Party Opposition Leader to Menzies, he resigned the party leadership.

So in 1942, Menzies really was starting over. (He'd go on, of course, to found in 1944 the Liberal Party of Australia, win government again in 1949, and serve as Prime Minister again, and again and again and again, until 1965). And as he looked to restart the parliamentary organisation of the interests of property and enterprise, and restart his own career, 'The Forgotten People' is what he had to say, particularly to define and create a constituency.

Here's how he begins (we'll let Menzies do the talking, not least so you get a feel for the language and tone of the speech):

Quite recently, a bishop wrote a letter to a great daily newspaper. His theme was the importance of doing justice to the workers. His belief, apparently, was that the workers are those who work with their hands. He sought to divide the people of Australia into classes. He was obviously suffering from what has for years seemed to me to be our greatest political disease - the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the rich and relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

Now, the last thing that I want to do is to commence or take part in a false war of this kind. In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. 

But – there is a 'but':

But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class - the middle class - those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false class war; the middle class who, properly regarded, represent the backbone of this country.

Menzies defines this middle class first by exclusion: it does not include 'the rich and powerful, those who control great funds and enterprises' (says Menzies, 'the rich can look after themselves'); nor does it include 'the mass of unskilled people, almost invariably well-organized, and with their wages and conditions protected by popular law'. Then he gives examples: those of the middle class are 'salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on' ('the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament'). But to really define and characterise the Forgotten People, Menzies employs a powerful metaphor: that of 'homes'.

The middle class 'has responsibility for homes - homes material, homes human, homes spiritual.' Says Menzies:

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.

As Brett observes, there's a bit of a slip here, as it appears that Menzies is about to give us a three-part class scheme described in terms of housing, but when he gets to the workers, he refers instead to their 'officialdom', not their housing. Brett says 'it is as if the working class do not also have wives and homes and children; or rather, in as much as they do have them, they are invited to see themselves as middle class.'

This is Menzies' unspoken project in 'The Forgotten People': to open up the domestic sphere to politics, and set a conservative liberal agenda there.

Menzies works on that agenda as he goes on to elaborate what he means by 'homes material, homes human and homes spiritual'. His themes run across the headings, but like Menzies we'll consider each in turn. First, 'homes material':

The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own". Your advanced socialist may rage against private property even while he acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours: to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will.

If you consider it, you will see that if, as in the old saying, "the Englishman’s home is his castle", it is this very fact that leads on to the conclusion that he who seeks to violate that law by violating the soil of England must be repelled and defeated.

National patriotism, in other words, inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.

We won't spend too long dealing with Menzies' connection of home ownership to patriotism, which we think is specious: after all, at the time of his speech, about half of Australian households rented and we're inclined to think (though we have no figure on this) that the typically young males enlisted in the armed services were less likely to be home owners than tenants or occupants of the parental home. For very many servicemen, home ownership came after their service, through the assistance of the War Service Homes scheme. More on that in a second.

We take the main point here to be that for Menzies, the material home should be one that is saved for, acquired and owned by the individual as their private property. Home ownership is one of our 'best instincts', says Menzies - and later, when in government, his housing policy would support and reinforce that instinct.

As we've observed previously, state support for home ownership was a feature of social liberal government since the turn of the century, preferred over public housing even by progressives. Australia's largest state program of direct assistance for home ownership was the War Service Homes scheme – not conceived by Menzies, but continued by him. Commenced in 1919, the scheme financed the construction of 310 000 dwellings to 1970 – 265 000 of them in the period after 1945. The scheme lent ex-servicemen funds for housing on very generous terms (in 1971, the interest rate was 3.75 per cent, over 45 years).

The distinctive contribution of the Menzies Government to support for home ownership came in through its changes to the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement (CSHA).

The first CSHA, commencing 1945, had inaugurated Commonwealth funding of State public housing authorities and, relatively speaking, hugely increased their share both of house building – in New South Wales, the Housing Commission built on average about 18 per cent of dwellings completed in the decade from 1945 – and of the total housing stock – in New South Wales, from a mere 0.2 per cent in 1945, to 3 per cent in 1954.

The 1956 CSHA, on the other hand, diverted 30 per cent of Commonwealth funds to co-operative building societies, permanent building societies and, in some cases, state banks, to subsidise finance for home ownership. In the subsequent decade, public housing's average share of completions declined by a similar proportion (in New South Wales, to about 12.5 per cent).

Moreover, public housing authorities also could sell much more of what they built – something Menzies and the State Premiers had been looking forward to for some time. (After a conference with the premiers in 1953, Menzies is reported to have said 'I do not want to see a state of affairs in Australia – and I am glad to gather that the premiers do not – in which governments are the universal landlords. I think that is a shocking position for governments to get into.') In 1956-57, the NSW Housing Commission built 3030 dwellings – and sold 3197. By 1969, the Commission would end up selling one-third of all the dwellings it had ever built (that is, 32 193 dwellings sold from 93 817 built to that date).

From our experience of talking with people about housing, the historical role of public housing in facilitating home ownership in Australia is not much remembered these days. One wonders how many of the present generation of politicians and policy makers who have run down public housing, have parents who bought their first home from the Housing Commission.

Back to 'homes human and spiritual' in part 2.

 PART 2