Public housing is (not) junk!

Alongside an emphasis on lack of worth and quality, definitions of junk commonly include an inherent or achieved state of permanent undesirability. This paper explores the process of acquiring junk status, focusing on the ‘junking’ of high-rise public housing in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Erected between the 1960-70s via a mass 'slum reclamation' program, the city’s 44 public housing towers were intended as a modern ‘solution’ to inner-city poverty and low-quality housing. Having been subjected to managed decline since shortly after their construction, however, the towers have been progressively recoded as the detritus of a bygone era of social welfare policy. In September 2023, the Victorian Government announced the planned renewal of all 44 buildings, arguing that they are "reaching the end of their useful lives, and no longer fit for modern living.” In their place will be high-rise mixed-tenure buildings, with public tenancy categorically excluded from this mix. Junk analogies abound in political discourse about the towers and their tenants. Not only are the buildings bad for residents' health, but the estates are dirty, run down, socially contaminated, a blight on the community, an eyesore, a waste of space, not worth refurbishing, and in the way of progress. These analogies include mutually reinforcing arguments in the business case for urban renewal: junking public housing as physical infrastructure and discarding low-income, racially diverse tenant communities through the government’s withdrawal from direct affordable housing provision. Drawing on insights obtained from primary research into high-rise public tenants’ experiences of the planned demolition of Melbourne's 44 towers, this paper explores the conceptual and material junking of high-rise public housing estates and the people who call them home. It ultimately argues that the political coding of public housing and its tenants as unworthy of public investment and inner-city space constitutes junking via organised state abandonment.<p></p>