The Victorian Greens have said the state's housing crisis is one of Labor's own making, after a scathing report found that decades of under-investment in community and public housing had fuelled it.
The Greens say at a time when Labor should be building more genuinely affordable housing, they're instead preparing to tear Melbourne's public housing towers down to give the land to private developers and push more people into the already stretched rental market.
The Council to Homeless Persons report was released overnight and found that Victoria's housing woes had worsened across almost every key measure.
It found that more people were seeking homelessness support in Victoria than anywhere else in the country.
Yet Victoria still has the lowest proportion of public and community housing of all the states and territories in the country (3%).
Meanwhile the waitlist was continuing to grow, and people with priority access due to family violence were still, on average, waiting more than 19 months for a home.
It follows the release of a separate Tenants Victoria report last week which found that renters continued to face outrageous rent hikes, with 80% of rental providers raising rents in the past two years, with an average rental increase of 17%.
This is despite CPI increasing by only 2.4% in the last year.
As stated by Victorian Greens housing spokesperson, Gabrielle de Vietri MP:
"This has gotten seriously out of control - for all of Labor's impressive numbers and big announcements, their response to the housing crisis has done nothing but line the pockets of property developers and push more and more people into housing stress and homelessness.
"Labor's solution to the housing crisis is to demolish all the public housing towers in the state and lock renters into unlimited rent increases.
"Everyone deserves a safe, affordable place to live. But with Labor putting property developer profits over people, we are hurtling towards a housing disaster."
