RESIDENTS have begun moving into 434 apartments in Melbourne’s Prahran, where the Allan and Albanese governments have delivered new social, market rental and specialist disability homes as part of an Australia-first ground lease model.
Under the Ground Lease Model 1 project (GLM1), Homes Victoria in partnership with Housing Australia has leased the land to the project partner to build, manage and maintain the housing for 40 years, ensuring all land remains in public ownership.
The GLM1 projects includes the Prahran redevelopment, a development in Brighton, where residents began moving in earlier this month, and multiple projects in Flemington, and will deliver 1,084 new homes.
At Bangs Street in Prahran, old and outdated dwellings in the city’s inner south were replaced with 228 energy-efficient social housing homes, 206 market rental homes and 11 specialist disability homes. The mix of one, two, and three-bedroom homes are centrally located in the suburb, close to trams and the Chapel Street and High Street retail and dining precincts.
Victorian Minister for Housing Harriet Shing was joined by Federal Minister for Housing Julie Collins at the opening.
The Victorian government has invested $519 million across the three GLM1 sites. Housing Australia provided $394.1 million, comprising a loan facility of $344.4 million through the Affordable Housing Bond Aggregator (AHBA) and $49.8 million via the National Housing Infrastructure Facility (NHIF). The NHIF funding enabled infrastructure works including stormwater and sewer drainage, and water, gas and electrical power supply works.
The Prahran site has also been upgraded with new green, outdoor spaces that are open to the community, including a park and pedestrian and cycling paths.
The project comes under the Victorian government’s $5.3 billion Big Housing Build program, which started in November and has claimed 9,200 homes completed or underway. The government says it is on track to deliver more than 12,000 new social and affordable homes and create more than 40,000 jobs in construction, as well as hit its ambitious plan of building 800,000 more homes over 10 years as announced in its Housing Statement last year,
The federal government has already delivered almost $500 million to Victoria through the Social Housing Accelerator, which aims to build up to 769 new social homes across the state. More social housing will be delivered via Victoria’s share of the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, which begins at the start of July, as does the National Housing Accord that aims to deliver 1.2 million “well-located homes” across the country.
There were 51,455 new applications for social housing on the Victorian Housing Register in the September quarter, state government data shows.
The state government has also created a $1 billion regional housing fund to deliver more than 1,600 homes across regional Victoria.
