Provision of housing: Preservation of residential public buildings

Architectural practice proves that remodeling public housing can be cheaper and less disruptive than demolition for new projects.

Writing in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jenks enthusiastically declared the death of modern architecture and gave the exact cause, date, and time: Modern architecture died in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m. (approximately), when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its blocks, was destroyed by dynamite.

It had previously been damaged, mangled and dishonored by its black residents, and although millions of dollars had been spent to rebuild it (fixing broken elevators, replacing broken windows, painting), it was finally put to rest. Boom, boom, boom. Consisting of 33 virtually identical, 11-story, rectangular brick and concrete tower blocks, Pruitt-Igoe housing was the Platonic image of public housing: repetitive, rational, austere. Grids of similar tower blocks have been built all over the world. From projects in the United States to housing estates in Britain and banlieues in France, twentieth-century housing developments were largely driven and enabled by slum clearance programs. In theory, the relocation of poor city dwellers into densely populated high-rise apartment buildings was supposed to allow both the regeneration of urban slums and the social transformation of their inhabitants. In practice, the demolition of work housing and the relocation of residents to newly built complexes has led to racial and ethnic segregation and only entrenched class-based stigma.

On September 20, 2023, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews announced "the biggest urban redevelopment project in Australian history". At the announcement, Andrews, who stepped down next week, unveiled a plan to begin demolishing all 44 remaining public housing towers in Melbourne, starting with buildings in Flemington, North Melbourne and Carlton. The plan to decommission and rebuild all 44 towers by 2051 can be understood as a combination of three separate concepts: the assumption that the existing buildings are irreparably unsuitable; the belief that private housing providers are better equipped than the public sector to meet the huge and urgent housing needs; and the belief that we all want to rid Melbourne of its tower blocks. Boom, boom, boom.

Andrews' description of Melbourne's concrete towers also resembled Jencks' emphatic rhetoric. "Our 44 high-rise towers are old, they're obsolete," Andrews said. - "They're crumbling. They need to leave." But what both Jencks and Andrews overlooked is that age, physical condition, and public housing design were very rarely the cause of his problems and contraversions. In her article "The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe" (which later served as the basis for the documentary The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe: An Urban History), Kathryn Bristol reexamined the demise of the St. Louis apartment complex and learned that "chronically inadequate maintenance and the increasing poverty of the tenants" were two major factors in its descent into crime, blight, and subsequent abandonment, and that "by 1972, these key elements of the story were all but forgotten in the drive to condemn the architecture." While Pruitt-Igoe was demolished (along with other infamous projects such as the Cabrini-Green towers in Chicago), similar developments in other US cities remained relatively modern and are still in use today.

The Victorian Government has committed $5.3 billion to its Big Housing Project, promising to build more than 12,000 social and affordable housing units across metropolitan and regional Victoria by optimizing existing land parcels. "The acreage is much larger than where the buildings are now," Andrews said. - "There's room and height to do a lot more. So we believe this is a unique opportunity to partner with pension funds, the private sector.

But as many experts point out, this project will not solve the chronic shortage of social housing. In June 2023, there were 65,195 social housing applications on Victoria's housing register, of which 36,690 were prioritized. Dr. David Kelly and Professor Libby Porter point out that the government's redevelopment plans are based on a 70:30 ratio between private and social housing, which is "not based on any data on the social mix and is done purely on the basis of calculating property values to make a profit for the private developer in the partnership." The $5.3 billion cost of this project may not reflect the total economic, social and environmental cost of this work.

Louise Bassini, acting director of legal practice at Inner Melbourne Community Legal, disagrees that "no argument has been presented for why these towers cannot be repaired." She told The Age that "instead, the government is treating housing estates as attractive plots of land without taking into account the destruction of communities that would follow. This is the transfer of publicly owned housing to private developers. "

Professor Associate Philip Oldfield, head of the School of the Built Environment at UNSW and an expert on sustainable design, estimated that renovating all 44 towers would require the equivalent of 144,000 tons of carbon emissions, about 12 times Melbourne Council's total emissions in 2020, while rebuilding the towers would require the equivalent of 240,000 tons of carbon emissions.

"There were definite red flags in Andrews' statement," says Simon Robinson, director of multidisciplinary design and research practice OFFICE in Melbourne. - "First of all, there was no consultation with residents. A general statement was then made that all towers should be demolished. Finally, there is a lot of anecdotal commentary about previous reports that have been produced [to support the claim that the towers cannot be saved and modernized], but there is no transparency about those reports. "

In recent years, when OFFICE has been unable to access any publicly available studies, it has conducted its own research comparing the economic, social and environmental impacts of public housing renovation and demolition. Although Robinson is an architect by training and his partner Steve Mintern is a landscape architect, OFFICE is an unusual Australian design and construction practice. These two directors, now in their 30s, started in public affairs immediately after graduation and eventually arrived at a working model that allowed them to continue this work throughout their careers. Registered as a charitable organization governed by a board of directors and required by statute to undertake public benefit projects, OFFICE decides who and where to provide assistance rather than responding to commercial demands.

In 2017, the Victorian Government launched the Public Housing Revitalization Program, which included the demolition of nine central, low and mid-rise public housing developments. These sites were essentially to be privatized and redeveloped by public housing providers as a mix of public, affordable and private housing. "As an architect, the first thing you do when you're going to demolish something is figure out if it can be preserved or renovated," Robinson says. - "There has never been a publicly available document that says these buildings cannot be repaired. "

Through the Save Public Housing Collective OFFICE contacted a group of public housing residents at Ascot Vale, a housing estate comprising 57 three-storey brick blocks of flats and one of nine central sites earmarked for redevelopment. "Simon and Steve said their original plan was not only to save the housing estate but also to bring the existing apartments on the estate up to modern 2020 standards," recalls Claire Hanson, who has lived in the estate for 13 years and is one of the leaders of the residents' group. "It's important because one of the arguments that the government is making is that the buildings should be demolished because they are too old, which is a silly claim because based on that logic, half of Melbourne should be demolished." Eight Ascot Vale buildings had already been demolished and replaced with new apartments when the OFFICE-led team, which included economists, structural engineers, environmental engineers/p>