As more Victorians find themselves sleeping rough in towns and bushland around the state, councils are scrambling to address housing demand.
In the western Victorian city of Ballarat, mayor Des Hudson says councils are playing catch-up when it comes to the housing crisis.
“It’s something that has been rolling along and rolling along, and now it’s at crisis point and everyone’s talking about it,” he told AAP.
“But houses don’t come onto availability within a quick moment in time.”
Affordable rental listings in regional Victoria have plummeted since the pandemic, with PropTrack data showing rentals under $400 (US$266) per week falling from almost 70 percent in March 2020, to a little more than 20 percent in April 2024.
Ballarat’s population is expected to grow from 118,000 to around 170,000 in the next two decades.
Mr. Hudson said the Victorian government had recently signed off on the first of three proposed growth zones on Ballarat’s fringes, but local government tools to address the crisis act slowly.
The shire has recently released its draft social and affordable housing plan that includes freeing up council and state-owned land for development, and improving housing diversity.
“If I look back over probably 15 years, there hasn’t been a hell of a lot of one—or two-bedroom premises coming onto the market,” Mr. Hudson said.
More options exist for larger homes but the rents were effectively as costly as a mortgage, the mayor said.
“That’s where we’re seeing some of the rental stress and it’s pretty alarming that the highest proportion of our rough sleepers in the City of Ballarat are middle-aged females trying to escape from violent domestic violence situations.”
In the central Victorian city of Bendigo, house prices jumped by around 56 percent in the five years to 2021, while average incomes lifted only 22 percent, the council’s strategic planning manager Anthony Petherbridge said.
“We know there’s a complete mismatch,” he told AAP.
“We’ve also got over 3000 applicants on the social housing waiting list for this for this area.”
Bendigo’s council has proposed a strategy favouring urban development over greenfield expansion as it braces for an expected 87,000 new residents in the next 30 years.
The change would align with state government plans for a 70:30 split of urban versus outer-metropolitan residential development in Melbourne.
“It’s probably a slight shift of thinking that’s needed for a lot of our community,” Mr. Petherbridge said.
“We’re not talking about multi-storey developments everywhere.”
Regional Cities Victoria, which represents nine of Victoria’s biggest councils, is calling for federal and state-funded grants for housing, infrastructure and attracting workers critical to planning and building.
“We absolutely want to make it quicker, easier, and cheaper for people to build their home in regional Victoria,” the organisation’s chair and Shepparton mayor Shane Sali told AAP.
“We just can’t meet the expectations of government commitments ... if we don’t have the professionals to do the work - such as planners, engineers, building surveyors and project managers.”
Councils were keen to play their role to unlock land supply, Mr. Sali said, but a lack of pipes and water was holding back investment and deepening the housing crisis.
“We’ve got the space to grow, but the need for utilities for these areas ... is stopping development,” he said.
